Blog Action Day: Monday October 15, 2007
I’ve just registered to post a special blog entry on the topic of the Environment on Monday October 15. This as part of Blog Action Day. Over 11,000 bloggers reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands will post on the one topic on the one day. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any kind of network effect as a critical mass of bloggers mind-melds on the issue.
One thing we can be sure of, however, is the inevitable effect of tens of thousands of bits flying between server room and laptop; blade and router; requiring substantially more electric power generation that day than if all us bloggers had, ahem, simply stayed in bed (a la John & Yoko).
As Viridian List-meister Bruce Sterling wrote back in 1999 every ten megabytes burns five pounds of coal quoting Forbes magazine:
The infoelectric convergence is already having a visible impact on overall demand. At least 100 million
nodes on the Internet, drawing from hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours per year, add up to 290 billion kWh of demand. That’s about 8% of total U.S. demand. Add in the electric power used to build and operate stand-alone (unnetworked) chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13%. It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.
Not using the internet to draw attention to the urgency of environmental issues in order to save coal is of course counterproductive. Better we lobby for some smart innovations such as HP’s Chandrankant Patel champions with his Dynamic Smart Cooling solution - a wake-up call for datacenter HVAC engineers to consider.
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I have recently initiated a month-long blogging campaign on my blog, The Giving Hands (http://thegivinghands.org), which began on Sept 15th and will end on Oct 15th in conjunction with Blog Action Day. I would like to invite you to join the current discussions, do you have any tips to share?
By pelf on 10.13.07 5:41 am
Blog Action Day!
My message for all is: “Safeguard and Improve Your Environment”
http://spiritualbeing.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/safeguard-and-improve-your-environment-the-way-to-happiness/
By ppedersen on 10.15.07 3:51 am
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