Catherine Mack's regular column in the Irish Times has featured www.flysmart.org
“One excellent website for those of us who have to fly sometimes, but who want to do so more responsibly, is www.flysmart.org. It provides some good tips, the top one being, ironically, �take a train when possible�. A �smart flyer� can travel more carbon efficiently by going direct, taking minimum baggage and choosing a carbon-efficient airline. Unless you are a green plane spotter this is tricky, so the site provides a link to a carbon-friendly flight finder. This ingenious use of internet technology allows you to find your cheapest flight to a destination not only moneywise but also carbonwise. Doing a random search on a flight from Dublin to New York, it was reassuring to see Aer Lingus come out the cheapest and greenest. Even smarter, you can then go straight to the booking section and buy your flight.”

Read the rest of the piece on Plane Speaking at
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/travel/2009/0124/1232474677424.html

There has been talk for sometime of using mobile phones, Wi-Fi and GPS technology for interpretation and marketing. The new iPhone has a WhosHere function and it could be used for marketing or interpretation. You could send messages or call any mobile phone user passing by � but the technology is highly intrusive.

Mathew Honan has written a very disturbing piece in Wired Magazine I Am Here: One Man's Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle

�The location-aware future�good, bad, and sleazy�is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google's Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what�and who�is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you'll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.
Simply put, location changes everything. This one input�our coordinates�has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go�they all change once we merge location and the Web.�
Think more than twice about this technology � read his piece at
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig

Today�s Sunday Times  carried a report on work by Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross which asserts that two Google searches can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea. This is because of the way Google runs its international networks.

The Sunday Times reports that an April 2007 report by industry analysts Gartner  have estimated the use of electricity by the ICT industry at 2% of global carbon dioxides emissions, similar to the amount produced by airlines.   Gartner published advice to the industry on how to reduce the environmental footprint of networks in December 2007

Virtual travel may not be as green as some protagonists claim. In the same Sunday Times article it is reported that  �Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.�

More information at Making Websites Green www.co2stats.com