Thoughts and Thoughts

BitTorrent is hard to explain, but a wonderful resource once you understand some of the basics.

Thankfully, Lifehacker gives a great basic explanation of BitTorrent here. Very nice.

Google has posted their official response, using many of the same sources I posted in my previous post on Blackle.

I’ve gotten a number of emails, and people seem to be getting excited about a website named blackle.com. I finally decided to look into it, and what I find is a little disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong. Blackle is an ingenious idea… for the founders. It preys on the guilt we all feel as we use more energy and natural resources in order to do what we need to do from day to day. The premise is that by simply changing to a black background, we can each save a little bit of energy each time we use Google. Given how many people use Google everyday, the potentially energy savings are can appear to be high.

Blackle.com is simply a Google Custom Search placed on a black background. Anyone in the Adsense program can get a Google Custom Search bar, and get paid by Google everytime someone uses it. So Blackle is clearly a great way to make some quick cash with only a little effort, particularly if you can get people to use it regularly.

It also preys on our inherent laziness. It’s easy to change our homepage, and so with just a push of the button, we line the pockets of Blackle’s founders.

But is the claim even true? Like all things, not everything is so simple. You will save 5-20% if you are using a old-style CRT monitor,. According to recent data, less than 25% of the web use CRT monitors. If you are using an LCD screen, you might be actually using MORE energy. LCD monitors work by having a continuously on backlight, and energy used to block the light from coming through the LCD screen to our eyes. Some case reports of people testing their own monitors has shown that this energy increase may be measurable. By the way, if you are using a CRT monitor you are also using about 5 times more energy CONTINUOUSLY compared to an LCD monitor. If energy conservation is really your concern, it might be time to switch. LCD prices have come down a lot.

To make things more complicated, the monitor is only a small component of the total amount of energy used when you surf a website. Energy is used by every server, every router, every wire that the data traverses to get to service point and back. So, not only are you sending data packets to the Google search engine server, but also to the Blackle server as well. Google maintains a huge infrastructure of servers placed all over the world so that the closest server will serve up the page to optimize speed. Google also has made multiple efforts to be carbon neutral, and strategically builds server facilities near environmentally friendly energy sources such as hydroelectric power.

Overall, I would only consider using Blackle if you have a CRT screen, and even then I’m not sure it will make much of a difference. I’d suggest that if you feel guilty about the environmental impact you are making on this world (as you should), then I’d suggest getting involved more pro-actively.

References:

• Wikipedia – Blackle
• Triplepundit.com – Askpablo – Black Google
• Seopher.com – Blackle – the evil environmentally friendly search engine
• Discussion thread on forums.techarp.com
• techlogg.com – Black Google power saving figures are wrong
• Greenbang.com – In the dark: Blackle may not save as energy as hoped

Newspaper Articles:

• Sydney Morning Herald – Search site cashes in on eco-guilt
• Metro.co.uk – Google goes black to go green
• MediaBistro.com – Blackle, Your Energy-Efficient Google
• WebProNews.com – Dark Google Delivers Energy Savings?
• WSJ.com – The Numbers Guy: Does Darkened Google Really Save Electricity?

Arthur Sulzberger, the owner-chairman of the NY Times, recently discussed the relationship of print and online media in an interview that was posted on Haaretz.com.  (Click for link to the direct story is here)

Of interest, is the quote: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”  Sulzberger sees a time when the print edition of the NY Times will become obsolete, and cites the vast differences in production costs that are required in the print version compared to online.

I personally love the website, the power of search is amazing.  However, I have to admit that I’d be a little sad to see printed newspapers go away.  It makes sense, of course, particularly for a newspaper with a global audience like the New York Times.  While I love picking up a copy before an airline flight (or any other time I will be offline), I can’t help but think how HEAVY all that paper is, and the cost of delivering it to every little newspaper store in the world (never mind the cost of printing it), and how much of that weight and paper usually gets dropped into the trash (on a good day) unread.

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Adam Bosworth, VP of Google recently has posted a few items on their blog regarding health care and the poor information transfer withiin the field.  I can only imagine that Health Informatics must seem truly backwards when one comes from a place like Google.

His first post is here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html

And there is a second post, including a link to a transcript of a keynote address regarding this very issue.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/thoughts-on-health-care-continued.html

There are a number of obstacles to overcome, and the technical limitations are only a part of them. The bigger problem is that people working in the field are so fearful of litigation from a privacy breach, especially when it gets released to the “net.”  Some of this is because people are afraid of increased insurance rates, and many of these concerns are legitimate because information is just SO easy to duplicate a million times over once it is digitized.

I find myself often trying to explain the merits of using RSS to filter and keep up with the internet.  The web is pretty overwhelming otherwise.  Basically RSS is a format or “feed” that allows a user to subscribe to various webpages and then allows the user to read updates on a webpage through a central reader.  My personal favorite RSS reader is Bloglines.

There is a page that tries to explain RSS on About.com.  It is laughably complicated for a “netforbeginners” section, but you might like it if you’d like to read more.  Unfortunately, if you do a search on Google for ”What is RSS” you’ll get a whole lot of results showing technical pages that explain how web designers can publish an RSS feed.

 Anyway, for those in the medical profession, one of the great uses of RSS feeds is that you can set up PubMed to create a custom feed of any search you like, and then have the feeds update whenever a new academic paper gets published within that search.  David Rothman at http://davidrothman.net/, has an excellent entry that takes you step by step through how to set up a PubMed feed using Bloglines.  Hopefully, those of us in the medical academics will be better able to keep up with the overwhelming research that occurs around the world.

I’ve been looking at some blogging options lately, and I’ve been particularly impressed with WordPress. I’ve actually been double posting on both Xanga and WordPress for the past few weeks, just to try it out.

My page is here: davidkpark.wordpress.com

WordPress is kinda like the old-school Blogger.com, where it is a blogging engine as well as a hosting site. WordPress.com is a pretty functional host, and comes with all kinds of themes which make it pretty easy to setup a site and get it running.

On WordPress, I really like the categories, and really like the clean page (xanga has tons of clutter). I also like the portability of my data. I have almost 3 years of posts on xanga, and even if I download it by paying for a Premium account, I don’t know how to convert the posts into something useful. The geeky side of me also likes how wordpress plugs in to the greater blogosphere, connecting my post to other blogs that are talking about the same thing through Technorati and the like. Some part of me likes to think that by posting about a topic, I’m contributing the greater discussion, and maybe even changing a few minds.

On the other hand, Xanga is really easy to use once you are in the network. Setting up subscriptions are really easy as long as you have a xanga account. WordPress uses RSS feeds to do the same thing, but RSS is not that well understood by non-geeks. (For a quick explanation for RSS, check out an explanation here. (I highly recommend Bloglines as a web reader). At some point, I’ll post about how RSS is the best thing that has happened to the internet in a while….

I guess I can use WordPress for more topic oriented stuff, while using Xanga for more personal blogging. That said, you’d notice how rarely I blog about personal stuff on this site….

Anyone who has looked into these hosts care to comment?

The The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey regarding bloggers on the internet. I found some of the results surprising.

About 50% of bloggers are women, which is much higher than just about any other online activity. 8% of internet users blog, which also breaks the rule of 10s… (1% create content, 10% interact with content like comment.)

It also breaks down why people blog, and what people blog about. I thought this might be interesting to those in the xanga community.

— Addendum

Why did I start blogging? Those of you who were with me from the beginning (or who read all the way back) know that this blog started as an exclusively medical blog. It’s still isn’t very personal, although now many of my friends read it. Yes yes, I’ve heard your complaints.

Anyway, I started writing because I wanted to record ideas and thoughts in a “diary” sort of way, but also because I wanted to practice writing for a public audience. I was afriad that as I started my medical residency that I’d slowly degrade into the type of doctor who only made sense talking to other doctors. A major motivation for starting a blog was because I wanted to polish a writing style that reaches out to a wider (aka “normal”) audience.

Why did you start blogging?

This is a first post on WordPress. I’ll be attempting to import from my xanga account; hopefully this will simply mark when I’ve made the change.

So why did I switch? Well, you might notice my old site, I spent a fair amount of time figuring out programming in comments and programing in html. It was quite painful, and kept me up all one night. I checked this place out, and found it had everything built in!

It also allows me to post a picture of myself, so people will know which “Dave Park” they’re reading about….