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Pongtip Puvacharoen works at the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific stand on the first day of Carbon Expo in Barcelona.

As promised, here's my first update from Barcelona and the CarbonExpo. Today is the first official day of the Expo, and my colleague from Bangkok, Pongtip Puvacharoen, and I basically just finished helping the World Bank's East Asian clients – China, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Thailand – set up the East Asia and Pacific Pavilion.

This year's CarbonExpo focuses on the efforts of cities to increase their sustainability by introducing clean transport, improve air quality, increase the production of renewable energy, and improve energy efficiency. I do love living in cities, in particular "megacities" of over 8 million inhabitants. But I am also a big fan of trees, green spots in between the concrete, and a fresh breeze – some things I sometimes miss in the U.S. and in East Asian metropolises.

This is why I really thought it important that Jakarta (Indonesia), Tianjin (China), and Bangkok (Thailand), participated in the Symposium on Cities, Climate Change, and Finance, co-organized by the World Bank, the Spanish government, and the City of Barcelona. After all cleaner, greener, and more livable cities are good for all of a city's inhabitants, rich and poor, and help improve living standards and the health of its people.

I came across a small, but interesting online effort to raise donations for an organization that works to improve child literacy in Laos. Called Library for Laos, the effort aims to raise $5,000 by May 1– just five days after it started. The money raised is intended to go to Big Brother Mouse, a neat, Laos-based project that publishes, teaches and distributes books to children in a country they say desperately needs it.

It's a nice concept for a good cause, but what sticks out to me are the coordinators' clear attempts to use social media to spread the word about their effort. On their website, they bank on the ease of PayPal for donating money and the viral nature of social media: "How many people follow you on Twitter? How many friends do you have on Facebook? Let's see how valuable they are!" It's early to tell if they're succeeding. After the first day, they had apparently raised $500 dollars.

Either way, the endeavor highlights how social sites like Facebook, which permeates everyday life for many of us, can serve the world's poor. For example, you have the option to join various "causes" on Facebook. And on Twitter, information can spread like wildfire through retweets (rebroadcasting content to your own set of followers). What do you think? Would you ask your online friends and/or followers to donate money to a good cause?

(Found via: Escape the Cube). Image credit: rustystewart at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Early next week, days before the G-20 summit, head over to the World Bank homepage for the live video stream of a speech by the Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, to be broadcast on Tuesday at 10 a.m. in London (5 a.m. in Washington, D.C.). If you can't make it for the speech, it will be posted to worldbank.org.

During the Reuters-hosted event, Zoellick will answer questions submitted by readers. You can participate by submitting your questions for Zoellick directly through the comments section of Reuters' The Great Debate blog or by using the #askwb tag on Twitter. It looks like there is already plenty of interest – with more than 130 comments posted as I write.

The Web is abuzz with the role of Twitter (which I wrote about last week) in spreading news about the China earthquake. A reminder and an update: Twitter is the site where users post messages of no more than 140 characters to say what they're doing at any certain moment. This is kind of... limited, and users of Twitter are coming up with other applications. But yesterday, the first news about the earthquake in Sichuan were made known to the world not through CNN or BBC, but through Twitter, when Robert Scoble started reporting accounts from residents in China just as the earthquake was happening. He was ahead of even the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) by three minutes.  Does this mean Twitter has "come of age" and proved itself to fill a niche that other media can't?