This week Green for All, one of my favorite organizations, released five free guides for green businesses and start-ups.  The one I found most interesting was 10 Green Business Ideas for New Entrepreneurs (PDF).  Much like a slimmed-down version of 75 Green Business Ideas (but shorter, and cheaper), the guide divides green businesses into ten sectors, and provides numerous examples of business ideas within each sector, and points towards businesses that are already trying out those ideas.  The ten sectors are:

1. The Healthy, Local Food Movement
2. Renewable Energy Alternatives, Green Collar Job Training, and Green Business Incubators
3. Green Transportation
4. Green Product Innovation and Consumer Goods Retail
5. Green Home- and Offce-Cleaning Services
6. Become Part of the ReUse Revolution!
7. Energy-Effcient Homes and Green Home Retrofts
8. Green Landscaping and Green Plumbing
9. Green Information Technology (IT)
10. Green, Grassroots Community Lending and Microfinancing

Hopefully, this report will encourage entrepreneurs to pick up the shovel (figuratively or literally) and get to work on creating high-quality green-collar jobs!

Tip of the hat to Green VC for highlighting these excellent resources.

By way of the great folks at Green Lights comes this great new rap from members of the Louisiana Green Corps:

I wonder if you'd call this socially conscious hip-hop?  It's a great way to kick off the weekend, regardless!

One of the biggest challenges in greening our economy is green job training.  GreenBiz recently highlighted the efforts of Green for All (one of my favorite green organizations) and the state of California in leading the way on green-collar job training.  I applaud these efforts to develop solid training programs for green-collar jobs, but I believe there are also opportunities for smaller-scale green training.

In particular, I'm thinking about free online videos for simple energy efficiency tasks, like caulking and storm window insulation.  If you search YouTube for "storm window installation", you'll eventually find the following:

This video is actually pretty good, and it's a testimony to the diversity and quality of video available at YouTube (despite all the static).  But it's possible to improve on this user experiene quite a bit, in a number of ways.

I'd like to see a site dedicated exclusively to providing users with instructional videos about weatherization tasks, and perhaps some overview videos that give some high-level information about how weatherization works and why it's important.  Such a site would feature the following:

• The ability to browse videos by type of task and difficulty level
• Multiple videos showcasing different approaches to the same task (e.g. one video for vinyl storm windows, and another for permanent storm windows)
• Ratings and comments to allow users to review a video and provide helpful critiques
• Ecommerce features to allow users to buy related products for their weatherization tasks
• Community features to allow users to get together with others in their area and participate in a weatherization project

Using Drupal and embedded videos with YouTube (together with some helpful Drupal modules like Five Star and Ubercart), it would be relatively easy to build such a site on a low budget.  The revenues for weatherization product sales could help pay for maintenance.

I think the main trick would be driving traffic to the site and keeping users engaged over time.  The site would certainly be targeted towards motivated individuals, who are interested in energy efficiency and like to roll up their sleeves.  While it wouldn't be as comprehensive as a bona fide job training program, such a site would be one more approach to making weatherization projects more common and widespread, and could help contribute to lower energy use.