I’ve worked on a couple of environmental focused websites such as VerdantConcepts and Greener Earth Maps. A concern has always been the benefit/environmental cost ratio of running servers 24/7 that use up power and resources. This has been a big issue in persistant worlds such as Second Life where every acre of digital world has a real-world cost due to maintaining the simulation, even if no one is there!.

Therefore, it was a happy surprise when one of the hosting companies I use (such as this blog), Dreamhost, announced they are carbon neutral. What this means is they’ve purchased certificates from a carbon offset provider. You can be carbon neutral by planting trees, using renewable energies, use carbon sequestration techniques, or the easy (yet effective) method of buying carbon offsets from an organization that will do this for you.

The internet, and computing usage, has a huge, and growing, impact on the environment. Companies create power stations just to power large internet companies and their hosting requirements. Therefore it is important to understand this impact and alleviate it through any of those means mentioned above.

In some ways, it is buying yourself the “Green” label, but in the end the effect is the same. You’re putting your money where the need is, saving the environment.

So the question you should all be asking yourselves: “Is my hosting provider carbon neutral?” If not, make them, or move to one that is.

Update: for the low-down on how carbon offsets reallythis informative-info-graphic from Salon. (thanks to Sean Gillies for being the sleuthy detective in finding this gem via Reddit).

Chris Haller has recently released a very cool new localized news video site, iCommunity.tv. The site allows users to upload and geotag videos of their own news media around the world.

iCommunity.tv is a fore-runner in providing video media primarily centered around geography in addition to focusing on citizen journalism , and not just videos of crazy stunts and movies served up by other media sites. Users can create custom channels and collections based on their interests and locations.

They offer a GeoRSS feed and a KML feed of the postings – which means it works very well in your Mapufacture Maps. See the feed map. Now you can add the feed to any of your Mapufacture maps to get update when a new video shows up in your community (or area of interest, for example where your family lives or you’re going to take a vacation)

Lastly, under the hood, iCommunity.tv is built on top of the Drupal CMS platform and is an excellent example of the power behind building a GeoCMS. In the future, Chris possibly plans to offer the ability for users to aggregate their video blogs through the service to allow for easier posting.

iCommunity.TV is a service of eParticipation.com

I was intrigued by the concept of Location vs. Locality posed at EarthCode.com. Location is the latitude and longitude that mark a spot, or the address of a building. Locality is the ‘area’ that is local to you, and is much less defined: downtown Detroit, Northern Virginia, East Coast.

Locality also varies scope depending on what you’re talking about. Are you physically going to a restaurant? You probably are looking fairly close. Do you want an update on news? Then the larger metro area is more interesting. Weather? You’re looking at national regions (or local too, if you live near interesting geographical features).

But what do you call it?

To add to the concept, or confusion, is what people refer to these localities as. Is it: NoVA (’no-vah’), Northern Virginia, or just DC? And what would a tourist guide from Madagascar refer to it as?

Of course, English speakers are often have it a little easier because many locations have an English name – even if the location itself isn’t an English speaking location. Of course, this happens all of the time in other languages as well for English locations. But you probably recognize Roma is Rome, and España, is Spain. However, do you know where Vereinigte Staaten is? Or what about 中國 (Zhōngguó)?

We’re constantly referring to locations by names we’ve given them and not as they’re known by the people that live there. The term for giving a name for a location that isn’t used by the locals at that location is an exonym. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

An exonym is a name for a place that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants, or a name for a people or language, that is not used by the people or language to which it refers.

The name that a location is referred to by the locals is an endonym.

What is interesting looking at exonyms is that they are a marker of levels of foreign involvement in the region. As cities and areas became colonized or visited by outside people, they would typically be bequethed a name in the new language. Some of these names would just be used by the visitors, but in many cases, for long periods of time this exonym would be the official name of the city. For example, look at former Soviet states or India (Bhārata Gaṇarājya).

There was a lot of this in New Zealand as well, where the Pakeha (Europeans) would bestow English names to the large ports and coastal cities. But as you venture out of the cities and leave Auckland or Christchurch, you start passing Whangarei, Tonagariro, or Oamarau.

For a demonstration of some variations of the names in Europe, check out the Interactive Map of EUROPE and database of exonyms.

We can all just get along

Internationalization of applications has long been a difficult task and subject. It is made even more relevant as the internet, and websites, becomes widely available in many more countries. Users speaking their native languages will want to view maps of their localities, using the endonyms, localized names.

This will be especially important for projects like OpenStreetMap that seeks to create a global map, for the people. There are projects in many other, non-English speaking, countries that are doing similar projects for their own regions, and presumably in their own languages.

And excellent example is the Mumbai FreeMap that seeks to “develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.”

How do you find all the names for a location? Flickr geocoding leverages people’s own terminology for location and maps it to a location. So a photo taken by an English speaker in Germany may be labelled: Germany, Munich. Whereas taken by a native German speaker may be labelled: Deutschland, München. Together, these tags describe the same location, but with the exonym and endonym.

So when developing web applications, in particular geographic services, keep in mind who your users will be and how they will use your tools. They may be locals and want to use their own names, or they may be visitors or virtual tourists and interested in learning more about the world outside their window.

I’m a fan of splimes – web-enabled, syndicated sensor-webs. What I find both hilarious, and ingenious, are these GPS-enabled, sensor-laden pigeons.

In a project known as PigeonBlog, sensors in the backpacks collect data on toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, as the birds wing through city skies.

The information is then sent back to a central computer, which automatically posts a map of the pollutants’ concentration on the Internet.

The entire package costs just $250 USD and weighs 1.3oz. Not a bad size for distributing these to people to carry around as well. Apparently the sensor itself is a modified smoke detector.

Go check out PigeonBlog

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame – the dream of many an engineer to throw off the yoke of the corporate world and write comics for a living) came down with a really exotic condition 18 months ago that caused him to lose his speech only when speaking one-on-one. His speech was fine speaking in a large group (thousands) or by himself. But when he spoke one-on-one, he could only manage a hoarse whisper. This was a permanent condition.

The other day he fixed his brain by speaking rhyme. Not only was he able to say the rhyme using a normal voice, it rewired his brain to now allow him to speak normally!

An excellent example of how really odd and complex the human brain is.

- via BoingBoing