There is something I find mind-numbingly stupid, and astonishingly brilliant at the same time: Carbon Offsets.

The Wiki defines carbon offsetting like this:
Carbon offsetting is the act of mitigating (“offsetting”) greenhouse gas emissions. A well-known example is the purchase of carbon offsets to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions caused by personal air travel.

One company you could buy offsets from is a company called Climate Care. They have a carbon calculator, to show you how many “carbon credits” you should buy to become “carbon neutral”.
I ran the calculator to show how much I would owe. here’s what it looks like:

Your emissions from this car are 5.25 Tonnes
The cost to offset this CO₂ will be £39.38

Hmm.. So if I wanted to compensate for my large carbon footprint, I’d have to shell out about 78 dollars to this company, that would in turn use that money for things like paying people to not chop down the forest.

That’s brilliant! Do whatever you want, and throw money at the problem to make it go away.
Let me use that logic in all other fields…

There are some bad, rich people in this world. I feel sorry for them, because a lot of times, their badness is what allowed them to be rich in the first place, like politicians and mafiosos. I propose a solution: Evil Offsets. I, and a group of moral, wholesome individuals will offset the evil that they do, for a small fee. The service costs 5 dollars per credit, with one credit buying ten minutes of good behavior. In the future, I’ll provide Evil calculators, so that potential clients can measure their “Malice Footprint”, so they can become “Morally Neutral”.

How about one for heiresses and pop celebrities? “Stupid Offsets”! For every credit, I’ll spent ten minutes studying.

If anyone is interested, I’ll set up a paypal account, so that you can start making your conscience feel better… Hey, at least SOMEONE is doing something, right? Heck, give me money! I promise I won’t chop down the forest!

In the end, I think carbon offsets are a fad that will soon go the way of the pet rock. Charities are good, since they don’t imply that you’re “neutralizing” your own actions, forcing you to be proactive as well as charitable. Hopefully, the media circus will get bored with global warming (just like they did with AIDS, endangered species, and the continent of Africa) enough so that people can start to think rationally about the situation, and come up with real solutions, if there are any.

Site maps suck.

As probably the most effective way of looking at all of the pages on a particular site, site maps are really underused and underdeveloped. a quick look at Google’s and Apple’s maps, I can see that it’s pretty plain looking.

I don’t think it could be all that hard, but if a page map were to represent the traffic of individual pages, and the hierarchy of pages in a nice, elegant way, it’d be a hit.Forgive the picture, but this is a crude representation of what i’m thinking of. Highly trafficked pages are colored to represent what’s popular at the moment. Information could be displayed in a very dynamic way, and allow you to quickly digest information in one look.

I’m thinking that Java or CSS could be used to develop it, and be linked to the site’s page counter to show the traffic info. Tag Clouds are a promising start to quick site navigation, but it doesn’t let you see the hierarchy of the site. With all of the information on the web, there have to be changes in navigation styles.

Aha! I was right!

A newspaper called the “New York Times” ran a story on Jerry Yang’s keynote speech at CES. Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, told the audience that Yahoo was undergoing some fine-tuning.

Here are some excerpts: (full story here)

Mr. Yang displayed a prototype version of Yahoo’s popular e-mail software that had been transformed into a powerful communications hub. It could, for example, tap into social networks to give higher priority to messages coming from senders with close ties to their recipients.

That’s right. Yahoo is realizing that people don’t care about their opinion or their take on the news. People want Yahoo to step aside, so they can listen to their friends.

Mr. Yang said other Yahoo services would be similarly overhauled to open them to the rest of the Web and to run outside applications. Such a strategy has successfully been embraced by Facebook and others. The goal, Mr. Yang said, is to turn Yahoo into a primary online “starting point” for consumers.

Outside apps? Whatever happened to things like things like the Konfabulator? I guess Yahoo got tired of buying applications at hefty prices only to slap their logo on it. By allowing outside applications, Yahoo becomes a dot-connector, allowing them to focus less on application development, and more on administration.
I’m Mr. Yang used the word “starting point”. It implies something that you want to get away from as fast as possible. Like airports and train stations, Yahoo should see itself not as a destination, but as a site that allows people to get to other places easily.

Relying more on outside content and services, however, also means relying less on some of Yahoo’s own properties. The company has begun a process, which some insiders and analysts say was long overdue, of phasing out or consolidating some services, like Yahoo Photos, premium music, auctions and Yahoo 360, a largely unsuccessful social network.

Good job Yahoo. Why make shoddy features that hurt your image, when you can join forces with the programs and applications that are actually making waves? Cut the fat, become a “starting point”, and you’ll see your numbers go up.

To my amazement, there are actually people that take time out of their lives to read (at least part) of my blog. The map shows the ip addresses that have been recorded so far. (Australia?!) I highly recommend Statcounter, they have some really good information that they make available to you. Keyword searches, entry/exit pages, monitor settings, the whole works. One thing I don’t understand, though, is how on some of the hits that I get, the duration is of zero seconds. Could it be just the ISP pinging the website? I don’t know… Either way, my favorite feature is definitely the map.

When trying to find a topic to blog about, I often find myself trying to muse about a certain subject. Although that’s fine, I’ve found that the most successful bloggers are reporters, simply relaying to their readers the bottomless pit of topic-specific news. Just like wells, the personal expertise of one individual will soon dry up, leaving the writer with a frustrating block. The best thing to do is to be a news filter, and cast your own light on the endless spring of world events.

“Originality is overrated”, the authors of lifehack.org wrote (a concept they believe in, noting the obvious rip on “lifehacker.com”). When you take a look at Alexa’s top 100 ranking websites for the US, it becomes more apparent that the most successful websites are really just a conglomeration of other people’s information.

Here’s a few:

1) Google- As noninvasive as websites come: just a search bar, and some colored letters. It seems to say “hey, I know you’re not here to see me, let me help you send you on your way”.

2) Yahoo- It’s been the most popular portal on the internet for the larger part of its existence. Most popular feature is its search bar. It probably lost its first place rank because of its lack of Google’s minimalistic approach

3) Myspace- A social networking hub for friends to share pictures, gossip, and flashy .gif’s. Myspace isn’t really anything more than a way to connect the dots (the dots being friends, see?)

4) Youtube- If videos were muslims, Youtube would be their Mecca. Everything is there, but Youtube doesnt put anything original out there.

The list goes on, listing search engines and file sharing sites, till it finally gets to the first “original-content” website: CNN, ranking at #19.

What does this mean to budding internet entrepreneurs? Don’t focus so much on finding the “next new thing”, but instead try to see how to get people together to share information. Ask yourself questions like “truckers have CB radios to connect to other truckers– would they want a website?” (Truckbook.com is already taken… maybe Mytruck? Oh well…) Being a dot-connector really frees you up from constantly trying to increase a website’s “stickiness”, and lets you focus on simply maintaining the site itself, leaving the stickiness issue to the individual users.