To celebrate the Olympics, we’re announcing another competition with global significance… Carbonrally Leagues!

Now you can see how your team is performing relative to others in your category. For example, if you play on a college team with fellow students, you can now face-off directly against other college teams across the country. We’ve started out with four leagues, but this is just the beginning. Stay tuned for the creation of more leagues, and let us know if you have ideas for new leagues we should consider.

Here’s a bit more detail:

University League includes teams registered as colleges, universities and grad schools

School League includes teams registered as high schools and middle schools

Company League includes teams registered as companies (teams of work colleagues)

General League includes all other teams not registered as colleges, schools, or companies. This is where you’ll see neighborhood teams, family teams, fan clubs, and other teams formed around certain interests or social ties.

We’re still posting an “All Teams” leaderboard where the ultimate carbon busters can vie for the top spot, regardless of category. But, if you know of other groups that might be worthy of competing in your league, get them into the Rally…. and show them who’s boss!

Hi All,

I came across this little Carbonrally cheat sheet posted by pinksoysauce on the Eldorado team page. It’s a very nice and simple guide for first-time rallyers.

Thanks Pinksoysauce for spreading the word and for leading a rockin’ team out of Louisville, Colorado too!

Is it called twittering? twitting? tweeting? Either way, using Twitter is a lot of fun, and a great way to stay up to date while away from the computer. People have been following their friends on Twitter for a couple of years now, and it’s such a cool tool that we thought Carbonrally should get in on the action.

Now you can follow Carbonrally on Twitter. We’ll keep you up to date with new challenge releases, new website features, and other special announcements. Now you don’t need to check your email to see what’s new at Carbonrally.

Follow us Carbonrally on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Carbonrally

If you are not already on Twitter, consider joining Twitter and set it up so you can “tweet” from your phone. Then you can let your Carbonrally teammates & friends know whenever you’ve successfully biked instead of driven, used a re-usable coffee mug, chosen tap water over bottled, or other Carbonrally-related musings. You may find yourself hooked on Twitter like thousands of other people out there.

Rally On!

Hi. We’re excited to announce a few new features that will hopefully make the site more fun and easy to use. We’d also like to thank many of you for your ideas and feedback that have led us to these new features. If you have a minute, please check these out….

• Invitation-only Teams. Team leaders now have an option to make their team invitation-only. Read more
  
  
• Opt-in for special news and alerts. There is a new email preference to opt-in for Carbonrally special news and alerts. We encourage people to select this option if they want to receive important news from Carbonrally from time to time.
  
  
• Mapping all locations. We were previously only mapping the top 100 locations, but now all locations are on the map of the United States. So, if you want to view your city and your neighboring cities, have a look at the Total CO2 Impact Map.
  
  
• More flexibility when inviting people. When inviting people individually or inviting to your team, the list of email addresses may be one to each line (good when copying list from spreadsheets), separatedsemi-colons or commas. Of course, you can still access your friends’ email addresses using the Get addresses from my address book button.
  
  
• Search Carbonrally. You may now search the Carbonrally site to find certain rallyers, teams, suggestions, and tips. Look for the search box on the left side of each page.
  
  
• Delete comments on team page. Team leaders may now delete comments from their Team Page.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about these features or anything else at feedback@carbonrally.com

Many teams want to be an “open” team and allow anyone to join, while some teams prefer to limit their team membership to co-workers, schoolmates, friends, etc. For those who would like more control of who can join their team, this feature may be for you.

Team leaders will find an option to make their team invitation-only on their Edit Your Team page (and on the Create Team page when first creating a team.)

The following are more details about what it means and what will happen for invitation-only teams.

• People must be invited to join an invitation-only team. Users cannot join without an invitation.
• All team members (including the team leader) can invite other people to the team.
• If an existing Rallyer wants to join an invitation-only team, they will prompted to request an invitation when clicking on the Join This Team button. Requests will be sent to the Team Leader.
• Team Leaders may respond to requests with a message back that enables a new member to join. Team leaders may also decline a request by ignoring it.
  
  Let us know what you think of this feature. Thanks!

We spend a lot of time tinkering in Carbonrally’s “engine room”, making small adjustments in hopes of improving the site. Today we are making two such adjustments. Like most changes, these are inspired by feedback from you.

Take up to 3 New Challenges a week

We’ve noticed that some people take as many 10 challenges when they first come to the site. This commitment to action is awesome, but we’ve found that some gung-ho rallyers are less likely to stick with the Rally after their big splash. So, in keeping with our mission of “Small Actions, Big Impact”, we are implementing a change that asks people to limit their new challenge commitments to 3 per week. This will not impact any of your repeatable challenges. You can always repeat a previously accepted challenge.

Change up to 45 Lightbulbs

The lightbulb challenge “Change a Few Bulbs” continues to be very popular. In fact, some people are changing all the bulbs in their house, and then changing bulbs in their friends’ houses too. Right on!

Claiming personal CO2 credit for bulbs changed by friends, however, is starting to wreak havoc on the score system. We’ve seen cases where folks accepted the challenge 80+ times. At 3 bulbs per challenge, that adds over 240 bulbs worth of CO2 credit to a single account. For this reason, we have created a limit of 15 acceptances for this challenge. This number is based on EPA estimates that an average US house has 45 lightbulbs. If you’d like your friends’ actions included in the Rally numbers, please encourage them join us!

Team Leaders: You may sometimes see unfamiliar names and people joining your team. This might be because somebody likes your team and wants to join it, or because one of your team-mates has invited a friend that you don’t know.

If you are uncomfortable not knowing all of your team members, there are few things you can do:

1. Send an email message to your team mentioning the arrival of the new team member, and ask if anybody who knows them would be willing to provide the team with a quick introduction of the new member. You can use the blue “Message Team” button on the left side of the team page to send an email to your whole team.

2. Post a public comment on your team area requesting that the new member please introduce themselves.

3. Remove the user from your team. Click on “see full roster” on the left side of your team page. This link brings you to a complete list of all team members and provides a function to remove individuals. Once a team member is removed, they become “free agents” and can join other teams. Carbonrally sends an email alert to people to let them know they have been removed from your team.

Did you know know you can now add a PHOTO to your comments under a challenge?

It’s pretty easy to do..

1. Upload your photo to any major photo sharing website (e.g., flickr, ofoto, photobucket, snapfish).

2. Select the photo you want on that photo website, and view it in small or medium size.

3. Right Click on the image and select “copy image location”. Note: as an alternative, some photo sites may provide you directly with a link you can copy.

4. Paste that link directly into your challenge comment .

5. Put exclamation points on either side of the link, like the following, except replacing the “(exclamation point)” with a !

(exclamation point)http://photosite/yourphoto.jpg(exclamation point)

Having trouble? Please let us know at feedback at carbonrally.com. Thanks!

Here’s some detail about the new recruiting tools we deployed on April 2, 2008:

• We now keep track of how people join Carbonrally. If they join as a result of your invitation or your web badge, then you get a recruiting credit! This credit is shown on the lower section of the Leaderboard and also on your personal profile. This tracking works with all the recruiting methods listed below.

• Upgraded Friends Invitations. On you’re MY CARBON page, clicking on the “Invite Friends to Carbonrally” button brings you to our upgraded invitation form. Here you can quickly import addresses from your Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL accounts. You can also manually enter email addresses (must be separated with commas). Each of your friends will receive an individual email from Carbonrally on your behalf.

• Upgraded Team Invitations. If you are on a team, go to MY TEAM page. Here, the “Invite Friends to Team” button brings you to an upgraded invitation form. It has the same new features as the Friends Invitations except that the link brings people directly to your team so that they can join it.

• Note about invitations: to help us maintain our good standing with the Spam Lords, please only send invitations to people you know.

• Upgraded Web Badges. You will now see Carbonrally web badges available in the lower left of your My Carbon Page and Team Page. These badges can be posted on your personal webpages, blog, or anyplace else where javascript works. When somebody enters Carbonrally through a badge, and signs up, you will receive recruiting credit. Here’s an example:

• If you are already using a Carbonrally badge on your blog or website, don’t worry. They have all been upgraded automatically.

• Note for Company Teams: Your team badge is not designed to recruit people to your team. For company teams, folks should rely on Team Invitations to recruit new members. Here’s an example of a Company Team Badge:

We’re proud to announce our first significant new feature! It’s called the “Challenge Workshop”, and it enables anyone to propose new challenge ideas for Carbonrally.

From the beginning, we’ve hoped the Rally would be a place where folks could have a personal impact on global warming… a place where one person’s brilliant idea could lead to positive change on a massive scale. The Workshop feature is designed to make that possible.

We know from our inbox that many of you have creative and fun ideas for new challenges. Now, finally, you can share these challenge ideas on the site, and hear what other rallyers think about doing them.

This first version of the Workshop is somewhat experimental. We’ll need your feedback to make it better. For now, here’s how it might work…

• You can use the tools in the workshop section (tab) of the site to create new challenge suggestions.

• You can EDIT or UPDATE your suggestion any time. Click “view details”, then hold your mouse over the suggestion title to reveal the EDIT link.

• You can vote and comment on ideas you like or don’t like.

• We’ll look at the ideas that have been posted long enough to receive some votes, and find the most popular and unique ones.

• We’ll polish up the very best ideas by doing some extra research (if needed) and then “promote” them to “Featured Challenges” in the Challenge section of the site.

• Links to your challenge suggestions, votes received, and your promoted suggestions (if your idea’s a winner) will be visible on your personal “my carbon” page.

• We’ll do our best (with your help please) to keep the area clear of irrelevant and inappropriate info and language.

• Rule of thumb: if the suggestion is something that many people can do to reduce CO2, and wont offend anyone, than it most likely IS appropriate!

If you have a moment, please give the Workshop a quick tour. If you have any feedback, please post it below. Thanks!

Hi. We’ve received a bunch of requests from people outside the US looking to join the Rally. In fact, we’ve had visitors from over 80 countries since launch! We’ve always thought a web-based international collaboration to reduce CO2 would be outrageously cool. We just can’t believe we are seeing interest in this idea so quickly.

So, we’ve been putting our heads together here in Boston to determine how to offer international rally features, and fit them in with many other new features we are developing. Besides extending the maps, we’ll need to properly localize the challenges to the reflect the activities of each country. User-proposed challenges (coming soon) will help with this. Still, getting the whole planet turned up is going to take some time.

Please bear with us. One near-term fix for our friends outside the US is to create a “rally embassy” for your country in a US city. For example, a team Japan has been started in San Francisco. We recognize that this is far from perfect, and that some of the US challenges simply wont make sense for people around the word. But, it’s a start. The existence of these embassy teams will also help us figure out which countries to focus on first in our international plans.

If you have any ideas on this topic, we’d love to hear them. You can use the comments section of this blog post of you like. Thanks.

Did you know that you can delete challenges from your profile? This is a handy feature if you accidentally accept a challenge too many times, or if you need to bail-out of a challenge for any reason.

Here’s how to do it:

Go to your “My carbon page”. At the bottom of this page you can view all the challenges you’ve taken, and “un-accept” any ones you accepted by accident or were unable to complete. Please click on the word “un-commit” next to the challenge you want to delete. You can do this for up to 21 days past the date you originally accepted the challenge. Please let us know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks and happy rallying.

Question: If I already did the challenge activity before hearing about the Rally, should I accept the challenge or not?

Carbonrally: No, you shouldn’t. The objective of the Rally is to drive actual changes in personal behavior. We hope the Rally scores will represent the CO2 reductions associated with these changes. So, folks should only accept challenges that represent a real change in behavior, not just the continuation of something they do already.

But there are other things you can do to help the Rally….

If some challenges no longer apply to you, you can contribute in other ways like recruiting new members, or re-doing challenges that are repeatable. We’ve updated the Rules in the About section to hopefully make this more clear. If it still isn’t, please let us know!

Some folks are asking “why is this challenge showing ‘0’ impact after I accept it?”.

Sorry for the confusion. This challenge racks up 6 lbs of CO2 reduction over the course of a month. So you’ll see 0.2 pounds added to your account each day for the next 30 days. We’ll make this more simple in the next challenge. Sorry, and thanks for bearing with us!

Please keep the feedback coming.

Show fellow shoppers that you’re leading the Rally when you sport a Carbonrally grocery tote! They’re organic cotton, really durable, and a limited edition. We’re giving away these totes to top performers in several categories. See below for details….

Congratulations to the top performers in May (sorry, no prizes to these teams because they received grocery totes for their winning performance in a previous month – these guys are tough to catch!):

The next prizes will go to:

• Team with highest 30-day impact on June 30 (each team member gets 1 bag)
• The Individual with highest 30-day impact on June 30
• The top Rally recruiter on June 30

We’ll announce winners on this blog and contact folks to arrange for prize delivery. Also, we expect to post new prizes and categories as the Rally develops, so check back here soon!