Recently in activism Category

Over the past month or so I've been quietly posting on a new site of mine, iveswitched.co.uk. It is a microcampaign site encouraging people to replace their power strips

The power supplies that so many of us use to support our digital lives all drain power when they are plugged in, even if their device is not actually switched on. You can feel the warmth of them if you put your hand on them. Much more detail on iveswitched.co.uk, but the take away message is to assess the things you plug in and consider turning them off at the socket. A power strip with switches can help you do this more easily.

After seeing Gavin Starks speak about AMEE at Xtech I've been thinking more seriously about the amount of energy that everything I do uses. I'm reminded of James Duncan Davidson and Chris Messina, both of whom have written about green issues.
I think that as web developers we should think carefully about the amount of cpu cycles and bandwidth we use in our applications. We should be optimising both our usage of energy and the performance of our applications. I'm not advocating a hairshirt attitude, we still need to serve up pages to our users, but we can be a bit more thoughtful in how we do this. Yahoo take this seriously, too.

At the @media2007conference I asked the panel at the end about the environmental impact of what we do and got somewhat blank looks from most of the panel. So I think we need to do a bit more discssion about this amongst tech circles. Look at what you send to and from the client, AJAX can help a lot in terms of avoiding full page refreshes, but watch out for accessibility issues. Use mod_gzip on your web servers, ensure that you support the not modified 304 http status on your feeds. Look at asynchronous means of responding to queries, Jabber will have an interesting role to play in this. Many bits of information do not need to be processed live and immediately returned to the client, some do I'll admit.

A lot of the tips for improving performance will help save the planet too, so at least there is a primary driver for companies to implement this. Something I'd be really interested in would be the trade off between cpu cycles and bandwidth in terms of energy usage. Is it better to gzip and then decompress to avoid sending excess data through many routers, or does the gzip and decompress use more energy? It seems to make sense that sending less data is more efficient.

Textdrive have been exploring this area, as part of their move to Solaris and Sparc machines is to lower their electricity bill. So, I'm pleased that I'll be moving to one of their new solaris machines soon. Amazon EC2 can also be seen as a good initiative in this area. Why have your own capacity sitting idle just in case. Much better to have your code swapped in and out on another machine which is being otherwise kept busy.

I know that this may seem a tiny issue, compared to leaving power adaptors plugged in and electronics in standby, but every little counts. If you have a site then every excess cpu cycle or byte you send uses power every time you serve up a page. Whilst each page downloaded is a tiny contribution, there are many of them. So keep this in mind as you make new websites and applications.

Tags:
enviroment, web development , climate change, performance, bandwidth

I was listening to the report on Broadcasting House at the weekend on how the major drug companies in the world do not see it in their interests to create new general purpose antibiotics, they lack the ongoing sales of long-term illnesses. This seems pretty shocking and one of the demerits of providing shareholder value.

Somehow we all lose out and PVL (HPA FAQ on PVL), MRSA etc are serious threats. Probably more concerning than avian flu, this wikipedia article antibiotic resistance is striking reading.

Still the drive for shareholder value is not going to change, so why aren't the WHO going cap in hand to the major governments in the world and asking for a few billion to commission one of them to make some drugs. It would benefit us all and be more use than our efforts in Iraq etc.

It is a good role for the charitable benefactors of the world too, pumping money at HIV and Malaria is all well and good, but it seems we all need new antibiotics too.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, I've been pretty quiet, one of the reasons has been a small battle with weblog spam. I was at my wife's parents having a lovely time for much of the Christmas period and occasionally checking email on their adsl line, much of it was weblog spam. Even on Christmas and Boxing day, this depressed me, but as everything on here has been in premod for a month or so, it was fine, 6000 of them in the end...

Then I got thinking about how sad and empty some peoples' lifes are that the best thing they can think of doing was to send thousands of weblog spam on the day when most people are celebrating with friends and family. I'm assuming a few things here, most spam orignates from the USA and they celebrate Christmas there, I know countless thousands do not. The spam continued right through, day in day out, not a break for the disaster in the Indian Ocean. Donate to Disaster Emergency Committee in the UK or Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders worldwide (donations to MSF). MSF were first on the scene in Sri Lanka, as they are in many countries, Lucy and I donated to them.

That people are hunkered down over their machines trying to use others' good will, time and server space to make a buck is a sad state of affairs. Potentially the frequency of disasters like the Tsunami and other earthquakes, like Bam or the crisis in Darfur will slowly turn people away from this empty activity and on to something that cares more about the wider world, some small hope I know.

Some American comments on the coming election, now a week away. Starting with the amusing and angry William Gibson, who signed off from writing to return to writing books in September, only to return in October with avengence.

He notes James Wolcott, of Vanity Fair, in particular this post on what might have happened if there was no insurgency. Also he mentions Media Matters for America a campaign organisation to correct media spin in the US, particularly the neocon bias.

On a similar vein, Seymour Hersh in Salon makes silghtly more depressing reading. Lifting the mood a little, Hunter S Thompson in Rolling Stone is a robust read on Bush and those face to face debates and the whole political game of getting into the White House.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2. Rolling Stone, October 2004

Finally, I liked this cartoon commenting on the aspect of religion by Kirk Anderson, via agit properties, who make funny political t-shirts.

I'm still angry about the war on Iraq and about American policies towards the climate and multi-lateralism, I hope a Kerry victory will make some small change to the direction the world is headed for the sake of the USA and the rest of us.

The Tories are newly organized with a refreshed, if not new leader. The Libdems should be taking the fight right back to them, challenging them for the right to be the official opposition party.
Instead the Tories are regaining the limelight, the summer long talk of the ascendancy of the LibDems is now forgotten and all I hear is what the Leader of the Conservative party has to say on an issue. I know that the Libdems must be getting their fair crack of the whip, but theirs is not the voice I'm hearing. If this is the case and I'm a wavering Labour voter towards them, then this is not a good sign.
So they have 18 months to make an impact and really challenge labour, there is plenty of meat to feast on in the recent Queen's speech, so lets see some activity and retain three party politics, rather than returning to the two party world of the 1980s.

The Guardian have launched a new weblog aimed at removing all agricultural subsidies worldwide, it is called KickAAS. Thanks to Tom Coates and Matt Jones for highlighting it first.
Interesting to use a third party blogging tool to create a political platform for raising awareness of a very important issue. It gives them some freedom to actively promote an issue and lend support to it, without it being directly on The Guardian's actual website.
I wholeheartedly agree with the idea, agricultural subsidies have been a bind for the EU via the CAP for decades, producing food that no-one wants and maintaining a hold over land that could otherwise be used for other activities.
The stated ambition of several American cereal and basic food stuff companies (name escapes me right now) is to have everything that is eaten using some of their products. This is supported via the GATT and other agreements to the point whereby it is impossible for a local farmer in Indonesia to grow and sell crops in a manner profitable for him to make a living, therefore he cannot participate in trade even with his neighbours so stays in poverty.
Well done to The Guardian for taking a stand on this issue and promoting it from within their paper. It'll be interesting to see how this develops and whether issue based weblogs are taken up by other broadsheets or if KickAAS becomes another pressure group.

The VoxPolitics event last night was interesting, see the commentry created by Tom Coates, Euan Semple, myself and others. See also articles covering the event from the BBC with a technology angle and a politics angle; plus one from The Guardian.
One issue that I feel was only lightly touched on was the people who run blogs with political content, the emphasis was firmly on the politicians. I think that many people who blog will naturally discuss political issues, there are relatively few purely political blogs from non-politicians. So you have two types the narrow single issue blog and the more normal general purpose weblog.
The single issue blog can generate interest and keep its focus, but people are much less likely to come across it. I don't think they are too common and they are a different animal from the hobby blog, like MacOS ones or photography. They are different as they span across interest groups, like the hospital saving MP, Dr Richard Taylor did in Kidderminster. The danger is that once the immediate objective is attained the group disintegrates. The group forms from an immediate common interest to deal with a situation pulling people in, often from a geographic area, on resolution there is little common interest to keep people together.
People who blog will discuss the issues that they feel important or interesting, this is a part of blogging. This kind of weblog is not a one trick pony with a short life span, for many people they are a long term means of communication and self-expression. Weblogs are a good way of highlighting an issue, see my East London line post for an example, it has started to get a good body of comments recently. People are more likely to become interested because they have come to know you through your weblog, your reputation and history are there for them to assess.
Weblogs are about people, a person runs it, your feedback tends to get a personal reply which builds a realtionship between the website owner and his or her audience. Part of it is about trust too, there is an expectation of what you might get from a weblog, sudden transitions in editorial content or style will diminish the relationship one has with the weblog.
The panel talks from last night missed some of this, too much of the emphasis was on getting some politicians blogging and all will be well. For me the focus was too much on the technology from some speakers and not enough on who and why. I wanted more on getting politically aware people blogging.
Politicians will suffer as bloggers, because only minor figures will be able to run a weblog, they will be hindered by audience scaling to too large a number and then they will end up with a broadcast model rather than a weblog. A minister with a blog is unlikely for several reasons, accountability is one factor, time and ability to respond to feedback is another.
I'd like to see more people blogging politically, I think that they are a good medium for expressing personal opinion and they encourage coherent thought about political issues, which can only be for the better. Whether this is expressed as "campaign weblogs" or part of one's own blog is not really the issue. If there are more people asking public questions of politicians then maybe it will encourage a more accountable representation from local council level right up to Government.

Last night, the VoxPolitics event left me with a thought that the increasing use of technology in politics will leave a large group of people behind. Several speakers mentioned that the public facing nature of blogging means that they reply to emails and comments ahead of the more traditional means of communication. Thus their attention will turn to the desires of the 40 odd percent of people who are online.
I think that this is a bad thing, but I suppose it is inevitable. Small pressure groups or lobbys have always excerted much more influence on MPs than the normal voter. Even the letter writers are smaller in number and will probably move to email more quickly.
A while back I commented that all this technology is great fun, but if it is accessible to only the top 10% then it is not very representative. A question from the floor last night raised the issue of literacy and how this, which is often coincident with poverty, stops people getting involved with politicians. It is a broader point rather than being directly about blogging, as illiterate people are just as unlikely to write a letter.
However they are more likely to fall to the bottom of the heap if the emphasis moves to more technology driven tools, as getting a PC or paying for time in a webcafe are not priorities for them.
If blogging enables an emergent democracy for only the wealthy, then what will it really have achieved for the whole population.

Tonight I'm off to the VoxPolitics event at Westminster, which should be an interesting night. Around 100-150 people are going to discuss Politics and Blogging, half the London centric polically aware blogging community will be there so it seems.
When I posted last week about this I was surprised how much I felt about this topic. I've been idlely discussing it with a variety of people over the past week and really think that blogging has caught the imagination of the single issue campaign groups. It is the right sort of low barrier to entry tool for anyone to use and makes people think about their opinions more clearly as they need to communicate them to others, more later as apparently we will have a WiFi network.