Jack of All Blogs » Charity

The Best Blogs Go Green

Andrew G.R. — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:17:57 +0000

Green this and green that. Green cars, green companies, and green thumbs. Wait. That last one has been around forever.

Everywhere you turn someone is going green.

It used to be one of my favorite colors. Now, it’s dead to me. Too common. I’m the kind of blogger that likes to buck a trend.

I’m sticking to the old definition of green. The one with all of those negative connotations: Inexperienced; jealous; sick.

The world will laugh last when the trees are all gone and I’m alone, hooked up to some God-awful mechanical breathing machine. But with my last breath I will declare black as my favorite color. Maybe cause it’ll be the color of my lungs. Or maybe because it just brings out the color of my eyes.

Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nm.

Huh?

Embedded carbon emissions and global warming and fossil fuels. Maybe I’m just too dumb to understand any of it.

Many bloggers are looking for ways to “green” their blog. Yes, green is now a verb. If you are interested, you can check out TreeHugger for more info.

Not me. I’m green enough.

Over 20,000 blogs participated in Blog Action Day, which this year, was all about – you guessed it – getting’ your green on!

So is Jack of All Blogs green? You betcha!

We like Kermit the Frog, pistachio ice cream (with cherries) and good ol’ American greenbacks. Plus, we’ll always have an affinity for green slime, a la Double Dare.

I’m not saying going green is bad. In fact, you should follow the herd. As for me, black is the new green. Who’s with me?

Who Has a Job for Scobleizer?

Franky — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:27:32 +0000

Yesterday’s cat fight between Nick Denton and Robert Scoble seems to have deeper foundations. Although The Scobleizer denied that he’s looking for a new job, this seems to become the biggest public secret.
Why would anyone otherwise suddenly remind the whole blogosphere plus his wife of all the social networks he is present at? With a bonus mention to LinkedIn as well

No, I still don’t do LinkedIn or Plaxo and I rarely use Skype anymore. I’m going to Plaxo on Tuesday to look at a new version coming out. But LinkedIn is close to getting me back.

LinkedIn only because he really tries to ignore all those platforms???

Damn, it seems like everyone in the world wants me to join it. I try to ignore these things, I really do.

I guess the Zooomr flirt with Sun didn’t work out for Scoble and the team around Zoho are an experienced bunch and already have an evangelist.
Certainly no blogger who forgets his work in favor to read feeds. If only I could find that entry I read yesterday, where Scoble mentions he is addicted to feeds. 31000/month isn’t it, Robert?

It must be sad if you’ve already blogged for half the technical blogosphere, gotten presents from Intel (I still wonder what happened to disclosure and the Intel notebooks!) and your content really isn’t that compelling.
I wished I just knew as many people.

Nevertheless Robert, I’m sure you’ll find something appropriate for your needs and if not… there’s always PPP.

Sincerest,

Franky.

A Generation Of Ravers & Do-Gooders

Mosey — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 05:04:57 +0000

There was a time that I genuinely believed that my generation in the UK (i.e: now aged 31-40) would be different and change the world for the better. This probably has something to do with certain chemicals I was using at that time, ahem, recreationally. Summer of Love, 1988. The place to be in the early nineties was Manchester. With well know outfits like the Happy Mondays and start-ups like my friends Ed and Tom, still going strong today as The Chemical Brothers, it was a non-stop party. But there was also an idealism, a hope- that we, as ravers, could do what our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Our recreational pursuits (somewhat purer, chemically, than today’s offerings…) were not hedonistic, they were internal journeys- or so we thought. Jonathan Porritt had released his book warning us of the impending doom to the environment if we didn’t act. Bernard Mandelbrot had discovered the Chaos Theory. We were just doing what our ancient, tribal forefathers had done and we were the Timothy Learys of the New Age. Pity nobody mentioned the word serotonin…

The only experience that I have to go on, in evaluating my US counterparts during the same period, is during the summer of 1991, when I worked in a hotel in Montana- Many Glacier Hotel, part of Glacier National Park. If you haven’t been there, btw, a truly beautiful place and well-worth the visit. When you watch The Shining (one of the greats, Jack!)- the opening scene shows Jack Torrence driving to the remote “Overlook Hotel” and that is the Many Glacier. Anyway, as a summer job, it was intriguing. The hotel is closed for the winters, so hires its staff on a holiday basis from all over the US and just about every state seemed to have one representative. With such a wide cross-section of students, I felt it was a good barometer, comparatively, of the differences with my own mates in the UK. This especially, as one of my big life “what ifs” was having chosen not to go to University in the US, despite being offered a place at Brown, where some of my friends from school ended up going to (in the UK- University is effectively free, so money was a big part of my decision).

I found that nobody was “into” the same stuff that I was, especially on the “house music” scene. It was really all Grateful Dead stuff and if not the beer, then the green stuff- or rather, the obsession of the wheres and hows of scoring it. I made some good friends and found that my US counterparts were much more “active” than us in the UK- who, while we talked a lot, were really just a bunch of slobs. No, my US friends were signing up petitions to protect the lake where we worked and a bunch of other do-gooding stuff from the get-go. I didn’t get the whys and whats of most of it- mainly, it seemed to me, was just doing things for the sake of it.

What I got passionate about (and this was more as a consequence of the aforementioned search for green stuff- than philanthropy), was the situation with the local Native Indians, the Blackfeet. I don’t have time here to tell the whole story, but it was a real eye-opener staying on the reservation in Browning. I bought into the whole sense of injustice hook, line and sinker. 10,000 year residents- their land now stolen, beaten by missionairies, given a rubbish tip in land compensation- man, I was an active protester handing out flyers en masse to get a Blackfeet to a position higher than dishwasher! Oh- and I learnt that alcohol and Joe Last Star don’t mix. And then I got fired from my job at the hotel as Gift Shop Assistant Manager, for “demonstrating“, and that was that. When push came to shove, all the do-gooders disappeared and seemed more worried about their bonuses, than doing the right thing- standing up for Native Indian rights.

What I learnt in terms of the difference about my generation in the UK, as “ravers“, was that we were just all talk, no action. And my peers in the US were in most respects the opposite- openly admitting and even celebrating hedonism, but at the same time actually trying to do something to make the world a better place, but with a lack of moral certitude.

So it seems that the change is in the doing, as well as in the conceptualizing and there’s no doubt, as ravers and as do-gooders, or Generation X, we all failed miserably then and nothing has happened since to change this opinion. In fact, if anything, on both sides of the Atlantic- it’s just gotten worse with age.

Joel. A. Barker summarizes it well enough-:

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.