For this year's Yahoo! Green Award, Yahoo! looked for a “green mashup” that would inspire people to use social technology to help the environment. After reading through the project submissions in the “Environment” Cause Area of the NetSquared Project Gallery, they chose Live Climate to be this year's Yahoo! Green Award recipient.

Below is an e-interview with it's co-Directors, Nick Handler and Matt Evans (who is also the Founder).

1. How does Live Climate work? Where did the idea come from?

Live Climate is a non-profit, online marketplace for carbon offset projects that do more than just reduce greenhouse gases - they also help fight poverty, create jobs in poor communities and protect local ecosystems. We identify these offset projects and then connect consumers to them through our website - www.liveclimate.org. We provide information and media on the projects that describe how they work and how they positively impact low-income communities and local environments. The consumer can choose the project, or projects that they'd like to support and purchase offsets directly from them.

So we've created a widget for the GreenerOne site that will allow a member to display how many people they've helped make a green decision while shopping for a product.

We mashuped a few technologies to make this happen. The widget is a dynamic image (PNG) generated from a image library to display how many people you've assisted with your reviews.

I’d like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who voted for “A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms” last week during the crowd-sourcing portion of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge.

I am excited to build out the mashup further in the coming weeks, and then travel to San Jose with the "finished product" at the end of May.

This competition is providing an amazing opportunity for Social Actions to finally build a grassroots movement around peer-to-peer social change. Thank you, NetSquared!

To get more involved in this movement, and to help with the development of our mashup ahead of the NetSquared Conference, please join the Social Actions google group.

In other news, I found out last week that Social Actions has also been named a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge, an annual competition to identify and support ICT innovations in international development.

To learn more, please read the proposal I submitted in December and/or my blog entry about becoming a finalist in both challenges.

These are very excting times for my project. All the best, Peter

Congratulations to the 21 Featured Projects! Yup, we have 21 projects again this year. For the second year in a row we had a tie.

Big thanks to everyone who spread the word about the NetSquared Mashup Challenge and got out the vote. You recruited and picked some fantastic mashups. We'll be turning the Projects' comments back on, so feel free to leave them a congratulatory note.

The deadline to vote for your favorite NetSquared Mashup Challenge projects is 5 PM PT---one hour from now!

The NetSquared Mashup Challenge is a community-based project so your votes will determine which 20 projects will go on to the NetSquared Conference (N2Y3).

Use your power wisely, and  vote.

I just put together this YouTube video to thank the NetSquared voters who added A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms to their ballots.

If you voted for A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms, please send me an email. This is the only way I know when and to whom to send thank you notes.

Hey Net2!

We've decided to give the projects who submitted mashup ideas to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge more time to get out the vote, so we've extended the voting deadline to Monday, March 24th at 5 PM PT.

In this video taken in Tanzania , 9-year-old Glory leads her class in a song about the HIV crisis in her country. We believe this little girl’s song – and other videos and images like this one - have the power to inspire real change. (If you’d like to learn more about Glory, check out her expanded story here.)

Flex your voting muscles and help determine which of the 122 projects that were submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3). The top 20 projects will have an opportunity to discuss and display their projects at the Conference. Conference attendees will vote to select the top three projects. All 20 projects will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money.

When you vote for your favorite projects this week, please keep these three criteria in mind:

There is less than half an hour left for folks to submit their projects to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. On March 17th, voting will begin to decide which 20 projects will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3).

We really appreciate everyone's help in getting the word out to a diverse range of audiences. We have received over 100 entries!

Thanks to all of the bloggers and tweeters who have spread the word about the call for submissions. We hope you'll help us tell folks about the community voting process next week: