If you thought Twitter was just for inane memes and eye-rolling self-promotion ("Just met with a terribly important person and they were terribly impressed with me!"), have a look at the Twestival phenomenon.

Change Everything keeps on astonishing me.

First, it was the amazing clothing drive for the homeless of Vancouver's downtown east side that self-organized on the site during a late 2006 cold snap.

Then it was the saga of EnviroWoman, a Change Everything member who decided to forego plastic for a year and blogged about it on the site. It made it to the big time, even garnering a mention on The Guardian's UK web site.

And now Change Everything is a finalist for the social networking Webby, one of the most prestigious Internet awards out there. Its competition: huge communities like Bebo and, oh yes, a little site you may have heard of named Facebook.

Exactly what is going on here? What puts a 3,000-member community into the same league as a 70-million-member behemoth like Facebook?

I've been talking about it with Alex. And here are five reasons we think Change Everything should win that Webby:

1. It's a community committed to social change. As someone who scours the Internet Movie Database obsessively, I'm the last person to complain that so much of the web is devoted to the trivial and inconsequential. But when a site weighs in with a substantive mission and becomes a real success, it encourages others to follow suit, pursuing real-world results – and for those of us convinced of the social web's potential as a tool for social change, that's powerful stuff.

Radio Netherlands is doing something amazing:

Every day we broadcast via Short Wave into Myanmar, also known as Burma, and that means our independent news is getting through.

This just in: the FDA and the Canadian

• My iPod. Those podcasts will just have to fend for themselves for a day.
• Elevators and escalators. (My thighs will be as mighty oaks! My calves will be as powerful bulls! My ankles will be... sore, I'm guessing.)
• Our Mac mini and TV. I can watch our (perfectly! legal!) Bittorrents another time.

I've pledged. Have you?

Here was the environmental footprint of the Christmas card in 2005, according to the UK government:

One billion Christmas cards, weighing 20,000 tonnes and equivalent in volume to at least 20 Olympic sized swimming pools, will end up as waste this Christmas.

That's only the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceberg. Consider the energy involved in transporting those cards to a billion addresses – energy expended all the more inefficiently because postal services have to ramp up each year for a huge surge in mail, and then ramp back down again.

This just came into my inbox, and sounds urgent enough that I wanted to pass it along:

DTES Housing and Homelessness Action: Piccadilly Hotel Eviction - write a letter by Tuesday! CC it to CCAP [the Carnegie Community Action Project] (wpederson@look.ca) for our files:

Bad news. The Piccadilly Hotel will evict its tenants this coming Wednesday, February 28, 2007. City inspectors say it's not up to code and it needs to shut down because the owner is not fixing it up. This is the perfect time for the City to use its bylaws to protect the last housing before homelessness.

There's this French initiative that has caught on well beyond the country's borders: turning off our lights for five minutes in the evening on Thursday, February 1st. (That's 10:55 am to 11:00 am our time here in B.C.)

It's starting to snow again in Vancouver – the latest in a series of unseasonable events this winter in what's supposed to be Canada's mild West Coast.

Few things take me back to childhood as much as the sight of white flakes in the sky. I see them, and I'm suddenly transported back to the living room window of our house on Bearbrook Road, wondering if this would be the snowfall that closed the schools for the day. Or the front passenger seat of my parents' car, with my dad driving, windshield wipers urgently dialing slush off the windshield, and the snow doing that swooping-toward-you thing it does when you're in a moving car – a feeling of danger barely held at bay by the reassuring presence of a parent. Or walking home from a friend's house at eight or nine, when the sky turned orange with reflected streetlight and the tires of passing cars crunched grooves in the road.

Look Who is Talking is a blog devoted to listing upcoming lectures and talks in Vancouver. It's a fantastic resource... one that deserves a place in any Vancouverite's RSS subscriptions.