Archive for the 'Energy' Category

Hey folks.  I’m back after a long day-job-driven haitus.  Things have been hectic, and the best way to jump back in seems to be some quick-blogging of items I’ve found intriguing over the past few weeks.

David Roberts at Grist offers a great primer on power grids, including the important distinction between a wide grid: “a new high-voltage backbone, with lines spanning the length and breadth of the country, able to carry electricity from anywhere it’s generated to anywhere it’s needed” and a smart grid: a transmission system that allows for distibuted production (think rooftop solar panels) and is capable of adjusting in real time to compensate for heavy usage, increased production, etc.  This is a recommended read to get a basic grasp of what David describes as two key power grid issues:

[O]ne grid issue is getting more power (transmission lines to new places) and one is using power more efficiently(smarter distributions systems). The politics around those two issues are quite different

Related, also courtesy of David: here’s a list of articles on my to-read list related to smart grids.

Jason Calacanis sent a long and thoughtful email about the ways in which anonymity online can be harmful to the extent that it erodes our empathy for other people. Jason goes so far as to call this trend a “disease”–”Internet Aspergers Syndrome”:

This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost.

In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, [and] twittering…–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

This is a provocative thought, and it does seem to me that the next big trend online (web 3.0?) will be authenticated identities driving the social media we’ve taken for granted.  Calacanis mentions that social networks in South Korea require a social security number to sign up.  There will inevitably be a tension between the norms that have developed in the web’s infancy and the changes that will be necessary to combat what is moving from a medium where goodwill and trust could be taken for granted toward an anything-goes medium where accountability is virtually (pun intended) nonexistent.  How we choose to make that shift–requiring social security numbers, for instance, might be a bit invasive by American standards–is unclear, but I think many of us are starting to feel fatigue with unaccountable spammers and trolls ruining the web for everyone else.

I’ve come across a fair amount of criticism recently of URL-shortening services (like tinyURL, bit.ly, Digg, others).  As TechCrunch explains:

Nobody really likes [URL shorteners], but they are a necessary evil. How else are you going to share links on Twitter without having the URL take up half the message?

The criticisms focus on a number of issues:

1. URL shorteners obscure links, which opens unsuspecting users to spam attacks;
2. shorteners, to quote the founder of del.icio.us, “add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system” and slow the web;
3. some shorteners, like Digg, deny direct traffic to sites by using a frame instead of directing clicks to the original material (Facebook users will find this familiar, since shared items are framed in a similar fashion);
4. all shortened links are dependent on the continued existence of the proponderance of shortener start-ups AND the perpetuity of their terms of service (in other words, the guarantee that your tinyURL will not be reassigned or disappear)

I worry about the Digg/Facebook model gaining traction, since “link juice” for original material is what feeds the web’s content producers.  But I think in the future you’ll see more of this type of functionality: an interim landing page where visitors will see a full URL before continuing to the source material.  If content aggregators (I’m looking at you, Digg) can add value by previewing pages and layering social rankings or other features, this could be a win-win-win proposition: People clicking shortened links are protected from spam; the URL shortening service has an opportunity to advertise and lure visitors to other material; the content provider receives a direct traffic boost.

That’s all for now, though I should be blogging regularly again next week.