Blog Action Day 2009 was a great success and I would like to share the excitement here …

This is the email I received as a follow up to inform us about the full roundup of the day …

Hey bloggers,

You did it!

Yesterday you and bloggers in 155 countries across six continents wrote about a single issue that impacts us all, and turned Blog Action Day 2009 into one of the largest social change events ever held on the web.

Your participation helped change the conversation and showed the power of the web to connect people across the world who despite their varied backgrounds have one shared desire: to make a difference. According to blogpulse, we increased the number of posts about climate change on a given day by 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today’s event across the web and around the world.

A full recap is up on our blog, and here are some highlights:

We hit 31,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17.9 million people yesterday. We just exceeded 13,000 registered bloggers on the site and are working to get all of you who posted but haven’t yet registered into the final count.

We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.

Of course, well-known bloggers were a big presence yesterday as well:

* The Official Google Blog gave a green tour of the company’s campus;
* Mashable asked what you’re doing to reverse climate change;
* The Unofficial Apple Weblog suggested “Five apps to help save the world”;
* Treehugger gave us two simple things that could, by themselves, stop climate change;
* Global Voices posted a roundup of bloggers from around the world writing in many languages;
* Gadling spent the whole day posting about green travel;
* BlogHer covered the road to the next international climate negotations in Copehagen.

There are many more, and we encourage you to check out the Featured Posts on the blogactionday.org homepage for a longer list of some of the world’s largest blogs.

Many of our nonprofit partners, leading organizations from around the world, were also actively involved in making the event a success:

* TckTckTck released a beautiful and touching new video;
* Greenpeace bloggers from around the world joined in;
* World Wildlife Fund featured Blog Action Day on their international climate blog;
* Oxfam helped emphasize the human side of the climate crisis;
* 1Sky wrote about the front lines of political activism in the US;
* The Nature Conservancy helped us understand the science of climate change;
* NRDC’s Switchboard bloggers wrote informative posts all day;
* Consequence wrote a whole series of posts on youth climate leadership.

You should all feel proud of this remarkable collective effort. And it doesn’t have to end today. For many, we hope this serves as an entry point into the broader movement to address the issue of climate change. There are a number of ways and some amazing organizations through which you can continue to remain involved, and we encourage you to check out our Take Action section to learn more.

We will continue providing updates and information about the success of today’s event and ongoing opportunities for involvement–including the the October 24th International Day of Climate Action organized by our friends at 350.org–here in the weeks ahead, and we hope you’ll stay with us.

Thank you so much,

Robin Beck
Lead Organizer
Blog Action Day 2009

Something to be proud of

I am really excited that I was invited to be a part of this great cause, and it really makes me proud that bloggers all over the world feel confident enough to unite and do something about an important issue like Climate Change, because if each one of us did a small action, we will together combine a big action that will eventually make a significant difference.

It is no secret that our planet is undergoing a lot of changes, and if we read through history, Planet Earth witnessed and survived major changes; lines of species disappeared because of these changes and Earth is what it is today as a result of all these changes. However; what accelerates the changes that we are witnessing these days is that the dominant species’ actions are contributing negatively and causing the change to happen faster than it should.

Nature has its own special way of creating a perfect balance; that’s how God meant it to be and He took care of all necessary details to maintain and retain this balance, but human beings are the most superior creatures in this life and they enjoy having a unique feature which is the free will. Humans are not driven by instinct alone, it is combined with the power of choices; but how do humans use this power??

Unfortunately; when it comes to climate and preserving the environment; I am afraid that our choices are not the best out there. Pollution, wars, killing forests, ozone layer damage and many other effects are caused by our choices and how we consume the environment, and the problem is that now we understand the problem, but we fail to contribute to the solution which makes us a part of the problem itself. If each one of us did a small thing in the right direction, these small actions will make a huge action in the same direction, then why aren’t we trying???

That is why I am so happy to be a part of this Blog Action Day 2009, I am considering the words I am writing here on my blog to be only a part of what I can do as a human benefiting from our Planet. Maybe I do not know exact numbers and facts that I can share here, but I have a strong belief in the power of words that can reach intellectuals all over the world and make a difference even if small.

If you are reading these words, ask yourself about what you can do to contribute in creating a better tomorrow for your children, how you can be a positive force towards maintaining Planet Earth for a good future, how can we prevent the drastic change that is crawling and becoming a sad reality every coming day, if each one of us treated this as his own personal mission, we will be able to make a positive change, together, we can, so let this be a good start for a great cause.

At the BET awards yesterday, Janet Jackson spoke on behalf of her family about their loss and Jamie Fox shared one of Michael Jackson’s best songs ever …

Amazing performance …

Check it out …

Very nice ….

Breath taking voice … very strong and so inspiring

I just love her …

I guess it is true that you don’t know how tough you are until this is put to the test!!

The last few years of my life were a series of ups and downs and I am afraid more downs than ups; downfalls and bad events that left me at more than one point vulnerable and fragile. Bouncing back from these events was not as easy as I wished it had been; sometimes it took all the strength that I could gather from within myself to be able to turn things around and move on or start over …

Sometimes I feel like shouting at the top of my lungs because I cannot take it anymore, but the problem is that if I fall apart, it will be like a chain reaction and a lot of those around me will start falling apart as well and maybe in worse ways, so the tough part here is not actually being in a situation where you are about to crack and break down, but the fact that you cannot even allow yourself to fall because some people look up to you and see you as a stone that stands in the face of all difficulties and hardships, so if you break, it means that they don’t even stand a chance, so you feel that you are not even allowed to show the smallest signs of weakness and that on its own is very hard to achieve …

Maybe the hardest thing you can ever go through is the broken trust between you and close ones, when someone that you care about or love or respect breaks your trust, that hurts in the core and it is really hard to bounce back from, because without you noticing it or feeling it, you will be affected and trusting others becomes a major issue, you will start assuming the worst in everyone’s intentions and actions, because if that person whom you believed in and trusted did a horrible thing to you and did not even care how it will affect or hurt you, then how can you expect better from people you don’t even know? I know that some will say this is not right, but tell that to a hurt person … at least, one needs time to get over it …

The recent things that happened to me were harder than anyone can imagine, both on the personal and professional levels, things are really messed up; actually .. they are more messed up than they ever were before, yet I noticed that what is different is me and how I am dealing with the situation … I realized that if the same happened to me a few years ago, I would have definitely fallen apart and broken big time, but I am now more responsive than reactive … I rationalize things and try to always look at the bright side which is not as easy as it seems … I try to be as positive about it as I can but I cannot help the occasional break that takes me by surprise and at the worst times possible, and I try to keep things under control, but sometimes I feel that allowing these breaks to surface is what is keeping me together till now, so I let go when I can …

After all this time and the few ups and the many downs I have been through, I realized that I am tougher than I thought I was, and as good as this may seem, it is exhausting and consumes most of one’s energy, and most of the time, there isn’t much left for anything else!!!

P.S. Friends are great in these situations and I thank God for all the friends that I have … I am a luckier person to have them in my life and I thank them for all the love and support they give me without even asking for it … thank you all for being the gems in my messed up world … I love you all