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Prado and Google launch new collaboration

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:29:00 GMT

Prado and Google launch new collaboration

Carbon research never mentions Google

Kevin Anderson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:56:51 GMT

Alex Wissner-Gross, the physicist quoted in several articles about Google's carbon footprint, is putting some distance between himself and comments attributed to him over the search giant's environmental impact. He told TechNewsWorld.com:

One problem: the study's author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. "For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google," Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. "Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."

Wissner-Gross did say that a search using Google has "definite environmental impact" and that they operate energy-intensive data centres, but Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch says:

But the "tea kettle" statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum simply isn't his.

Wissner-Gross asked for a correction, but none has been made.

That doesn't mean that Wissner-Gross isn't talking about Google's environmental impact, which he does in this CNBC interview, but he puts this in context of the global IT industry. The presenter seems shocked that Global IT has the same carbon footprint as all of the world's airlines, according to Gartner. But she also doesn't qualify the ffigure with real numbers, currently 2% of global emissions.

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Game review: Shaun White Snowboarding – Road Trip for Nintendo Wii

Steve Boxer — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:33:16 GMT

If the credit crunch is interfering with your plans to hit the slopes this winter, Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip might provide a tiny amount of solace.

The latest in a line of snowboarding games bearing the stamp of the best-known pro-boarder is designed to work with the Wii Fit Balance Board, and therefore approximates the real-life boarding experience better than any previous game. Admittedly, more mature boarders will find the teen-oriented storyline irritating. But the control that the Balance Board brings is impressive, and it does force you to bend your knees and is hard on calves and upper thighs, just like a real snowboard.

Every time you open a new resort (locations include Canada, Chile, the Alps and Japan), you're presented with challenges that test either your ability to nail tricks or to board accurately (by, for example, picking up trash). Plus there are boardercross races, and events on half-pipes and off big kickers. The graphics are mighty impressive for a Wii game – especially when you fall amid a faceful of virtual snow. But when you learn how to unweight for jumps, then chain tricks using judicious mid-air weight-transfer, proceedings become deeply satisfying.

It won't teach a novice how to board, but it will help tone you up for the slopes – even five minutes' play will induce a sweat.

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Game review: Lord of the Rings – Conquest

Mike Anderiesz — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:32:54 GMT

EA's approach to big franchises is always to pick a genre and copy its best exponent … and this time, it's the turn of Star Wars Battlefront.

LOTR: Conquest allows you to play out the key battles from Peter Jackson's trilogy, from Helms Deep to Gandalf's Balrog-bash, crammed into two single-player campaigns and a 16-player online mode. Each level follows the same pattern – namely, a frantic struggle against up to 150 onscreen foes to regain control points from the enemy.

Succeed and you can move on to the next objective or switch character class – from fighters, to mages or hero characters. Yes, it's one of those games that almost plays itself, but it's gorgeous to behold and a promising start to the gaming year.

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Game review: Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party

Greg Howson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:31:16 GMT

The Wii clearly isn't short of a minigame collection or two, with Wii Sports, Wii Play, Carnival Games and the numerous other titles offering a pile of quick 'n' easy games for casual players.

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party is one of the latest additions to the genre. Looking for deep, lengthy and rewarding gameplay? RRRTV isn't for you. Fancy shaking a Wiimote violently while pretending to be a jockey before going back to watching Corrie? Then this may be up your street. There is a thin plot of sorts – the "rabbids" have hijacked a TV station – but this is much the same as previous RRR games.

So expect simplistic racing, rhythm and other dumbed down mini-versions of popular gaming genres. The inclusion of Balance Board (Wii Fit) support makes thing more interesting with some of the games allowing you to dance or sit on the board. Multiplayer is obviously the way to go, but some niggles detract. Nevertheless, this is a solid party package that will appeal to casual Wii owners.

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New look for Lara will be 'more female-friendly': how, exactly?

Aleks Krotoski — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:06:57 GMT

Reeling from low sales of the latest iteration of their prize property, Eidos has announced that they're set to revamp the Lara Croft character, reinventing her as more "female- friendly" in a cynical attempt at wooing a new audience

Cory Doctorow: One Laptop Per Child - what went wrong?

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:36:20 GMT

Last week saw yet another depressing announcement from the One Laptop Per Child project – more redundancies, further cutting back on the project's commitment to its free and open operating system, and a general scaling back and winding down of one of the most ambitious, inspiring projects of the past 10 years.

In case you missed it, OLPC's mission is to put a small, flexible, hackable laptop in the hands of every child on the planet. There's been endless debate on the wisdom of this. Detractors say that the developing world needs food, literacy training and mobile phones – not laptops. These sceptics are sure to see the OLPC's woes as confirmation that the project was doomed from the start.

But I disagree, on both counts. I believe that the world's poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world, even if the OLPC project shuts its doors tomorrow.

First, the case for laptops as tools for sustainable, appropriate, community-driven development: the original, audacious OLPC plan envisioned its laptops as pedagogical and development wonder-boxes. They were to be wide open and trivially modifiable by their owners, ensuring that inspired young programmers could develop any and all software and hardware add-ons that suited their needs. Their networking stacks were built on the idea of forming ad-hoc meshes that made it easy to connect any OLPC units to one another, and to share Internet connections among them.

In short, the OLPC vision is to deliver to children in the developing world the capacity to play and work together to produce tools and networks and communities at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible flexibility. Poverty and its associated problems – hunger, poor health, lack of education and disenfranchisement – are fundamentally information problems. Poverty is exacerbated by the high cost of discovering how your peers have solved their agricultural problems, of accessing government services, of communicating with distant relations who have gone to the city to earn on behalf of the family. Poverty and oppression thrive in situations where people can't communicate cheaply and widely with one another about corruption, injustice and violence.

The success of mobile phones in defraying these co-ordination costs shows just how profoundly technology can change the cycle of poverty. Whether it's electoral monitors armed with mobile phones who watch the ballots move from the polls to the counting houses in Kenya, the citizen reporters who exposed the brutality in Myanmar, or the fishermen and farmers in Africa and Asia who use networks to find the best market for their goods. A mobile phone network can multiply the food, education, health and democracy that is already there, and be used to bring new resources besides.

But mobile phones are necessarily an interim step. Adding software to most mobile phones is difficult or impossible without the permission of a central carrier, which makes life very hard for local technologists who have a very particular, local itch that needs scratching (and forget about collectively improving the solutions that do get approved – when was the last time you heard of someone downloading an app for her phone, improving it, and republishing it?). Mobile phone use is always metered, limiting their use and exacting a toll on people who can least afford to pay it. Worst of all, the centralised nature of mobile networks means that in times of extremis, governments and natural disasters will wreak havoc on our systems, just as we need them most.

By contrast, an open laptop with mesh networking is designed to be locally customised, to have its lessons broadcast to others who can use them, and to avoid centralised control and vulnerability to bad weather and bad governments. It is designed to be nearly free from operating costs, so that once the initial investment is made, all subsequent use is free, encouraging experimentation and play, from which all manner of innovations may spring.

It may be that OLPC won't be the entity that puts a laptop into the hands of every child on the planet. Certainly, they've disappointed me more than once along the way: for example, the decision to add remote kill-switches to the machines to deter thieves (incidentally creating a situation where a thuggish state or despot could shut down the network), and the decision to emphasise running Microsoft's proprietary, non-customisable, toll-bearing operating systems at the expense of the free, locally modifiable GNU/Linux systems they started with.

But so what? I remember the decades during which I (and others of my bent) went around telling people that PCs and the internet were destined to change their lives for ever, no matter who they were, no matter what they did. Over those years, we had many failures, mostly due to bad preconceptions of why and how our loved ones and co-workers would benefit from our beloved systems. We told our grandmothers that the PC would be the ultimate cookbook, told our bosses that the internet would let them field better sales brochures, told our kids that educational CD-Roms would teach them to read faster. From Sinclair to Commodore to Acorn, computing platforms rose and fell, breaking up on the cliffs of the unguessable public taste.

Slowly and surely, though, IT infiltrated every social group. Whether you're looking for an underground dance party on Friday or help coping with your terminal cancer or a way to feed your compulsive need to acquire plush stuffed animals, the internet is where you live. Each new group came online when one key person within it figured out what all this technology was for, as far as his social circle was concerned. My grandparents steadfastly ignored PCs until they worked out that all their friends were getting scads of email from their grandchildren, while they were stuck with a few paltry letters and cards. In record time, a PC and internet connection were purchased, installed, and mastered – at least, far enough to tackle the key task for which the machine was purchased.

The protean nature of IT is its greatest weakness – it's impossible to say what it's for – and its greatest strength – it's for anything you can think of. The OLPC detractors who say that the rich, northern minority can't know what the world's majority need are right. And that's why giving the world's poor access to the tools that they can use in any way they can imagine is so powerful. It's a break from the centuries-old model of development and aid. It's an invitation for the world's majority to simultaneously access all of human knowledge as equal participants in the global conversation, all the while having the power to modify their systems to match their needs.

Early PCs such as the 1975 Altair were unrelentingly hostile to their users
and functionally useless except as systems for occupying the spare time of their owners. And yet, these early efforts led inexorably to the continuous refinement of technology, as larger and larger populations of users were captured by the promise of these systems. The eventual failure of the Altair (discontinued in 1978) did not invalidate the promise of computing. It would have been a visionary entrepreneur indeed who invented the perfect system the first time out.

Likewise, the OLPC may falter and vanish. But the vision of a world where we can all talk to one another, where we can all modify our tools to suit our needs, where we are not charged a toll for our access to democracy, communities and ideas – that will live on forever.

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Chatterbox Tuesday

Greg Howson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:40:01 GMT

Tuesday's edition of Chatterbox

Games

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Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac: Autism: equality's last frontier

Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:00:01 GMT

Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac: For Gary McKinnon, Asperger's has had a profound effect on his ability to fit in to society. When will we accept this disability?

No escape from turning up to class

Jessica Shepherd — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:05:09 GMT

School inspectors yesterday dampened ministers' hopes that tens of thousands of students would soon be logging on to online classrooms.

Ofsted said many schools and colleges in England were reluctant to embrace new technology which enables teaching and learning to continue online and out-of-hours.

In 2005, the government asked its agency which promotes learning through technology — Becta — to ensure the majority of schools and colleges made more effective use of technology. But today's study by the inspectorate found the take up of online classrooms was currently more of a "cottage industry than a national technological revolution".

Inspectors looked at the online classrooms — or virtual learning environments — of 23 colleges, 12 schools and seven other educational institutions.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are similar to intranet sites. Teachers can return coursework on them, provide notes for pupils who have missed lessons and post mock exam questions. Schools and colleges started using them in 2000.

Christine Gilbert, chief inspector, said some schools and colleges were using VLEs as "dumping grounds or storage places for rarely-used files, rather than for material that enhanced the face-to-face learning done inside the classroom".

She said: "The best VLEs allowed learners to reinforce their routine work, or catch up on missed lessons. In those best cases, the material offered was fun and helpful. In the least effective examples, documents had been dumped on the system and forgotten." In some cases, she said material posted was unhelpful.

However, in one adult education centre, a student who had moved to France kept in touch with her French class through the online classroom. In another, students used the VLE on Christmas day.

None of the educational institutions surveyed gave comprehensive cover to every subject they taught on their VLEs. Older students in colleges were more likely to use the online classrooms than pupils in schools, Ofsted found.

Gilbert said: "Although young people use computers and the internet routinely in their personal lives, there was no great expectations on their part that a VLE would replace a significant part of their face-to-face learning.

Melanie Hunt, director of learning and skills at Ofsted, said take up of VLEs had been slower than hoped partly because teachers may not have had sufficient encouragement from their managers. She said some teachers had not been trained to use the online classrooms and, particularly in primary schools, could not spare the time to keep the VLE up to date and post materials on it.

A spokesman from the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "This snapshot survey from Ofsted looks at just 12 schools out of 23,000 and makes it clear that while good progress is being made, it is early days and there is more to do. The bottom line is that we are the world leaders in schools ICT with the highest levels of embedded classroom technology in the European Union; one computer for every three pupils; and almost every single school with broadband."

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Many home turbines fall short of claims, warns study

Juliette Jowit — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:05:04 GMT

Home wind turbines are generating a fraction of the energy promised by manufacturers, and in some cases use more electricity than they make, a report warns today. The results of what is thought to be the most comprehensive study undertaken of the industry show the worst performers provided just 41 watt-hours a day - less than the energy needed for a conventional lightbulb for an hour, or even to power the turbine's own electronics.

On average the turbines surveyed provided enough electricity to light an energy-efficient house, but this still only represented 5%-10% of the manufacturers' claims, said consultants Encraft. The findings will be an embarrassment for an industry which was an early winner from the small but high-profile rush to adopt green technologies. Trendsetters included the actor Pete Postlethwaite at his country house in Shropshire and novelist Iain Banks at his home near Edinburgh. Opposition leader David Cameron applied for permission for a turbine on his west London home.

But the results also prove that when turbines are put up in the right places they are a good investment, said Matthew Rhodes, Encraft's managing director. "Sadly, an average semi-detached house, like the areas where most people live, where there are obstructions like trees and buildings, are poor locations," he said. The "vast majority" of customers had been poorly advised, said Rhodes: "There's a risk they [customers] will go off the whole agenda."

The study, funded by the British Wind Energy Association and the government, looked at turbines made by five manufacturers in four rural, 10 suburban and 12 urban sites for a year. It found the best performing turbines would generate "clean" electricity equivalent to that needed to manufacture them in less than two years, while the worst performing ones would take 40 years.

However, Alex Murley, the BWEA's micro-generation expert, said the study had been skewed unfairly, with few sites, and too many in areas with poor wind.

New codes of conduct for manufacturers and installers had been introduced, he added. The latest BWEA figures show 1,000 building-mounted small turbines had been installed in the UK by the end of 2007, with 900 of those installed during that year.

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HTC will take on both iPhone and Palm Pre

Jack Schofield — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:10:53 GMT

Smarthouse reports: "Mobile phone company HTC is set to launch a brand new phone touch phone that will take on the Apple iPhone and the new Pre offering from Palm claims a senior executive of Telstra." Telstra staff say:

"We have seen both and we believe that the new HTC phone will be a real competitor to the iPhone and the Pre which at this stage looks nice but is still not delivered to market."

Taiwan-based HTC already makes the Touch and Touch HD phones, which are based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile. However, it has got into the Android market by manufacturing the first G1 "googlephone" so it makes sense to develop -- or redevelop -- its own software on top that. Indeed, from HTC's point of view, it would make sense to offer the same TouchFlo interface on all its phones, regardless of operating system … and then refuse to share it with anyone else.

Both Android and Palm's WebOS are based on open Linux. It will be interesting to see how "de facto proprietary" they turn out to be in reality.

Mobile phones

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The shock of the old: MetaFilter may be just what you need

Jack Schofield — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:32:52 GMT

Anyone who searches for information on the web will land on MetaFilter eventually, probably without realising what it is. Nowadays, the web is designer driven, and priority is given to bold headlines, large photos, and illustrations. MetaFilter is the opposite: there are no pictures at all, and what might be headlines are in the same small print as the text. Here, it's the quality of the information that counts, not the quantity of the display.

MetaFilter describes itself as a "community weblog" and that's how it started in 1999. Matt Haughey wrote the software for the site, set it up, and still runs it. All the front page posts (FPPs) are made by members, who pay $5 for their lifetime accounts.

Like regular blog posts, FPPs are links to other things on the net, though the idea is that they should be less obvious ones. Yesterday's list included A visit to Russian abandoned nuclear lighthouses, Twenty-nine Tao te Chings, a line at a time, and Fridge magnets in seven scripts. Longer posts effectively synthesise a news story for discussion, often with links to a dozen or more sites.

Although anyone can make an FPP (after being a member for a week), the posts are consistently well written and correctly spelled. That's almost always true of the comments, too. MetaFilter has few written rules, but plenty of community pressure against ranting, self-promotion and fanboy product puffery of the sort that is the staple fodder of most comment sites. Anyone who believes in the "broken windows theory" could use MetaFilter as an example.

Nowadays, however, many MeFites (MetaFilter users) may be less interested in "the blue" front page than in some of the newer sections. The most important for outsiders is AskMeFi (Ask MetaFilter), where members suggest answers to a wide variety of questions. Lots of these are computer questions, but others range from what to eat to "How can my ex-girlfriend and I live together while avoiding jealousy and drama?" AskMeFi has 20 sections including media & arts, pets & animals, and religion & philosophy.

Two more recent additions are MetaFilter Projects, introduced in 2005, and MetaFilter Music, in 2006. The Projects area lets people promote what they are doing ("I'm starting this online magazine" etc) so that other members can provide feedback, or vote for them. The Music area lets members upload their own songs, performances or podcasts for others to share. If you ever wanted to hear "a cover of Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals that [clcapps] threw together this morning, primarily featuring gamelan instrumentation", this is the place.

Like any close community, MetaFilter takes some getting used to, and there is a wiki that provides help with the in-jokes and jargon. There's also some serious discussion in the MetaTalk area, which sometimes has me crying with laughter.

MetaFilter is a reminder of what online communities could be like, before the web was swamped by the hoi polloi. For that reason alone, it's worth cultivating.

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Can Honda's new Insight beat the success of Toyota's Prius

Alok Jha — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:41:41 GMT

It's about time the Toyota Prius had some competition. Last night, Honda launched its much-anticipated Prius-killer at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last night. The Insight, a petrol-electric hybrid that will go on sale next year, will be the company's first affordable hybrid for the mass market and a direct competitor for the Toyota Prius at a cost of less than $20,000 (£13,500).

The first version of the Insight was launched in the US in 1999 but Honda pulled it from sale in 2006 after disappointing sales. EcoGeek points out that the new Insight is smaller than the Prius but should open up a huge potential market for Honda in the US.

In this completely re-designed version, Honda claims a performance of 64.2mpg and CO2 emissions of 101g/km using its integrated motor assist technology that incorporates an electric motor and an advanced nickel metal hydride battery that can be charged by braking.

The five-door hatchback will seat four adults and takes some of its styling from Honda's hydrogen fuel cell concept car the FCX Clarity (and, if you squint a bit, Toyota's Prius is not too dissimilar).

An initial test drive by AutoBlogGreen was apparently positive, with some interesting detail on how the car tells its driver how environmentally friendly their driving is:

Like Ford on the new Fusion hybrid, Honda has added some extra visual feedback for drivers

Honda wants to sell around 200,000 Insights in its first year — no mean feat when the Prius has so lodged itself in the public's eco-mentality. Has the Insight got a hope against the Prius?

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Peter Mandelson ushers in a virtual New Labour revolution

Victor Keegan — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:50:04 GMT

The unveiling of Peter Mandelson's avatar in Second Life is part of Labour's push to beat the Conservatives in the political use of new technology, but it also has a symbolic significance. Unlike the rest of Second Life, where people drop a decade or two from their looks or masquerade as animals, Peter Mandelson will actually look like Peter Mandelson. What you see is what you get.

This reflects Mandelson's attempted makeover in real life. Who would have thought that the master spin doctor of yesteryear could have uttered the words he did this week: "When it comes to new media we have to recognise that the days of command and control are over. Instead we need to embrace and engage"? To regular users of the internet this is not more than a statement of the blindingly obvious but for New Labour it is something of a revolution.

At the moment all this will be at one remove from Downing Street. Mandelson's appearance in Second Life will be to introduce an "independent" blog, LabourList.org. This is being simultaneously launched in Secondlife.com (free registration needed) and in real life on 12 February, apparently with the approval of Gordon Brown, by Mandelson's former adviser, Derek Draper. But, er, Mandelson won't actually be operating the avatar in person as he has to be at the launch in real life. It will be manipulated by an assistant – so on this occasion what you see won't, after all, actually be what you get.

How independent the blog will be remains to be seen – it has already recruited Brown's former spinster Charlie Whelan – but there is no doubt that there is a gap to be filled in generating unconventional ideas for Labour at a time when almost every policy area is in a state of flux – particularly what on earth can be done to stop the economy from imploding.

Although some Labour MPs such as Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East (tom-watson.co.uk), have embraced the new technologies with verve, and some government departments including the Foreign Office even jumped aboard the latest craze of Twittering (twitter.com), there is nothing on the US scale. Barack Obama's use of new media played an important supporting role in his victory and won him a bigger following on Twitter than anyone else in the world.

The point about virtual worlds such as Second Life and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is that they offer a direct communication channel to voters when they are at play at a time when people, especially younger people, are switching off from traditional media channels. Twitter is still at an embryonic stage but if it keeps up its momentum then it, or a similar service, could become the standard way of communicating short messages across the world. If politicians manage to get millions of people signed up to "follow" them on Twitter then they could have a unique chance to recapture a lost generation.

But for people to be able to use these new technologies they really need to be on broadband. Far and away the best thing the government could do now would be to spend lots of the money it suddenly has available to ensure that every household in the country has broadband.

This would put people to work and ensure that everyone, not just the digital elite, has access to broadband to take advantage of the explosion of activity associated with video games, education, remote medicine, high-definition conferencing in the home, virtual worlds and so on.

It is very possible that the employment we seek in new industries to replace the collapse of the financial sector could come from the revolution that is happening as the internet moves into three dimensions. But to take advantage, everyone must be on it both to provide a big enough market and to motivate users to take advantage of it.

Mandelson's visit to Second Life, or rather his virtual visit as he wasn't actually there, is partly a successful publicity stunt but is also a way to make sure that leading politicians have some idea of what is going on out there. Sadly, most of them still don't.

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Disagreement over Google's carbon footprint

Kevin Anderson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:03:03 GMT

Is that Google search really necessary? It's the latest question that environmentalists are asking after the release of research from US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. He says that a Google search performed from a desktop produces about 7g of CO2, whereas boiling a kettle releases about 15 g. Google, and a fair number of others on the internet, are questioning the figures, making it one of the most discussed issues on the internet right now.

Google has fired back saying:

In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

Google claims that its servers generate 0.2g CO2 per search, and counters that "the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." Kevin Marks, who works at Google on their Open Social project, says on his personal blog that people generate about 6g of CO2 from simply breathing for 10 minutes. Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch looks at a few other activities to put this carbon output in context.

A single book runs around 2,500 grams of CO2, or more than 350 times a Google search. By some estimates, a single cheeseburger has a carbon footprint of around 3,600 grams - over 500 times larger than a Google search. Granted, meat in general has a notoriously large carbon footprint, but if you're genuinely concerned about your environmental impact then try cutting a burger from your diet every week and search guilt-free (you may even lose a few pounds).

Kevin Marks highlights this quote from Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, who estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g. That assumes 15 minutes of computer use per search. These estimates of several grams per search factor in six to 15 minutes of computer use by the owner of the computer. Is that Google's carbon or simply carbon produced from general computer use?

The tech community has also been quick to point out Google's green efforts, and tech commentator Jeremy Wagstaff highlights a possible conflict of interest for Wissner-Gross. Articles mention that Wissner-Gross has set up CO2stats.com. Wagstaff says that neither the article in the Times (nor another article at BBC News) explain:

...the website—and Wissner-Gross--directly benefits from this kind of research. C02Stats offers clients plans, ranging from $5 a month to $100, to calculate their websites total energy consumption, make it more energy efficient, and then neutralizes their carbon footprint by buying renewable energy from wind and solar farms.

Now, it's pretty typical for news organisations to cover stories like this, and it's a clever bit of PR. However, not to explain the business model of Wissner-Gross' website, help put the figures in context and provide motivation for the publication of the figures. Many have asked about the figures methology, and CO2stats.com provides an outline of its method:

CO2Stats software continuously scans your website so that it can monitor your site's energy usage each time someone visits your site. CO2Stats is very smart, and is able to capture a large amount of data about your site's total energy consumption. For example, it can tell what make and model of computer your visitor is using, what its electrical consumption is, and even what types of fossil fuels are being burned in order to power that computer. Likewise, it is able to detect how much and what type of energy your server is using, and even how much and what type of energy is being used to power the networks that are connecting your visitors' computers with your servers.

That raises a question. Is Google responsible for the ineffiency of some computers that people are using to conduct their search?

Articles are also unflatteringly comparing the carbon output of the global IT industry with another oft-cited carbon criminal, the airline industry. However, to put this figure in context, both industries contribute 2% of the global carbon emissions. With campaigners targeting airlines for action, how long will it be before IT is in the crosshairs? John Naughton thinks "environmental impact of computing is one of the Next Big Stories." How long before we see pickets at PC World?

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Iain Dale: Will Derek Draper's new Labour website give me some competition? I hope so

Iain Dale — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:00:01 GMT

Rarely has a political website launched to such fanfare. The beta launch of Derek Draper's LabourList has received blanket coverage in the blogosphere and also made it into the mainstream media. It is a measure of the increasing profile (and perhaps influence) of the blogosphere that the launch of such a website is covered at all, let alone in two Sunday newspapers and today on Channel 4 news. But launching a website is easy. Making it work is more difficult, as many will pay testament to.

I had lunch with Draper in late October when LabourList was a mere twinkle in his eye. I'm sure he would concur that his knowledge of new media was mediocre to say the least. He wanted to pick my brains about how the left could "up" its game. Although many see me as a deeply partisan right-of-centre exponent of the art of blogging, I have always felt that it would be a positive development if there were some more high profile left-of-centre rivals. Healthy debate is a good thing.

Over the last couple of years, there have been a number of initiatives from the left, but they have failed to achieve the prominence of sites like ConservativeHome or Guido Fawkes. LabourHome was meant to rival ConservativeHome but has never really found its feet and attracts a minute fraction of the hits ConservativeHome gets. Liberal Conspiracy, launched in 2007 by Sunny Hundal, has come closest to success, but it takes itself far too seriously, seems to frown on humour and has failed to find a likable "identity".

And there lies the main problem for group blogs. With a multitude of contributors, it's so difficult for a group blog to gain the kind of personality an individual blog can project. ConservativeHome has managed it, and so has the Spectator Coffee House, but few others have. Will LabourList be able to? The jury is, so far, out.

It seems to me that LabourList's identity is it main problem. Looking at the list of contributors, it's like a who's who of New Labour. Sure, there's the odd lefty thrown in for good measure, but the likes of Simon Fletcher and Ken Livingstone seem to be a diversionary tactic. ConservativeHome isn't a success because it can get leading Tories to write for it. It succeeds because it is a genuine grassroots site, which thrives in publishing articles from complete unknowns. Indeed, several stars have emerged – the likes of Graeme Archer, Andrew Lilico, Simon Chapman and Alex Deane. They have a following on the site far wider than its more well-known contributors.

Draper plans to spend three days a week on the site. That's not enough. He needs to breathe it morning, noon and night, especially in the first six months. It's his baby and it is his efforts that will make it succeed or fail. He's got to be the inspirational driving force behind it. It needs to be updated many times a day. Just posting the odd new article will not be enough. I update my site between 5 and 10 times a day. ConservativeHome has something new on it virtually every hour. More than half of my 80,000 monthly visitors come to my site more than three times a day. I just clicked on LabourList and nothing new had been added in the last 14 hours. OK, OK, it's in beta mode, but most people judge a site from their first couple of visits. It's not good enough to plead that the site doesn't launch properly for another months. As far as most people are concerned, it's live now and that's the end of it.

Guido Fawkes advised Draper to become "Labour's Iain Dale". I'm not sure whether Draper was flattered by that advice and I'm still not so sure about my own reaction to it. But he had a point. Draper has the kind of personality that would write a fantastic and very readable individual blog. He has the necessary sense of humour, insight into Labour politics and ability to comment to make a success of it. Draper is a front man. He doesn't do "behind the scenes" and time will tell whether he is best suited to the role of commissioning editor. I suspect not.

A further dilemma will be how far the site will go in terms of distancing itself, when necessary, from the Labour party. The signs are not hopeful. We have a Gordon Brown Quote of the Day. All but one of the initial batch of articles were nothing to do with grassroots Labour politics, but were attacks on the Conservative party. If they want to go down that road then that's fine, but it's not the way to define the site. ConservativeHome is primarily a site for Conservative activists to discuss the state of the party, where it's heading and its policy platform. Sure there are attacks on the opposition but they are not its whole raison d'etre.

Draper's next problem, once he is comfortable with the direction of the site, is to resource it. He can't do it on his own and doesn't seem to have an independent financial source to maintain it. He has said he expects to fund it at least in part through advertising. He'll be lucky. Advertisers are notoriously shy of advertising in anything political, let alone something that is very partisan. I suspect he will end up doing exactly what the Labour party itself does – and tap up the trade unions. Perhaps that explains Charlie Whelan's prominence in the site's list of contributors.

To sum up, I've made it clear that I think LabourList has some real hurdles (some of them self-created) to jump before it can be termed a success. It's had a successful launch, if you judge it merely by publicity. I wish them well and genuinely hope they make it. It would be good for the rightwing blogosphere to have some real competition for a change.

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We know the Daily Mail has no sense of humour. But Twitter?

Jemima Kiss — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:55:51 GMT

Further proof, if we needed it, that the Daily Mail has no sense of humour. Some wag created the inevitable spoof account for the Mail on Twitter, which resulted in various diverting tweets including:

"God bless Prince Harry! He's only saying what we're all thinking..."

and

"@maggiethatcherUK How DARE you impersonate Britain's greatest ever Prime Minister? Is Twitter full of fakes and boring gits?".

But no sooner had the fun began than the account name DailyMail_UK was cruelly snatched away and replaced with NotDailyMail_UK. The Daily Mail and General Trust lawyers had emailed Twitter complaining, according to Twitter's response on GetSatisfaction, which prompted them to change the login name and password without warning.

The mystery Twitterer said he created the account in response to "a pathetic and rather lacklustre piece of 'journalism' in the Daily Mail", so it is really surprising it didn't happen before. Particularly when you take a peek at the official Mail Twitter feed which spews out headlines all day without actually attempting to engage with anybody in the manner of, oh, I don't know - a social media tool?

The problem is that Twitter's response explicitly describes that impersonation is acceptable in the case of parody: "The standard for defining parody is, "Would a reasonable person be aware that it's a joke?" I think we know the answer to that. What on earth did DMGT's lawyers say to Twitter to get them to buckle so absolutely? Perhaps our US colleagues underestimated the value of - and demand for - a Daily Mail parody channel...

"I am not naive," writes NotDailyMail_UK. "I know that writing a parody of the litigious bastards at The Daily Mail was likely to land me in a spot of bother. But I rather did think that Twitter might show some backbone or - at the very least - allow me to have my say before they gave away my account...."

It's a joke, numnuts. Photograph: Uh...Bob/Flickr/Some rights reserved

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Leo Hickman on the carbon cost of Googling

Leo Hickman — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:28:57 GMT

Can two Google searches really produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling enough water in an electric kettle for a cup of tea? That's what Alex Wissner-Gross, an environmental fellow at Harvard University, is claiming. "Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power," says Wissner-Gross in forthcoming research about the environmental impact of computing, which calculates that every Google search produces 7g of CO2. "Google are very efficient, but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy."

It should probably be noted at this point that Wissner-Gross is also the co-founder of Enernetics, and its associated website www.CO2stats.com, which, according to the Boston Business Journal, allows "websites to get analysis of how energy-efficient they are and sells carbon offsets to help them reach a neutral status". So let's first congratulate Wissner-Gross on getting himself and his company talked about all over the internet, including here. But does his claim stack up?

Without any published data to hand it's hard to tell. All Google is saying is that it is takes the issue seriously, but that "the energy used per Google search is minimal". It adds: ""In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query." (If this is true, it surely makes a mockery of Wissner-Gross's claims as there's no way an average computer uses as much power as an electric kettle when it's boiling water.)

So let's do some crude sums based on what we know and what is being claimed. Google receives millions of search queries every day from all over the world. Estimates vary about quite how many queries it receives, but they seem to range from 200m up to 500m. Let's, for the sake of argument, take the top figure as a worst-case scenario.

If Wissner-Gross is correct then 3,500 tonnes of CO2 (500m x 0.000007 tonnes) are emitted every day through all of us performing Google searches. Or put another way, 1.28m tonnes a year. That's about the same as Laos emits each year, the 151st biggest emitting country in the world.

I'm torn between thinking that this sounds like an awful lot – "Shock: Google emits as much as a country!" – or whether it doesn't sound too bad, given, for right or wrong, how integral Google now is to many of our lives. What is certain is that the environmental impact of information technology as a whole is considerable and ever rising.

A widely quoted figure is that the global ICT sector produces as much CO2 each year as the global aviation industry – about 2-3% of total global emissions. It is helpful, therefore, that Wissner-Gross's claim is at least providing a needed spur to debating the ICT sector's impact, and how best to reduce it.

Ultimately, though, I suspect this particularly quotable nugget will have little impact on the searching habits of internet users. Nor should it, really. We can each monitor how much electricity our own computers use – and aim to keep it at a minimum – but it can only ever be Google's responsibility about how much power its servers and related hardware use. Perhaps there's even an argument for saying that internet searches have helped to reduce net emissions by greatly reducing the need to make physical journeys in search of information, say, a trip to the local library or bookshop?

(NB: At least one cup of tea was consumed during the making of this blog.)

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Video: CES 2009 - Leaving Las Vegas

Bobbie Johnson, Elliot Smith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:12:18 GMT

Bobbie Johnson winds up our video coverage of this year's CES and gives his verdict on the show

My Virtual Decatur: city announces competition for virtual world builders

Aleks Krotoski — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:10:02 GMT

The city of Decatur in the US state of Georgia has opened up their call for developers to create a virtual city, titled Virtual Decatur, in a massively multiplayer online environment. Potential winners of the competition will have creative liberties to the extent that any activity supported in the online version must be "considered acceptable in the actual environment of Downtown Decatur" and is aligned with their mission for the project (pdf):

New Nintendo DSi and download games

Greg Howson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:00:03 GMT

I've definitely warmed to the DSi, Nintendo's forthcoming update to the hugely successful DS Lite. When originally announced it seemed to me nothing more than a minor update – an excuse to create Brain Training 7: Camera Edition. But the ability to download games and – perhaps even more importantly – the customisation options suggest that the DSi may be more interesting than originally thought. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has recently been talking up the prospects of downloadable DS games and the ability to personalise your device.

Nintendo DSi, the latest version of the DS series, was launched in November and sold 500,000 units in the first month. The product includes new functions such as a camera and the ability to download software through the Internet to customize it for the individual. We hope this will create a trend in which each family member will have his or her own DSi with their favorite software installed.

Iwata also argued that games can do well in a recession, although how the thousands of DS owners who got the handheld this Christmas will feel about their new handheld console being superceded so soon remains to be seen.

It seems more and more people are enjoying games instead of travelling or eating out to save money. Sales of the Wii video game console and Nintendo DS portable video game player have exceeded our expectations so far.

Fighting talk then. But what do you think? Will the DSi continue the huge success of the DS series? Or is it simply not enough of an upgrade to tempt current DS owners? And if not can the PSP - or even the iphone/ipod touch - tempt new portable gaming players?

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Chatterbox Monday

Greg Howson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:50:00 GMT

Monday's edition of Chatterbox

Games

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How a coyote became a cyberspace star

Stuart Jeffries — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:45:22 GMT

There's an 8am blizzard blowing through Ten Sleep, Wyoming, when I ring Shreve Stockton, who has become a cyberspace star for her blog about raising a coyote at home. Two years ago Stockton, 31, rode a Vespa from San Francisco to New York. When she arrived in Wyoming, she fell in love with red dirt, mountains, open spaces. "I knew I had to live there."

So she did, became a substitute teacher and then fell in love twice more: the first time with a trapper called Mike - "He grabbed my attention just like Wyoming did" - and then, when Mike turned up at her door with a day-old orphaned coyote in his pocket, she fell in love with the puppy too.

Mike had shot its parents, who had been killing sheep. "I had to decide: should I raise Charlie [as she named the coyote] or let him die." She chose the former. It was the start of a beautiful relationship - and a blog called the Daily Coyote, where Stockton writes about raising a wild animal in her home, illustrating her story with photos. The blog became a US hit. Why? "It's about reconnecting to wildness and freedom. Most people don't have that."

In one photo, Charlie sits with Stockton's cat. Why isn't Charlie eating Eli? "I know! Eli should be Charlie's prey, but Eli has a commanding energy, which Charlie respects." He also respects Stockton: "I once had to defend myself with a chair, and now I know why. Every day I have to establish myself as the alpha, say, by eating my food before he can, otherwise he will attack me." She also had him castrated, which probably helped.

The blog has now become a book, The Daily Coyote: A Story of Love, Survival and Trust in the Wilds of Wyoming (published in the US). What about a film? "Not unless it was beautiful and true to my life." It's a life funded by her writing. Is she happy? "I'm in awe every moment. "It's 8.15am and Charlie is running around in the blizzard. He'll come inside soon, possibly for a cuddle."

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Toyota's lightweight battery-powered commuter car

Andrew Clark — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:08:19 GMT

With an environmental paint job of birds and leaves, Toyota unveiled a lightweight battery-powered commuter car yesterday, which it plans to mass produce by 2012. The Japanese carmaker, which recently overtook General Motors to become the world's top carmaker, is putting much of its serious financial firepower into the idea of a plug-in urban car. Dubbed the FT-EV, it shares a platform with Toyota's iQ, which is already on sale in Japan. It can go up to 50 miles on a charge - enough, Toyota argues, for a typical commuter. The firm wants to capitalise on the success of its Prius hybrid to become a global leader in green technology, with a target of selling 1m petrol-electric hybrids a year by the next decade. It has also rolled out a version of its Camry saloon powered by natural gas. Irv Miller, Toyota's vice-president for environmental affairs, said last year's soaring petrol prices were no anomaly: "It was a brief glimpse of our future."

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