Offmessage

Must admit that I didn’t notice this story when it first broke (despite having over 4,000 diggs!), but there’s an interesting thought that if Google were to invert the colours of it’s pages (with a black background) it would save approximately 750MWh (Mega Watt hours) of energy per year.

This sounds fantastic (it sounded more fantastic before the migration from CRT to LCD got factored in and the savings were 3,000MWh). But. A note of caution. The average electricity consumption of a UK household is just shy of 4MWh per year, meaning that even Google can only save the electricity of 192 UK homes. Rather stops you worrying about energy consumption in your web design. Still, black is the new green makes for a nice slogan. Those interested in the power consumption of different colours (on CRTs) can find out more from the US Gov.

Interesting that blackle (a black page Google custom search) has gained a lot of traction among the eco/ethical crowd. If I’m honest it looks like a fairly cynical ploy; host AdSense on a standard version of Google and tout yourselves as ethical. Given the energy savings that such a site offers in reality it’s just another way of getting traffic to your ads - nothing more, nothing less. 469kWh saved to date (as I write this post). Approximately 10% of one UK household. I’m betting the ad revenue would pay for a whole lot more electricity (or solar panels, or wind turbines) than that.

Internet Explorer hijacks 404 pages.  Firefox hijacks styled RSS feeds.  Now google toolbar also hijacks 404 pages less than 512 bytes (just like IE). Please please please all of you just stop trying to improve the web, already. It works just fine without y’all mucking about with it, thank you very much.

I love the fact that you could “not install Google Toolbar” as an option to avoid this behaviour.  I mean purlease - nowadays every mass market PC on the planet has this installed by default.

How Google would look if it wasn’t Google. (You may have already seen this at MeFi).

Fascinating piece by Joel Spolsky on the future of application software.  I have a feeling he’s on to something…

Strategy Letter IV

If you have 8 minutes with some speakers this is well worth a watch.  From 2004, but some of its predictions are remarkably prescient. (Link for those of you without embedding).

I’ve mused before about the accidental exposure of our private lives online.  With the advent of Twitter, Plazes and the like this is only getting worse.  And what about Google Street View?  Mashable takes a look.

Robert X. Cringely on the death of Google.

Go to google and search for “go to hell” (including the quotes).

Just in case it’s gone, there’s a screen shot here.

This bloke makes a big thing about the fact that he has number one google spot for the search term celebrity bestiality.

I was impressed until I discovered my mate Doug has the number one google spot for Britney shoving cock. Stick that in your ass (as they say).