Backlash Against Green Hype Machine?

I don't have any idea when or if a backlash against the current green orthodoxy will start but two articles on slate.com caught my eye. Neither article dismisses or denies the problems that the green movement addresses, but they both poke holes in the fear mongering and simplistic solutions offered to the public. As an agency serving clients with a green message, this is something to keep on the radar screen.

It's Time To Turn Down the Heat
Slate.com
By Gregg Easterbrook

Artificial climate change is real; even skeptics now call the danger scientifically proven. But Friedman, Al Gore, James Hansen of NASA, and others present climate change as some kind of super-ultra emergency. Global warming is a problem, one that must be managed via greenhouse-gas restrictions and a weaning away from fossil fuels. But in a world of poverty, disease, dictatorships, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, lack of girls' education, and more than 1 billion people without cleaning drinking water or electricity—climate change barely makes the Problem Top 10. Besides, the solution can't be a panicked pullback from the present economic system, though perhaps that system can be amended over the long term. Economic growth is needed to allow the world to afford environmental protection. At least for the next few decades, headlong resource consumption will be necessary to generate the capital that will pay for a clean-energy infrastructure.

Rusted Roots
Slate.com
By James E. McWilliams

...One issue frequently overlooked in the rush to embrace organic agriculture is the prevalence of excess arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury, copper, and zinc in organic soil. Soil ecologists and environmentalists—and, to some extent, the concerned public—have known for more than a century that the synthetic pesticides of conventional farming leave heavy metals in the ground. But the fact that you'll find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret.

Nothing ever continues in a straight line forever, so I'm sure that an eventual rise in measured criticism will cause the Greens, as a political and cultural group, to lose the current hollowed status they currently hold. These two articles might be a couple of the early data points that support that view.

What do you think? Am I completely off my rocker?

Do Not Copy Other People's Stuff

It's been said before. Everyone should have picked this up in school. Maybe in the past, before the Internet, you might be tempted to copy a paragraph or a sentence here and there. No more. The Internet is forever, and everything you write is there forever. And it's almost instantly search able.
Don't believe me? Read "How my blog started the avalanche that buried presidential aide Tim Goeglein" by Nancy Nall Derringer in Slate today. Here is the link: http://www.slate.com/id/2185657/

I wonder how many people are going to fired ten, twenty years from now for plagiarizing other people's content (...and all the snotty, mean, vicious things they write on their own blogs or while commenting on other people's...). Seriously people, do not copy other people's stuff.

Is Digg Authentic?

As a late early adopter, I tend to get into technologies after the hardcore geeks but before the mainstream crowd. I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of this blog, which I'm pretty excited about. Over the three years or so, as I've followed the rise of social media and the PR industry's struggle to understand and leverage it for our clients, I've tried to remain somewhat realistic about the sometimes messianic claims made about blogs, wiki's, etc.

As a PR person, I can sometimes see beyond a company's messaging and notice when the reality of its situation differs from its public face. All the talk about the Wisdom of Crowds and the revolution of participatory, democratic communities is an age old dream from the Levellers, to the Sans-Culottes to the hippies. The social media sites Wikipedia and Digg have positioned themselves as the virtuous online version of this vision of truth, justice and equality.

But we know that the Levellers failed and was followed by Cromwell's invasion of and genocide in Ireland, the Sans-Culottes begat the Terror and the guillotine, and the dream of Woodstock died at Altamont. Human societies are naturally hierarchal. These hierarchies can be a little unequal or a lot unequal. All attempts at developing complete equality have not lasted, as those communities eventually developed hierarchies, with all the consequences that come with that.

This story in Slate today started me thinking about all this ("The Wisdom of the Chaperones"). Here is some of what Chris Wilson wrote:

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

The same undemocratic underpinnings of Web 2.0 are on display at Digg.com. Digg is a social-bookmarking hub where people submit stories and rate others' submissions; the most popular links gravitate to the site's front page. The site's founders have never hidden that they use a "secret sauce"—a confidential algorithm that's tweaked regularly—to determine which submissions make it to the front page. Historically, this algorithm appears to have favored the site's most active participants. Last year, the top 100 Diggers submitted 44 percent of the site's top stories. In 2006, they were responsible for 56 percent.

It's clear that the "wisdom of crowds"messaging that Digg and Wikipedia have developed and communicated to the market isn't quite accurate, given the unequal levels of participation. This messaging has served them well and helped Wikipedia especially position itself as the virtuous alternative to paid websites like Encyclopedia Britannica. But as they mature as organizations, they are either going to have to change their positioning or alter the structure of their communities to bring them more in line with the ideal.

Busy Bee! And Alisher Usmanov...

I read a very interesting story on Slate this morning ("Civil Disobedience on the Web") and immediately thought I'd blog on the subject. I pulled up my blog in my trusty Firefox browser and realized I haven't posted since September 26. Gulp.

Definitely a violation of some sort of blogger code...my apologies to all. I've been working on three, count 'em, three, events that'll I'll tell you all about in the coming week or two, as well as working on a number of interesting new deals. On top of all that, I'm working on website redesign and editing video footage of our last event with the SIIA. Busy bee!

So anyway...due to the rather vicious and broad nature of the libel law in the UK, it's very easy for the well connected and rich to sue, and win, libel cases against the press. This state of affairs has started to experience some changes as bloggers have started to challenge some of London's less than savory billionaire immigrants, including one Alisher Usmanov, a bad, bad man from Uzbekistan.

The next case is more telling for the breadth of its reach and the greater uproar it entrained. It involves Uzbek-Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, No. 142 on Forbes' list of the world's richest people, who has acquired a stake in British soccer team Arsenal. Usmanov is one shady character: In the 1980s he was jailed for a variety of crimes, including fraud, but he was granted a full pardon—and reclassified as a Soviet political prisoner—upon Mikhail Gorbachev's assumption of the premiership.

Some bloggers wrote some not so nice things about Mr. Usmanov, who promtly sued...the ISP's that hosted the bloggers. Apparently, in the UK, hosting providers can be held liable for the speech of the people who use their service, as in the USA. These ISP's promptly caved and shut off the offending blogs. Uproar insued.

Read the whole article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2175579/pagenum/2/