Clean Coal: Not a Reality

It's shocking the success coal power companies have been enjoying by marketing "Clean Coal" as a genuinely safe and clean technology for the future. This insanity has created the need for a quality push-back, and it has started. (Image: YouTube screenshot) For anyone not familiar with the coal propaganda campaign, it's been marketed under the trade-name the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electicity. The Coalition has been advocating that coal is indeed a clean power source and represents America's best chance at sustainable power and continuing independence. Check out an example and the strike-back after the jump...

This advertisement is part of their America's Power campaign. Now, I will admit that clean coal is possible, but the coal industry, who is behind the Coalition, has resisted government regulation to make emission standards stricter. As of now, "clean coal" is merely a dream of environmentalists and the pawn of fossil fuel burning polluters. They have even gone so far as to link their cause to Barack Obama in some advertisements.

This ads, along with those by big oil companies under the name Energy Tomorrow, have created a backlash from environmental groups. The two ads below are part of this push-back. The first is from Repower America, advocating modern solutions with alternative energy -- in this case, solar power. The second advertisement is from This is Reality, a campaign mocking the idea of clean coal in the capitalism of the American energy market.

Repower America:

This is Reality:

I think both ads are pretty good. I quite like the first because the solution becomes so obvious seeming. What do you guys think?
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Diving into Web 2.0

Recently I watched a video by anthropologist Michael Wesch, which discusses YouTube as a cultural phenomenon. Is YouTube part of a surge of democratic media or a wasteland of disorder? That is the question. (Image: YouTube) The video by Michael Wesch is a relatively simple capture from a live presentation at the Library of Congress. However, the fact that we can access this video speaks to the power of YouTube as a platform. Before YouTube, finding a video of a specific presentation would have been nearly impossible. Now almost everything is on YouTube or similar services.

The most important point to take from the discussion of YouTube as a cultural item is that it depends on its users to create and (sometimes) filter content. Wesch describes in detail how social sites like Digg and Delicious represent a new level of user control over their portal to the internet. Digg displays user-filtering, while Delicious shows user-organization. Both of these functions work to create a communal browsing experience that depends on users not just for content, like YouTube, but also to define the collective browsing experience.

The Internet user-generated movement has outpaced growth of any other movement; dwarfing the amount of TV content produced by networks over their entire life. In some ways it seems like we isolate ourselves more and more behind screens, but, as Wesch points out, there is a type of networked individualism that emerges. We are creating an individual experience, but we share it and take-in the experiences of others.

The YouTube culture is one of paradoxes. We are isolated, yet part of a community. We are talking to no one, but talking to everyone. We "pirate" content, yet create new things. Our individual experiences turn into collectively embraced internet phenomena. Everyone has an identity, but it might not be rooted in reality. These uncertainties make YouTube a cultural community that serves a different purpose to all of its participants. With either serious or playful motives, everyone seems to enjoy YouTube.

Here's his video for anyone interested:

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Social Networking or Social Fracturing

I really do enjoy spending some time on Facebook writing on friends' walls or sending messages, but I can't help but wonder if these sites are to some extent de-socializing. (Image: Wikipedia) I raise this question because they all encourage the use of remote communication instead of face-to-face discussion or even calling friends on the phone. To me, as much as I would advocate the utility of the internet to community, this raises alarm bells about how we communicate.

This topic has been tossed around a lot by "concerned parents" organizations and many others to no avail. Apparently, people simply don't see it as problematic for kids to be spending hours on FaceBook. But to put this into perspective, I believe that those who doubt the significance of this need to remember how the time in question was spent before FaceBook and MySpace.

Before the children (and teens) were sitting in front of their computer screens, they would be out and about with friends taking part in far more active pastimes. FaceBook time is increasingly overlapping what used to be hanging out with friends time.

But to stop worrying about the children for a few moments, there are also questions about how these social networking sites affect groups like university students and even older groups. The main concern I have is that the loss of 1-on-1 communication, in an unmediated way, limits how genuine our connections truly are.

When you have the time to look over something you wrote to a friend and get to edit out a bad wording or misstatement, you are mediating something that would have otherwise been communicated unfiltered. The filtration of debate is important because it presents the opportunity for communications to be less genuine because they are so heavily moderated.

Saying the wrong thing before you realize its the wrong thing is a very important part of friendship in my eyes. By removing these Freudian slip moments through moderation, the dialogue becomes a misrepresentation of what you were thinking at the time. So in some ways I believe that FaceBook communications are de-socializing because of this effect. A world where it becomes hard to make a mistake, is not a very human world in my eyes.
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The Blogosphere: Reflecting on a 2007 Snapshot

For several years, Technorati has provided a wealth of data on the development of the blogosphere. After recently reading a slightly dated State of the Blogosphere, I got to thinking about how fast this movement has taken hold. (Image: Screen shot -- Flickr) The State of the Blogosphere posts are by David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati. These posts highlight some of the many statistics his site gathers.

The post I read was from April 2007, but it revealed continuing trends in the blogosphere. The one that Sifry identifies as most important is the tagging movement. I agree with this assessment, and in the nearly two years since this State of the Blogosphere tagging has gained more traction.

What Sifry describes as the "Live web" is built around the ability to tag items. Tags can be broad or specific, but their basic function is simple: tags link items together. Networking pages by common topics through tags is invaluable to the casual browser as it exposes them to a variety of sites by following natural language links.

Social networking has introduced many users to the notion of tagging by tagging people to specific items like photos, videos, or notes/blogs. Media-sharing services, such as flickr and YouTube offer tag-based browsing or encourage tagging to organize content, as demonstrated by the links, respectively.

Since 2007 bloggers have gained on Mainstream Media (MSM). On the day of U.S. Election, a TechCrunch traffic survey revealed 3 non-MSM sites in the top 15 news sites. This shows the power of non-MSM outlets to survive the fierce competition with MSM conglomerates.

For the blogosphere to remain competitive it will need technologies such as tagging to boost the flow of users to non-MSM sites.
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