In terms of direct pollution, the impact [of an individual blog on the environment] is likely to be pretty small. To provide a reference point, the popular blogging site WordPress said it transferred about 161,100 gigabytes of data last year across 3,132,606 active blogs. Do the math, and that adds up to only about 51 megabytes of data transferred per blog per year—a tiny amount. Of course, a given blogger's bandwidth will be much higher if he or she receives lots of traffic or posts large images and videos. But even those whose sites transfer a couple of gigabytes a month would be responsible for just a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Using somewhat outdated stats from the Department of Energy, that would put even one of those larger blogs somewhere in the range of the average household's microwave.That's Slate's Jacob Leibenluft on the environmental impact of blogs and other stuff on the web (link). Works for me on two levels: one, it's another reminder of how just incredibly, jaw-droppingly cheap (in terms of marginal cost, at least) is so much ordinary web use--why people are willing to offer things like near-infinite cloudware storage and, well, and free blogs. And two, how little this point seems to have sunk in as evidenced by the fact that the question is being asked at all.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Well, That's a Relief
Apparently my blog is not the web equivalent of the Hummer:
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1 comment:
As a fellow blogger I hate to say it, but the real waste is not of kilowatt hours but of of once-productive time now frittered away in blog surfing.
How much productivity will some wage drone have to add to his daily output to replace the labors of his fellow drone who faithfully devotes himself to a variety of blogs — political, social, literary or just plain idiotic ones?
What are all those people who alight on my own blog each day thinking? And where have their supervisors gone?
And why do I waste my own time thinking of things to say on my blog, your blog, all the other blogs?
Speaking of which, I really owe my own blog a new piece. It says I'm still on vacation.
Well, perhaps if I can make short shrift of the work that pays my income, I'll have some time to devote to my blog later this week.
Final thought: In the old days, you wouldn't have been caught dead (and certainly you wouldn't have stayed employed) reading magazines of the morning's newspaper at your desk. But with a computer, you can look very busy while remaining throughly unproductive.
God blog America!
Crankily yours,
The New York Crank
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