Archive for June, 2008

It’s Time to Can the Green Gloating over Fuel Prices

Some environmentalists continue to cheer on rising oil prices even as people feel pain at the pump. It’s a mistake.

Gasoline prices

I spend most of my day writing and editing Green websites: EcoTech Daily, ecoTumble, and our soon-to-be-relaunched Lighter Footstep.

So I tend to bump into a lot of folks from the environmental crowd. Inevitably, these days, the topic of conversation turns to fuel prices. The last few months have turned us all into armchair energy analysts. We can tell you the daily closing price of light, sweet crude; we notice every hiccup in the production line; and there’s endless speculation about what instability in Nigeria or a hurricane strike on Gulf oil platforms might do to summer prices.


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Do You Make Content Or Noise?

There are those who create content and those who help content find its audience aren’t necessarily one in the same.

Woman with megaphone

The noise you can’t ignore. That was the more-or-less official slogan of Jacor Broadcasting, one of the hot companies from back in my radio days.

Noise is good. It’s how people discover content, and is what drives the growth of the web. Social media guru Robert Scoble is fond of saying how “noisy” he is, and the same holds true for the top tier of SM personalities on services such as Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed. Together, they’re the Jacor of New Media.


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Dear Twitter: It’s Over. And It’s for The Best

People change. Now and then, it’s best to tell someone you really care about that it’s time to move on. Goodbye, Twitter.

Angry couple

Dear Twitter,

We’ve had some good times over the past couple years, haven’t we? The long, rambling, late night chats. The little in-jokes. The reflexive tendency to address our friends with an @ symbol.

But things have changed. I know you feel it, too. You’ve grown — a lot, really — and so have I. We’ve come to lead very different lives, and I think it’s time we both moved on.


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