Drive Safely Work Week 2010 is coming (in the U.S. – sorry, fellow Canadians), running Oct. 4-8. It’s a joint project of the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The focus is on the dangers of using mobile devices while driving, and I’m thrilled to be able to make a contribution. (To the week. Not to the dangers.)

NETS has produced a tool kit for organizations that want to take part in DSWW. And they asked me if they could use one of my cartoons.

The kit is impressively thorough: sample messages, posters, banners – even a daily activity sheet. (My cartoon appears on the sheet for Thursday, Oct. 7.) If you want to participate, just fill out a short survey and you’ll get a download link. (You can also follow the NTES on Twitter.)

By the way, the campaign has been blogged by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Five years ago, the idea of a member of the U.S. federal cabinet blogging would have blown my mind. Today, it seems perfectly normal.

Stories abound of rock bands who produce hours and hours of music that deepens the soul, challenges the psyche and redefines human existence in a new, profoundly meaningful way.

And then they write one frigging novelty song, and that’s the one that chews its way to the top of the charts. You spend years writing songs about social justice and the human condition, but I Just Choked on a Tic Tac is the song that defines your life’s work.

This can happen in blogging, too. You’ll write post after post about your interests and passions, posts that draw on your unique expertise… but it’s that one post you dashed off about how to get gum out of your sofa’s upholstery that gets all the search engine traffic and inbound links.

Well, if life’s sending traffic to your lemons, why not let that traffic know about your lemonade stand?

That’s an issue near and dear to me, because I’m facing that exact situation. I’ve been blogging on my personal site as well as on Social Signal, and I’ve written a few tech how-tos that get an inordinate amount of search engine traffic. Four or five of those posts – about Firefox, Drupal, the iPhone, WordPerfect and Mac OS X – are especially popular.

People visiting those pages tend to take the information they need and then leave. After all, my blog really isn’t a tech troubleshooting site, and they’re here on a mission. But I also know there’s stuff I could show them that they might find interesting – especially from my cartoon.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do on those pages: add a few thumbnail images of relevant cartoons, link them to the cartoon section of the site, and invite visitors to check it out. (A related-content plugin could generate that material automatically… but I want to control exactly what I’m offering to the visitors on these pages, and gauge how they respond. Hence the manual approach.)

Most of the people visiting probably won’t click on those links. But my bet is that some will.

I’m trying this out today on the Apple-related pages. I’m annotating Google Analytics, and I’ll let you know in a few weeks how this worked.

I was on holiday in Paris with Alex and the kids earlier this month, and in assorted cafés and bistros, it was easy to let a lot of my cares and troubles slip away. (That doesn’t include the “Am I a good parent?” anxiety, which crosses international borders and time zone boundaries unattenuated.)

But sooner or later l’addition arrives, and with it a little reminder that this holiday comes with a price tag.

That’s a message that North America has been sending to Europe loudly and with more than a little disdain over the past few years. Our governments and pundits have looked askance at European social programs; our news runs stories of cradle-to-grave ChocolateCare and iron-clad guarantees of job security, vacation time and wage parity with the cast of Grey’s Anatomy.

European societies may not meet with the demands of North American business elites for fiscal discipline. They may not have made the same tough (read service-and-benefit-cutting) decisions as Canadian and American governments.

But they have made tough environmental decisions… even if they weren’t necessarily deliberate ones.

Vehicles here are small – in part a function of narrower streets and pricier fuel. Appliances are smaller and more energy-efficient, and hot-water heaters are of the small, instant-on variety; again, small space and costly fuel play a role. Rail transit abounds, thanks to greater population densities, and bicycles are a viable and much-used alternative to cars.

Europe is still wrestling with the decisions that will allow them to grapple with the economic crisis. (Not all mean cutting services, by the way. For instance, Greece’s problems also stem from their astonishingly small number of people who actually pay the taxes they owe.)

But they’ve already made many of the sacrifices we’ll need to make to cope with a future of high-priced oil and strictly-capped carbon. It may well be that, before long, it will be the French who are shaking their heads over OUR lack of discipline… all the way into their early, comfortable pensions.