Do you enjoy making your friends feel badly about themselves by explaining to them in very complicated terms how, for example, their choice of tic-tac flavor can have severe environmental impacts on bird migration patterns? Also, do you like saving the earth? Then this is the site for you!

Treewala is a project by an organization called Greenwala. Their goal is “to provide a destination where people can learn to be green, brag about being green and even gain rewards for being green.” I think this is a noble goal, and they are off to a great start. The premise of Treewala is simple: you attempt to define ecology-related vocabulary terms, such as “plantlet” or “multiple use” (don’t worry, you slacker, it’s multiple choice, not short answer ). For each one you get correct, you earn a leaf. And for about every twenty leaves you earn, they plant a tree in a place called Los Gaviotas in the eastern plains of Colombia.

So how does it work? No, the good folks at Treewala are not emptying out their pockets on account of your expansive knowledge of obscure ecological terms. It works off of ad revenue: each time a new question is loaded, a banner ad is displayed on the bottom of the page. Greenwala must be getting paid for impressions, so each new question you see means a couple more fractions of a cent towards planting a baby tree!

I think this site is great. I’ve always been a fan of informal learning, especially so when it has to do with environmental consciousness. I’d be curious to see how the site’s business model fares over time – do enough people click on the links for this to be sustainable? Also, I’m interested in what the patterns of use look like: is this something people would do throughout the day? Only on their lunchbreak? Or are people just too busy during the workday to take these quizzes. So here’s where I think the mobile context is really relevant. I often look to my phone to fill small gaps in time – waiting on a line or for the elevator, bored at a meeting, etc. – and these time-filling interactions normally consist of me pressing Send/Receive on my GMail acccount or fiddling with settings. If it were possible to put a Treewala-like portal on my mobile phone, either web-based (think WAP or iPhone web app), J2ME, or any other development platform that could support dynamically-provisioned advertising, then I think this would make for a supremely fulfilling (both on a personal and and environmental level) time-wasting experience.

Want to know what a co-fire is? Go on over to Treewala to find out!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Environment, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.