jjprojects: our social web » clean tech

Google Earth Engine launched to aid global environmental monitoring and measurement.

John Johnston — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 02:29:10 +0000

Google has launched Google Earth Engine at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, currently underway in Cancun, Mexico. The new platform enables global monitoring and measurement of changes in Earth’s environment.

Google Earth Engine will allow scientists to use Google’s huge infrastructure to analyse imagery (running analyses across thousands of computers), in order to study data related to such things as the state of deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response and water resources.

Google says it’s particularly excited about the use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify efforts to stop global deforestation. Deforestation is responsible for a substantial amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, and loss of biodiversity.

It’s a timely launch, as a United Nations proposed framework for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) is a key agenda item at the Cancun conference.

Because of the huge amount of satellite imagery, and the substantial computer resources needed to analyze the images, many images have never before been seen or analyzed. Google says that scientists will now be able to build applications to mine the significant amount of data they have built up.

Google is also donating 10 million CPU-hours a year for 2 years on Google Earth Engine, to help developing nations track the state of forests. The aim is to provide transparency and certainty to efforts to stop deforestation; both important and significant issues.

It’s good to see Google using its resources in a project such as this, which I notice is also supported by several partners, including key strategic and funding partner the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Facebook is all Green now, don’t give us any more suggestions please.

John Johnston — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:40:40 +0000

Perhaps in response to the earlier reported pressure from Greenpeace and others, Facebook has put up a ‘Green on Facebook’ page, highlighting the company’s “efforts to be a green and sustainable global citizen”.

The page has information on Facebook’s environmental and energy efficiency programs, and has links to its energy efficiency partners, such as Digital Energy Solutions Campaign, Alliance to Save Energy and The Green Grid.

Facebook may be correct in asserting that “By enabling millions of people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share, we believe we can help unleash innovative environmental initiatives across the globe.”. In addition, it appears that Facebook has now realised, with more than a little pressure it has to be said, that it should also lead by example.

An obvious question now, given how big Facebook has become, is: do you think Facebook is doing enough? Facebook’s stated programs and energy efficiencies now include:

Encouraging recycling and composting throughout Facebook facilities.
Reducing water consumption by nearly 60%, including auto/dual flush toilets and motion sensor faucets.
Motion sensor controlled lighting, reducing energy consumption by 60%.
A Green transportation program offering shuttles, car and vanpooling, bike racks and subsidised public transport for employees.
Facebook has designed a programming language (HipHop for PHP) that provides 50% CPU savings, meaning fewer servers are needed.
Facebook has made the storage of user photos more efficient, so it uses 20% less power than industry standard storage architecture.
Facebook has invested in and is introducing various data center efficiencies on an ongoing basis.

Not bad. They have also added a “Have any further suggestions related to Facebook and the Environment, submit it here” link, but strangely enough, when I clicked it, it came back with:

Hmm, bit of an oversight there. No doubt they’ll fix that. They do allow comments on their wall though. I noticed quite a lot of “No To Coal” spam there as it happens.

The web and the emerging paradigm shift toward sustainability.

John Johnston — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:13:01 +0000

I want to pick up on an idea in a recent post I read over at GreenBiz.com. It’s a very brief interview with Tim O’Reilly on How the Web is a Sustainability Platform. The post is a precursor to their Innovation Forum being held in October.

Partly, I want to pick up on this concept because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now too, and let’s face it, we do tend to gravitate to ideas that we agree with.

I think the idea of the web as an emerging sustainability platform also relates to my recent post The great human hive and the road not taken, which discusses increased connectivity in relation to an emerging global civilisation.

Seeing the whole Earth from space in images for the first time– the seeds of a paradigm shift? Earthrise image courtesy of NASA.gov.

In the interview Tim O’Reilly states,

One (parallel with the open source and Web 2.0 paradigm shifts) is that the Web represented a complete sea change in the media world. People were in denial for a long time and most companies completely missed the opportunity because they tried to marginalize it. In a way sustainability is an even greater change in the world of consumer products. People are still in denial. I think one of the big lessons from the Web is that things that seem to start small can actually be utterly transforming.

Well said. Furthermore, I have come to believe that sustainability is going to be THE key driver of business innovation this century. With every day that goes by, this seems clearer and clearer to me. This will involve a huge transformation – in the way we move around, the way we work, the products and services we buy, how products are produced, how we create and deliver energy. With all the advances in technology we have made so far, it will not mean taking a step back to pre-industrial times as some people fear. Far from it.

I think it’s way bigger than the transformation brought on by the Internet and the digital revolution in general, but it will most certainly involve these too. How could it not? There was a time when I thought the internet would be the biggest innovation and transformation I’d see within my possible lifetime. I was wrong.

By the way, if you are interested, here’s a recent article from Harvard Business Review, The Sustainability Imperative, May 2010 (most of which is behind a paywall sorry). This article articulates this emerging paradigm shift in some detail.

In short, the two external references I’ve pointed to here (as well as many other voices around the world) are saying, get on board now or face being left behind as this paradigm shift gathers pace.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree or do you see it going another way altogether?

Greenpeace campaign takes aim at Facebook’s coal–fired servers [animated video].

John Johnston — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:49:08 +0000

Following the recent social media driven succes s of Greenpeace’s campaign to get Nestlé to stop using palm oil linked to the destruction of rainforests, it seems the activist organisation is now taking aim at Facebook’s massive new data center. Apparently, the new facility is not powered by clean energy.

Greenpeace wants Facebook to “drop coal and commit to 100 percent renewable energy, cutting its carbon footprint and helping in the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change”

Greenpeace has released the embedded animated video, which is a bit of a spoof on the new feature film The Social Network – another movie Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not be particularly happy about.

Earlier this month, Facebook responded (in the comments section) to a Greenpeace open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, maintaining that their massive, new Oregon data center is quite energy efficient, although not run on renewable energy.

Perhaps Greenpeace feels Facebook is a good target for this kind of campaign as it’s getting pretty huge, with over 500 million users now. In addition, Facebook is increasingly in competition with the likes of Google, which is doing substantially more to address its carbon footprint, and even making investments in renewable energy technology.

What are your thoughts on what Greenpeace is asking Facebook to do? Could Facebook be doing more, given its huge size and growing revenue? In any case, It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how this one turns out.

I take issue with the label Green, here’s why.

John Johnston — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 03:40:38 +0000

From a mainstream communications point of view, I think there’s a growing issue with labeling things “Green”, or having a separate category for Green, as is nearly always the case. It’s true, a few individuals, organisations and businesses have started to move beyond using the Green label but most have not yet.

Mainstream backdrop

A little background is in order first. Over the past few decades, since the sixties and even before that, there has been growing concern around the world over rising pollution levels and increasing environmental degradation in general. In addition, world population is now approaching seven billion people, estimated to reach nine billion around 2050.

Further, since the eighties, mounting scientific evidence of human induced climate change (despite ongoing attempts to discredit the science), has become occasional front page news, and pretty much never out of the news completely. That’s most unlikely to change over the coming years.

We had the situation late last year where governments who agree that climate change exists and is a significant problem, met in Copenhagen to attempt to hash out a binding global agreement to curb global emissions. There was unprecedented media attention on the COP15 event and an enormous amount of pressure from different individuals and groups to achieve a sensible outcome. Needless to say, there was an accord reached but expectations were not met at Copenhagen.

However, it’s not over by a long shot. Global warming is still on the agenda and it’s not going away. As I said on Twitter the other day, I’m 100% convinced that climate change will continue to cause catastrophic damage to the careers of quite a few of the world’s politicians. In Australia (where I live), Kevin Rudd’s position as Prime Minister comes to mind. Among other issues, after publicly staking so much on it, he never really recovered from the failure at Copenhagen and his party’s failure to get a proposed emissions trading scheme signed into law. He was ousted from within the party after a significant drop in the polls. The new leader, Julia Gillard, will face the issue again should she be reelected.

The problem with Green

So given the contemporary situation, what’s my issue with the current proliferation of the “Green” label or category? What’s not to like? What we have appearing all over the place recently are things like Green sections on popular news blogs, sites and in newspapers. We have Green products proliferating, and companies advertising the new Greenness of their products and services, in some cases whether they are actually more environmentally friendly or not.

“Greenwashing” is a term I have less of a problem with by the way, as it seems like a fairly descriptive and accurate term for what has gone on in some cases. BP’s Beyond Petroleum makeover springs to mind as an obvious example, but there are many subtler versions out there. But I digress.

Now, after Copenhagen, we have governments such as the Obama Administration talking up a much needed push towards a new, emerging green economy, and the many green collar jobs that will create. We have technology related blogs and sites introducing Greentech sections. We have Green online social networkers wanting to build sizeable communities and become ‘friends’ with as many people as possible in order to help spread the word and get action on various environmental issues.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all well and good. Green has been useful and has worked well to attract and communicate with a certain percentage of people. I don’t think the fact that there’s a growing awareness and a proliferation of information, ideas and action is bad at all. It’s brilliant! The main reason I now have a issue with the label “Green”, is that we have got to the point where it’s going to marginalise what needs to become very mainstream, ubiquitous in fact.

So what next?

There are many people, perhaps the majority, who do not want to identify as Green and probably never will. Green is a turn off to many. Even though the label Green has become a lot more mainstream, to many it still conjures up images of hippies, “greenies”, “treehuggers” and environmental activists climbing chimneys.

But hey, guess what? A lot of these people would still like to help fix the environment even though they don’t identify with the Green label. Many might switch to clean power given half a chance, rather than use coal-fired power, if it comes at the right price that is. Many might buy an electric car one day that runs on clean energy. They might buy it because the technology is more advanced and it’s more efficient. They might buy more environmentally friendly products, but because they are better quality products, not just because they are greener. They might buy locally grown food, it might be organic, but they might buy it because it tastes better and is healthier, and because Jamie Oliver says it’s better. But green? No not me.

We will have big businesses who come to realise that investing in clean technologies, efficiencies and more sustainable production processes will in the long run make them even more profitable. It will also give them a leading edge when it comes to how their brand is viewed by the public, their customers, suppliers, shareholders and by the media. They won’t have to shout “we’re Green” and try and make it stick. It’ll become obvious they are making real changes when perhaps others aren’t doing so much.

The issues need to be so mainstream that they need to be integrated within many other information categories: news, technology, politics, business and finance, transport, energy, food, lifestyle, you name it. The majority of people in the world are going to need to change the way we live and work in order to move towards a more sustainable situation. Having a Green category that appeals to only a minority (admittedly growing) percentage of people is simply not going to be enough to do the job.

So I think it’s time to move beyond the Green label. It’s been useful but it’s served its purpose. It is happening to a certain extent but it needs to go much further. Most of the time I think Green in used for want of something better. I think sustainability is not a bad term to use within businesses. I think the term Clean is useful when talking about the clean economy, clean energy and cleantech. Eco can be useful but is a bit like Green in that it has often been used as a greenwashing instrument. Perhaps we need some new terms. Perhaps we don’t need a new label at all. After all, the idea of, and push for a more sustainable future needs to become so mainstream that it doesn’t have a name anymore, it’s just normal. We have a long way to go.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree we need to move beyond “Green”?

Hundreds of millions of social networkers contribute to new data center building boom

John Johnston — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:34:26 +0000

There seems to be a data center building boom currently going on in Silicon Valley, partly driven by the many hundreds of millions of online social networkers.

Internet map image from The Opte Project

Apparently there are 7 projects underway in Santa Clara alone. If these reports are to be believed, unlike during the over-funded, over-development during the dot-com boom, construction is struggling to meet demand from the likes of fast growing companies such as Facebook.

According to this report, Facebook is looking to grab all the space in two new data centers and a good part of a third that’s still being built. However, it seems Facebook is leasing some space to meet its short term needs until it builds its own in-house.

When Facebook only(!) had 300 million users, it said it had 30,000 servers. User numbers have increased by well over 100 million since then.

It’s good to see that Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have servers housed at Digital Realty’s Santa Clara operation. These data centers have a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

It’s got to take a hell of a lot of power to run all the servers these companies (and we) are using daily. As well as being efficient, wouldn’t it be great if this power came from clean energy sources at some stage in the near future?

Worth switching to Seesmic for iPhone from Twitter for iPhone? Yes. Here’s why.

John Johnston — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:20:09 +0000

I was a big fan of using Tweetie, then I started using the replacement Twitter for iPhone app after Twitter recently bought the app and took it over. There’s no doubt, it’s a great app, there’s much to like about it. You can easily move between multiple Twitter accounts (if you have more than one), access and manage your Twitter Lists, make and save Twitter searches, upload and tweet out images, shorten URLs within posts and more.

So if I like it so much, why have I just made the switch to the new Seesmic for iPhone? Well for me, here are a few of reasons that make it worth it. Keep in mind that I haven’t tried Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or any other similar app, so I’m willing to be convinced if you think any have better features than this.

1. The biggest reason is that it’s not only a Twitter client. You can operate multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook account, and a Ping.fm account from the app. The Ping.fm account access really opens it up to a lot of different network accounts.

2. You can hit the reply or compose button on one account and then choose which account, or multiple accounts, the message will be sent from. This is something you can’t do with Tweetie/Twitter. I find myself wanting to do this quite a lot.

UPDATE: Scratch no. 2. In comments tomtubbs has pointed out that you can actually do this in Tweetie. In all the time I was using Tweetie and Tweetie 2, I never realised you could do this. Doh! Or is this a fairly new feature? It’s still good you can do this in Seesmic too though.

3. You can easily move between accounts or saved searches by swiping the screen sideways. This is a small but nice little time saver when reading messages across accounts.

5. If you have Ping.fm set up, you can select a Ping group to send a particular message from, while the composer is open no less. This is a great feature!

I’ve now set my Ping account up with additional groups, so that each service is a group of one. This means that if I want, I can individually select my Google Buzz, Friendfeed, Flickr or any other account to send messages from, all at the time of composing a message.

Loic from Seesmic has said that they plan on adding Foursquare at a later date too, so hopefully you’ll be able to check in and send messages via Foursquare, as well as seeing your Foursquare activity timeline.

6. You can send tweets to Evernote, which I use on a daily basis. This is a handy feature if you want to read an article later that someone has linked to, for instance.

One downside to the Seesmic for iPhone for me is that you can view your Twitter lists but you can’t manage them from the app. Twitter for iPhone is great for this and I hope Seesmic adds this functionality.

Those are my reasons for using it instead of anything else at this point. Do let me know if you are using something you think is better.

Google launches Gulf oil spill crisis response and starts crowdsourcing news

John Johnston — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:00:35 +0000

Further to my previous post about the Gulf oil spill in relation to social media, Google has launched a Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Crisis Response page. Every day a new Google Earth layer is being produced to track the spread of of the oil spill.

In addition, Google is encouraging people to help by volunteering during the crisis and by donating to the Alabama Coastal Foundation.

Interestingly, they are also attempting to crowdsource news by asking people to upload their own videos of the Gulf oil spill as the situation develops. The videos will automatically be fed back to the crisis page.

There is also a Deepwater Horizon oil spill page developing on Wikipedia, with a substantial and growing number of references. No doubt this will become a significant resource as the disaster continues to unfold.

5 ways to find the best Twitter connections

John Johnston — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:05:58 +0000

Lately, a few people have asked me about the best ways to find “good people” to follow on Twitter. Here are a few suggestions. They are perhaps more for those who are fairly new to Twitter but if you’re an old hand on Twitter, please feel free to add your own suggestions. This is by no means a comprehensive list.

Firstly, it really depends what you’re into, as to who you might want to find and start following, doesn’t it? It may take a bit of effort to find the people who are the most interested in similar things to you, depending on what you are into.

For instance, one of my growing interests is for emerging clean technologies, or cleantech. Here are some of the ways I have gone about finding people, organisations and blogs similarly interested. You could do the same for whatever subjects you are interested in.

1. Twitter (Real-Time) Search

One of the best ways to find people to follow and talk with is to use Twitter Search itself. Simply search for any term or combination of terms and you are sure to find people tweeting on that subject. The search updates in real-time, so it’s possible to keep it open and reply to some of those tweets as they happen. The search can be saved for later and repeated at will.

2. Wefollow

Wefollow is a directory of Twitter users who have added themselves by tagging their profiles by category. It sprang from an idea by the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose. You simply enter a search term to find a list of the most influential and most popular profiles in that category. Don’t forget to add yourself so people can find you too.

3. Who do you respect? Follow some of the people they follow

Out of the people you already follow, decide who you respect the most in your chosen category. Look at who they follow and have conversations with. Chances are you’ll find some great people to follow this way. You may even feel you want to contribute to the conversation.

4. Who do you respect? Look at their Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists have been around for a while now. Have a look for the public Twitter Lists of the people you respect in your chosen category. Chances are those people have made some lists of the people they most respect, for the benefit of themselves and others.

5. Mashable’s new Twitter List Directory

Mashable has only very recently started a Twitter List Directory. It’s by no means comprehensive yet, but is still worth a search under your chosen subject. You can also add your own Twitter lists to the index, which will help others find you.

Got any other other good ways to find the best people to follow? let us know.

I’m Creating An Enviro Twitter List, Who Should Be On it?

John Johnston — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:26:49 +0000

I’m attempting to create a reasonably comprehensive Enviro Twitter list. The list contains many of the twitter streams I follow that involve the environment in some way, shape or form. So far there are 216 profiles on the list.

I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few, as I haven’t had much time to spend on it yet. If you can think of anyone who should be on it and isn’t yet, or you think you should be on it, just leave the username as a comment here, or just tweet me.

Later on I’d like to break this large list down into smaller, more manageable subcategories such as clean tech, organisations, individuals, companies and blogs.

Let me know if you can add to it. Thanks.

jjprojects: our social web » clean tech

Google Earth Engine launched to aid global environmental monitoring and measurement.

Related Posts:

Facebook is all Green now, don’t give us any more suggestions please.

Related Posts:

The web and the emerging paradigm shift toward sustainability.

Related Posts:

Greenpeace campaign takes aim at Facebook’s coal–fired servers [animated video].

Related Posts:

I take issue with the label Green, here’s why.

Mainstream backdrop

The problem with Green

So what next?

Related Posts:

Hundreds of millions of social networkers contribute to new data center building boom

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Worth switching to Seesmic for iPhone from Twitter for iPhone? Yes. Here’s why.

Related Posts:

Google launches Gulf oil spill crisis response and starts crowdsourcing news

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5 ways to find the best Twitter connections

1. Twitter (Real-Time) Search

2. Wefollow

3. Who do you respect? Follow some of the people they follow

4. Who do you respect? Look at their Twitter Lists

5. Mashable’s new Twitter List Directory

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I’m Creating An Enviro Twitter List, Who Should Be On it?

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