Joe Rogel

Welcome to the 196th edition of Carnival of the Green, brought to you by Gaiam! Thanks to TreeHugger, this week we bring you the best in Green from around the blogosphere and Twitterverse.

Big thanks to EcoTech Daily for hosting last week’s Carnival and keep an eye out for the next installment at La Marguerite on September 21st. For more information and to submit your site for consideration as a host, read this.

After asking you to vote on four composters we selected from your suggestions, the first round of the Gaiam Compost-Off has come to a close and only two composters remain standing. Here are the results:

Finalists:

Orb Composter – 51% Votes
Earthmaker Composter – 29.5% Votes

Voted Out:

Green Cone Composter – 15% Votes
Wigwam Composter – 4.5% Votes

If you’re a Gaiam fan on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or are a member of Gaia, you’ll recall that we recently asked for your input on how to make the best compost, best materials to use for composting, and suggestions on your favorite composters. Why, you may ask? Because we want to step up our selection of composting products to make it even better — and we want you to help us pick the next composter we should carry in our catalog.

Inspired by Kate Hanley’s blog post on finding her “Dream Yoga Mat,” yesterday we decided to give six lucky Facebook fans and Twitter followers the chance to win a dream yoga mat of their own. We simply asked them to answer the question, “What is your favorite yoga pose, and why?” We expected great answers, and our friends surprised us with so much more.

Green mobile app developer 3rdWhale will be the first mobile app developer to join 1% For the Planet, a “growing global movement of 1,202 companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of 1,781 environmental organizations worldwide.” And they want your help deciding where their money will go!

Admittedly, this post comes a bit later than fashionable, but I was waiting on photos from our friends of the first tweetup hosted by @Gaiam, @LOHASTed and @elephantjournal at the @happynoodle. After all, what good is a post about a tweetup without pics?

All in all, our first tweetup was an absolute success!

If you follow @Gaiam on Twitter, you already know by now that we’ll be hosting our first-ever tweetup with LOHAS and Elephant Journal at The Happy Noodle House in Boulder on Tuesday, June 16 from 6-8 p.m.

‘Tis the giving season, and just in time for the holidays, we have 25 great gifts for you, and they’re free! However, they’re not just any ordinary gifts — we’re presenting the opportunity to do something special this year by offering the gift of giving to you.

One of the best amenities at our new campus in Louisville, Colo., is the fresh, healthy food served up right here in our much-anticipated on-site Gaiam Café.

The Gaiam Café opened for business in September

Gaiam partnered with Savory Cuisines, a company dedicated to promoting “a choice of lifestyle that is healthy and life enhancing” to create a “Green Cafeteria.” We love the fact that our new café brings farmer’s-market-fresh food right to the office using 90% organic and local products.