With Earth Day just about upon us (April 22), here's a nifty idea for getting the message out about environmental issues.

The team at Gizmoz have designed a couple of animated, talking characters that you can program (very easy to do - mainly pointing and clicking) with your own environmental message. You can send it to your friends and colleagues as a video cards. Here's a sample I created that only took a few minutes to do.

Use it to send a protest, relay green tips or anything you can think of to help raise environmental awareness. The message you type in will be read back by the character and there's all sorts of customization tools available. The kids will love it too!