I’m in my mid-30s. Facebook, Twitter, Digg and the like are new concepts to me. I saw my wife reconnecting with tons of friends, which made Facebook seem like a fun and actually very powerful tool. It wasn’t really until November that I understood the extent of the power of social networking.

The historic and unprecedented presidential election convinced me that this is a trend that is here to stay. Barack Obama heavily valued social networking in growing his constituency. He has 5,368,315 supporters on Facebook and 325,234 followers on Twitter. I was in D.C. last week and met with a person that was on Obama’s tech team during the campaign. They raised half a billion dollars online for the campaign. Half a billion!

When I first heard about web social networking, I though it was an annoyance that I’d seen high school kids doing all over the place. I thought it really was just “social.” Damn, I’m naive. Like it or not, it is a major business style of a new era.

We have a lot of firsts happening right now in America. The first African-American president. The first president elected that understands and utilizes Web 2.0. The first time most of the people alive today have seen a great depression. Trivially, my first blog on Think Spot.

I am a biologist by training. My focus in college was on vertebrate ecology and evolution, so I have some Luddite and traditional tendencies. But with all of these incredible firsts going on, I’m giving this new stuff a chance. I am embracing the new tools and using them to spread the good (in my opinion) word. Hence the blogging, tweeting, facebooking and so forth.

I will be blogging about helpful green topics centered on green building and greening companies. I’ll discuss the stimulus bill’s impact on the green building industry and dissect LEED credits and practical methods for green building. I’ll talk about approaches to greening businesses from all sectors to further global sustainability. As life takes me on travels, I’ll tour green projects and report on them here. I’ll talk about trips to D.C., New Orleans and elsewhere.

Bottom line: I’m excited about this new stuff. Thanks GBA.