The blog for anyone whose crazy life includes planting, growing, weeding, fertilizing, raising, picking, harvesting, processing, cooking, baking, making, serving, buying, selling, distributing, transporting, composting, organizing around, lobbying about, writing about, thinking about, talking about, playing with, and eating food!
In todays world Globalization and Free Markets are said to be a savior offering an economic bounty to everyone. Of course the flip side of Globalization is the global economic crisis currently underway, with the global financial system behaving like a house of cards. Remove one card like Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers and the whole game tumbles into dust. Other problems with Globalization are increased environmental problems like global warming (because globalization means global shipping meaning more fuel being burned), and loss of cultures and unique civilizations across the world as the globalized culture imposes Coca Cola or Pepsi or Kentucky Fried Chicken and similar brands across the globe.
There are several forms of relocalization being promoted that one can think of as an anti-globalization effort. I like this reaffirming the value of local cultures, and the value each culture. I dislike the spreading of American culture across the globe. For example when I was in Glasgow Scotland I wanted to find a restaurant which would serve me a Scottish meal but despite walking all around downtown Glasgow all I could find was TGI Fridays and other American restaurant brands. And the bookstore? Borders Books. Uh, the Scottish people have thousands of years of history as I repeatedly saw throughout that trip, and all the people of Glasgow can think of for eating establishments in their fine city are American restaurant brands?
Surely there is are better ways to live? Surely wherever you live there is local cuisine, music, games, art, etc, that reflects the real history and uniqueness of the place you live?
In looking to Hollywood for cultural values we as a global society are losing the unique attributes of each of our local places. If everywhere is like everywhere else we will have lost a lot of cultural diversity and be the poorer for it.
live local is a website where people of all walks of life can post their stories, using words, pictures, and videos of how they improve and enjoy their communities. The "experiments", as they're called on the site, are as simple as riding your bike to work or mapping the location of publicly accessible fruit trees in a region – and as complex as creating a lush backyard garden or developing a bartering system.
It's based in Australia so it's a little curious for me (living in Silicon Valley) to think about using an Australian website to ponder how to live locally. But hey on the Internet everything is local, sort of. Put another way, everybody on the Internet is local to somewhere and we are all facing the same problem of globalization erasing our local life. Perhaps then it's good for a global network of people to jointly explore how to live locally?
In any case the site houses a community of people sharing resources and ideas to living locally.
A resource centre for rare and unusual plants, particularly those which have edible, medicinal or other uses. We practise vegan-organic permaculture with emphasis on creating an ecologically sustainable environment based largely on perennial plants. Just twenty plants provide the majority of food eaten, yet there are thousands of other useful plants which have not reached mainstream attention.
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Green Jobs: A Guide to Eco-Friendly Employment is a job hunting guide that's especially relevant to Americans right now. Why? With the Obama Administration the path promised to steer the U.S.A. out of our economic is green jobs, green technology, green businesses, etc. This podcast is an indepth look between the covers of an excellent guide to finding these sorts of jobs.
This book is very in-depth containing a very comprehensive list of resources for every item they discuss. The first couple chapters set the stage with the history of the environmental movement, and the environmental challenges facing our society. The latter part of the book is an extensive survey of the job market for green sustainable careers.
The book is set up with these sections:-
Technosanity Book Review: Green Jobs, A Guide to Eco-Friendly Employment
Twitter is this new phenomena that is raging across the world wide web. It is a massive interactive chat system, at least that seems to have been its original intention. They call it "microblogging" which means that each posting is minimized in size (140 characters or less). The brilliant thing is it is easy to "follow" people and there are several other social aspects to the system which makes it possible to create communities of interest. With the rising popularity of twitter there are some working on gaming twitters system for financial game. One of the more successful systems is the "Twitter Traffic Machine" which is an automated system to build up huge followings for the sole purpose of squirting advertising at them and gaining revenue. While the Twitter Traffic Machine is a brilliantly conceived Internet Marketing system, it is also contributing to global warming and other negative environmental impacts. To explain I will reveal how the Twitter Traffic Machine works. I used the title "Twitter Death Machine" because TTM is an example of the growth of the Internet causing more and more server systems to exist in order to handle the traffic load on the Internet. What's nefarious about the Twitter Traffic Machine is how much of the traffic it generates is machines talking to machines with no human benefit from the data those machines generate. As one who advocates for green web hosting and green computing the growing environmental impact of the Internet concerns me deeply.
The Twitter Traffic Machine relies on these automated systems:
I've just set up the system on a couple accounts and it appears to be working. As a method of marketing a message, the idea is a brilliant one that promises an automated method to build a large following. However...
What happens when two of these machines detects one another? Two twitter traffic machines may be programmed to target accounts showing an interest in golf courses. Both would be locating content having to do with golf courses, and tweeting that content. Because the model is to find other accounts tweeting on the targeted subject (golf courses) the two accounts would follow each other. Since it appears there are a large number of twitter traffic machines being operated, it appears many of these accounts are robotically choosing to follow each other.
There appears to be a flood of automated tweeting traffic generators. Maybe it's the accounts my accounts are following but I'm seeing a lot of traffic consisting of article titles with links to news or blog sites. Further many are the same title from different accounts generally leading to the same article. Given the large number of solicitations I've received concerning the Twitter Traffic Machine, it's clear many people are setting up their own TTM's. Even if they're not following the precise TTM model, the value of automated content generation is pretty obvious and it's pretty trivial to set up a system to autotweet automatically generated content. I had worked it out on my own several months ago on the electric vehicle news and information portal I run.
I'm receiving many follows on my accounts from accounts focused on Internet Marketing or other topics totally off-topic to my accounts. These look like an automated seek-accounts-and-follow-them process with the strategy to follow as many other accounts as possible. It's well understood that a large percentage of people who are followed will reciprocate with following the account which followed theirs.
This makes for a growing number of twitter accounts operated by robots. Further it's likely many of them are not monitored by humans. I'm seeing many twitter accounts following 20,000 or more other accounts, which would be a crushing load of twitter traffic for anybody monitoring those accounts. Heck, I have two accounts following a very modest 2-300 accounts each, and find it impossible to keep up with that traffic flow.
An ominous question here is how many of the accounts following a given account are themselves operated by robots?
Every transaction on the Internet creates a requirement for the Internet infrastructure to transmit those transactions. Hence the more Internet traffic which exists, the more Internet infrastructure which much exist, and there is a direct correlation of Internet infrastructure to resources (energy and materials) consumed to build and operate the Internet. This growing level of traffic aimed at Twitter and services related to running twitter traffic machines is contributing to more transactions on the Internet. Therefore twitter traffic machines contribute to ever-increasing resources consumed by the Internet, and directly contributes to global warming and other side effects of resource consumption.
The measure I would apply to this is, does the expenditure of resources lead to human benefit? The expenditure of resources from robots talking to robots with zero human benefit is, to me, a waste. It's just as wasteful as the SPAM flooding my email, or the junk mail arriving via the post office every day. These get dumped immediately and they all consume resources to generate the SPAM. It would be better for all of us if the SPAM did not exist in the first place, to avoid consuming the resources required to create and transmit SPAM.
The twitter traffic machines aren't necessarily generating SPAM. It's possible that in some cases real people are gaining real value from following these robot controlled accounts. Especially if a given TTM operator is doing a sparklingly good job generating useful and relevant content. However I hope to have made it clear some portion of the robotic Twitter traffic is simply consumed by other robots, and that there is a growing web of Internet services adding "value" to the Twitter. Some portion of this traffic is wasted in a similar fashion that SPAM is a waste, in that no human being is gaining any positive benefit from robots talking to robots.
Twitter is this new phenomena that is raging across the world wide web. It is a massive interactive chat system, at least that seems to have been its original intention. They call it "microblogging" which means that each posting is minimized in size (140 characters or less). The brilliant thing is it is easy to "follow" people and there are several other social aspects to the system which makes it possible to create communities of interest. With the rising popularity of twitter there are some working on gaming twitters system for financial game. One of the more successful systems is the "Twitter Traffic Machine" which is an automated system to build up huge followings for the sole purpose of squirting advertising at them and gaining revenue. While the Twitter Traffic Machine is a brilliantly conceived Internet Marketing system, it is also contributing to global warming and other negative environmental impacts. To explain I will reveal how the Twitter Traffic Machine works. I used the title "Twitter Death Machine" because TTM is an example of the growth of the Internet causing more and more server systems to exist in order to handle the traffic load on the Internet. What's nefarious about the Twitter Traffic Machine is how much of the traffic it generates is machines talking to machines with no human benefit from the data those machines generate. As one who advocates for green web hosting and green computing the growing environmental impact of the Internet concerns me deeply.
The Twitter Traffic Machine relies on these automated systems:
I've just set up the system on a couple accounts and it appears to be working. As a method of marketing a message, the idea is a brilliant one that promises an automated method to build a large following. However...
What happens when two of these machines detects one another? Two twitter traffic machines may be programmed to target accounts showing an interest in golf courses. Both would be locating content having to do with golf courses, and tweeting that content. Because the model is to find other accounts tweeting on the targeted subject (golf courses) the two accounts would follow each other. Since it appears there are a large number of twitter traffic machines being operated, it appears many of these accounts are robotically choosing to follow each other.
There appears to be a flood of automated tweeting traffic generators. Maybe it's the accounts my accounts are following but I'm seeing a lot of traffic consisting of article titles with links to news or blog sites. Further many are the same title from different accounts generally leading to the same article. Given the large number of solicitations I've received concerning the Twitter Traffic Machine, it's clear many people are setting up their own TTM's. Even if they're not following the precise TTM model, the value of automated content generation is pretty obvious and it's pretty trivial to set up a system to autotweet automatically generated content. I had worked it out on my own several months ago on the electric vehicle news and information portal I run.
I'm receiving many follows on my accounts from accounts focused on Internet Marketing or other topics totally off-topic to my accounts. These look like an automated seek-accounts-and-follow-them process with the strategy to follow as many other accounts as possible. It's well understood that a large percentage of people who are followed will reciprocate with following the account which followed theirs.
This makes for a growing number of twitter accounts operated by robots. Further it's likely many of them are not monitored by humans. I'm seeing many twitter accounts following 20,000 or more other accounts, which would be a crushing load of twitter traffic for anybody monitoring those accounts. Heck, I have two accounts following a very modest 2-300 accounts each, and find it impossible to keep up with that traffic flow.
An ominous question here is how many of the accounts following a given account are themselves operated by robots?
Every transaction on the Internet creates a requirement for the Internet infrastructure to transmit those transactions. Hence the more Internet traffic which exists, the more Internet infrastructure which much exist, and there is a direct correlation of Internet infrastructure to resources (energy and materials) consumed to build and operate the Internet. This growing level of traffic aimed at Twitter and services related to running twitter traffic machines is contributing to more transactions on the Internet. Therefore twitter traffic machines contribute to ever-increasing resources consumed by the Internet, and directly contributes to global warming and other side effects of resource consumption.
The measure I would apply to this is, does the expenditure of resources lead to human benefit? The expenditure of resources from robots talking to robots with zero human benefit is, to me, a waste. It's just as wasteful as the SPAM flooding my email, or the junk mail arriving via the post office every day. These get dumped immediately and they all consume resources to generate the SPAM. It would be better for all of us if the SPAM did not exist in the first place, to avoid consuming the resources required to create and transmit SPAM.
The twitter traffic machines aren't necessarily generating SPAM. It's possible that in some cases real people are gaining real value from following these robot controlled accounts. Especially if a given TTM operator is doing a sparklingly good job generating useful and relevant content. However I hope to have made it clear some portion of the robotic Twitter traffic is simply consumed by other robots, and that there is a growing web of Internet services adding "value" to the Twitter. Some portion of this traffic is wasted in a similar fashion that SPAM is a waste, in that no human being is gaining any positive benefit from robots talking to robots.
A San Francisco-based full service green business consultancy and communications firm serving the eco-economy. The goodMix is the preferred vendor for innovative sustainable organizations that want to achieve a fast ROI through strategic partnerships, brand awareness and business development strategies. The goodMix helps businesses thrive in the eco economy.
