Category Archives: Blogging

Carbon footprints

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My friend and OneWorld colleague, Peter Armstrong, never does anything by halves. About two years ago he decided that he wanted to reduce his family’s carbon footprint (which was high because he and his partner Anuradha have to do a lot of air-travel). He started with their house in Oxfordshire and installed a heat-pump as well as doing a lot of insulation etc. He also blogged the entire process in a fascinatingly open way. Here is his assessment of where they’ve got to after the first year of the new regime.

October marked the end of the first year with the heat pump and the other energy saving measures we have put in place. The results are very interesting and to some extent surprising. We can look at them in a number of different ways.

Our baseline was 2004 when our heating oil cost £2,431 and our electricity £2,292, giving a total energy cost for the house of £4,732.

Now in 2006 (Oct 2005-Oct 2006) we have only electricity to consider. This breaks down as non-heat pump £1,481 and heat pump £1,663, giving a total energy cost of £3,144.

So we may conclude that we have a crude saving of £1,579 on the year, about half from using less general electricity and half from using the heat pump instead of oil.

Perhaps more interestingly, the cost of oil in 2006 would have been £3,403, which would have made us another £1,000 worse off.

So we could say that the heat pump (cost £13,000) will pay for itself in seven years at 2006 oil prices…

Blogging and freedom

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This morning’s Observer column…

What do these countries have in common: Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam?

All are listed by the human-rights organisation Reporters sans Frontieres as having governments that seek to curtail freedom of expression on the internet. Some are the usual suspects, but it’s interesting to see cuddly Socialist Cuba keeping up with the massed goons of Burma, China and North Korea.

The two ‘stans’ are also coming along nicely, as their oil wealth increases, and of course Iran remains a staunch opponent of internet freedoms – or any freedoms at all.

Despite these efforts, Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the net, a reflection of an extraordinary phenomenon: the way Iranians, especially women, use the net to combat government control of conventional media. It seems to date from 2001, when hardliners shut down more than 100 newspapers and magazines and detained writers…

State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006

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Hooray! Dave Sifri’s latest State of the Blogosphere is online. Highlights:

  • 57 million blogs
  • 3 million blogs created during third quarter of 2006
  • 100,000 blogs created every day
  • 55% of all blogs are ‘active’ — defined as having been updated at least once in the last three months (doesn’t seem very active to me)
  • The blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days
  • About 1.3 million postings every day
  • Most popular languages are English (39%), Japanese (33%), Chinese (10%), Spanish (3%), Italian, Russian, Portuguese, French (all equal on 2%). Farsi (1%) has pushed its way into the top ten for the first time.

    • Nielsen conference on user-generated media bans blogging

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    From Greg Verdino’s Blog.

    Today, I am off to Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ clients-only CGM Summit 2006.  The agenda is cram packed with sessions covering all aspects of Consumer Generated Media (CGM) including an overview of where we are today, why people do this stuff, where CGM is going in the future, and how exactly marketers can leverage and measure this powerful channel.  Ironically, the confirmation email I received for the event includes this warning:

    “Off The Record: the CGM Summit is off the record, so please no blogging, reporting, recording or broadcasting.”

    Hmmm…  So how can you host an event about consumer generated media and not let your consumers, um, generate media?

    9/11 as the catalyst for the blogging phenomenon

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    Interesting Wired News piece on the impact of 9/11 on the blogosphere…

    When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.

    While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

    When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world.

    Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene.

    “I have a scrap of paper that flew onto my roof,” wrote New Yorker Anthony Hecht. “Typewritten and handwritten numbers in the millions. A symbol of our tragedy. It smells like fire.”

    Many bloggers strayed from their normal writing beats to produce a rolling news service comprising links to materials and tidbits gathered by friends.

    Dave Winer, author of one of the earliest and most popular weblogs, Scripting News, used his site to post one-line news flashes, New York webcam stills and links to witness accounts.

    The chaos was “a galvanizing point for the blogging world,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media.

    “We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful,” Gillmor said. “I remembered that old cliche that journalists write the first rough draft of history. Well now bloggers were writing the first draft.”

    A lost world

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    Lovely story on Harold Strong’s Blog…

    I had the good fortune to spend two months on the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inisheer (Inis Oirr), in 1962. This was the year before I sat the Leaving Certificate examination, the final school examination in Ireland. At that time if you didn’t pass Irish you failed the examination and couldn’t go to University. So the idea was that I would improve my Irish. This worked and was a fantastic experience. One that has left me with a deep affection for the islanders, their way of life and the Irish language along with a small collection of photographs.

    At that time I only had a basic 35mm camera and a few rolls of film. You couldn’t get more film on the island at that time and anyway I couldn’t afford it. When I came home after spending a month longer than originally agreed all I could do was develop the film but no prints! The negatives were kept among my personal stuff, put in a press [cupboard] and forgotten about.

    Last year I was using my son’s scanner, remembered these negatives and discovered that they could be scanned. He then introduced me to Flickr and suggested I should put them up there which I did.

    I moved on to other things and forgot about them until recently. An email arrived from the ‘Crashed’ music group asking if some of them could be used on the cover of a new CD. The result was that one was used as the outer cover of a CD and two more were used on the inlay.

    They were of the wreck of the MV Plassey which went aground on an offshore rock during a severe storm on the night of 8th March 1960. The 11 crew were rescued by the local onshore rescue crew using a Breeches Buoy. It was later driven onto the island during another storm. It is on the rocks in the opening scene of the Channel 4 comedy series ‘Father Ted’…

    I’ve just looked at the photographs and some of them (for example this one, of a funeral procession) are very evocative. It’s a lovely little archive portraying a vanished world.

    What Bloggers write about

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    Interesting research report from the Pew ‘Internet and American Life’ project. Summary:

    A new, national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.

    Related surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or about 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.

    These are some of the key findings in a new report issued by the Pew Internet Project titled “Bloggers”:

  • 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere.
  • 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
  • Women and men have statistical parity in the blogosphere, with women representing 46% of bloggers and men 54%.
  • 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others.
  • 64% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others.
  • When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is “my life and experiences.”
  • Other topics ran distantly behind: 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government; 7% focus on entertainment; 6% focus on sports; 5% focus on general news and current events; 5% focus on business; 4% on technology; 2% on religion, spirituality or faith; and additional smaller groups who focus on a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.

    • Political blogging in the UK

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    Useful piece by Ned Temko in this morning’s Observer. Includes links to some of the most prominent blogs. One of them is by David Miliband, the teenage Cabinet minister (and the next Labour leader but one), who writes his own blog entries and claims to read the comments.

    I also rather like the Blog maintained by Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor. I’m astonished that he can find the time to write one — his day job is one of the most punishing in the media business.

    Iain Dale’s Diary is rather good too, though the reference in the name will escape most younger readers. (Mrs Dale’s Diary was an early, genteel BBC radio soap which ran during my childhood in the 1950s.) Maybe the reference escapes the author too: after all, his name is Iain Dale!

    The Long Tail

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    Just back from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where I interviewed Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, about his new book, The Long Tail. He’s a voluble, intelligent, persuasive talker and he gave a polished performance to a packed house.

    Two interesting points.

  • Anderson wrote his book ‘publicly’ — by publishing chapters on his Blog and inviting comments. So he harnessed the power of Eric Raymond’s motto, “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.
  • He’s also harnessed the blogosphere by offering to give a free copy to any blogger who will review it. Smart thinking.

    • Growl

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    I’ve just seen a lovely New Yorker cartoon (which I dare not reproduce for fear of the copyright police). It shows two dogs sitting companionably together. One is saying, “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.

    Bow wow!