General Motors have launched an advertising campaign called “Live green, go yellow” which promotes their Flexfuel vehicles. Flexfuel means they can run on any mixture of petrol and ethanol, up to 85% ethanol (known as E85).

E85 is far better for the evironment as ethanol is produced from wheat, grain and other crops which take carbon dioxide from the air as they grow, and release a similar amount when they are burned. Unlike fossil fuels which realease carbon dioxide that has been accumulated over millions of years.

According to their advert they have already produced 1.5 million Flexfuel cars, however many people are unaware that they own these vehicles. GM are trying to address this lack of knowledge by fitting yellow petrol caps to all new Flexfuel vehicles, which is what the “Go Yellow” slogan is about. Existing GM (and other manufacturers) car owners can apparently check their vehicle serial number here to find out if their car is E85 compatible.

This is definately a step forward, it would be nice to see something like this happening in the UK. The furthest we’ve got with low-emission fuels so far is a single Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus

Last Thursday I went for an interview for a marketing job with Traveline, the organisation which provides public transport information via phone, web and text. A part of the interview I had to give a presentation on a subject of my choice, so I decided to do something relevant, which was “How to get commuters out of their cars” giving the benefits, the reasons why people are in their cars and what can be done to change it. They seemed quite interested in my ideas, but I didn’t get the job. I don’t really have much proveable marketing experience, so I guess I could have been as interested as you like in public transport but without the right experience its not much use.

Its a real shame for me, as I was looking forward to the opportunity to make a difference.

There are 2 very useful plugins available for Firefox if you’re a webmaster:

Web Developer extension
Has far too many functions to mention, but it is very useful

Alexa/Google Pagerank toolbar
This is quite useful as it shows you Google PageRank the same way the google toolbar for IE does. Also displays Alexa rank and sends stats back to them.

This week IT Productivity Center reported Firefox’s market share as being 10.28%, more than doubling its share of the market since January with a 6.05% rise. Meanwhile Internet Explorer lost 1.78% of its share, showing that Firefox are a serious contender.

Also this week Firefox announced that they are nearing 50 million downloads, which they are celebrating by giving away comemorative coins to users who promote the browser in an inovative way. Join the party and get your copy of Firefox.

This week I’ve been trying out the GMail spam filter and although I have no idea what rules it uses to decide what is and isn’t spam it seems to route about 90% of spam to the spam folder and so far no genuine emails have ended up in the spam box.