Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day. That means many bloggers will be writing on one general topic, this year, the topic is the environment. The idea is to see what might be achieved through coordinated posting.

What comes to mind for me is a study I conducted almost a year ago with 18-to 24-year old in the US, UK and Canada about technology. So many of them talked about how technology is going to solve our problems, specifically environmental ones.

Now, one can argue that generating the electricity for all of the servers for say MySpace or Google has its own ecological impact, even if we save in other ways. But I do think it's an interesting point, specifically in that the Internet allows us to share in new ways.

Take for example, freecycle, a site that allows members to give away used items. Got a bookshelf you can't use but can't sell, or how about a half used ream of paper? Just post it on freecycle and someone can claim it and pick it up. In a way, it's a type of simplified distributed computing. And just one example of how the Internet may be helping us reuse items instead of throwing them in the trash.