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There are start up stories and then there are good start up stories. WAYN (Where Are You Now) has a beginning that makes for the good kind. Maybe it’s because of these beginnings that the ‘doing good’ continues and not just for the bottom line. Amongst the recent Press Releases and blog posts about a partnership with Kayak.com or being chosen for the Top 100 European start-up companies etc. there’s a good story about the WAYN club –

It was launched as a forum by the founders of WAYN to showcase public opinion and raise awareness of world issues that are important to its members.

“A truly astonishing expression of the reach and strength of WAYN members’ convictions is the online petition demanding an immediate end to the slaughter of Dolphins off the coast of Japan. Announced in the middle of March as one of the ‘Make a Difference’ campaigns, over 50,000 members across the world signed the petition in the first week. Other campaigns, highlighting WAYN members’ concerns, will follow. »

Building platforms for like-minded communities (travel in this case, WAYN has become the world’s largest online social networking and travel community with over eight million members) then helping them to heave in a right direction for the environment is putting the tools of Web 2.0 to very good use, I’m sure you’ll agree. An Earth 2.0 isn’t on the cards however many Stanford students you get to work on it.

Which reminds me of the World Wild Life announcement made last month:

“The global conservation organization announced that from today more than 150 of its projects will be added to Google Earth, the satellite imagery-based mapping product”.
“People interested in conservation and the environment now will be able to visit WWF projects in some of the world’s most threatened and biologically diverse places from their home computers,” said WWF International’s Director General James Leape.

“We’re pleased that the WWF has chosen Google Earth as a platform for sharing their incredibly important conservation work,” said John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and the Google Maps.