I can’t understand why it is still considered acceptable to use plastic silverware for convenience when there is silverware in arms reach!?
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Google Acquires Zagat
September 8th, 2011
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Google has placed one of its biggest bets on location to-date, acquiring local reviews giant Zagat.
Writing on the company’s official blog, Google VP Local, Maps and Location Services Marissa Mayer says that, “Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.”
Zagat is far cry from the startups you typically talk about in the location space. The company was founded 32 years ago and started as a printed guide to restaurants, with “Zagat Ratings” becoming an industry standard. In more recent times, however, Zagat has reinvented itself on the web and with mobile apps, bringing it into competition with the likes of Foursquare and Yelp.
Location has been a tough nut for Google to crack. The company acquired early location-based social networking service Dodgeball in 2005, only to eventually shut it down and see founder Dennis Crowley leave to start Foursquare. More recent attempts include Latitude, a largely forgotten Foursquare competitor, and Hotpot, a recommendation engine that’s baked into Google Places. The company also appointed Mayer, one of its most prominent executives, to lead its location efforts in late 2010.
While we don’t have a price tag on the Zagat acquisition yet, it’s safe to call the buy one of Google’s biggest to-date in the content business.
by Adam Ostrow
The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors
July 27th, 2011
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Choose the Best Countertop Material for Your Home and the Environment
July 29th, 2010
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Key Considerations
Because of the beating countertops take over their lifetime, durability and stain resistance are key considerations.“The truth is that there is no such thing as a burn-proof, scratch-proof, stain-proof countertop material—green or conventional—no matter what some manufacturers will claim,” says designer Lydia Corser of Eco Interiors in Santa Cruz, CA. “The most important thing to realize is that nothing is foolproof.”
Lifecycle Thinking
When weighing the pros and cons of different countertop materials, remember that your countertop’s environmental impact begins long before it is installed in your kitchen or bathroom and will continue after you dispose of it. Here is a basic rundown of key considerations:
- Raw materials: Are the materials used to create the countertop renewable or finite, and can they come from recycled products? Are they mined or harvested, and if so, how well managed are these processes? For example, mining the metals to produce stainless steel is very energy intensive and in some cases highly polluting, but stainless can be easily recycled. To go a step further, using salvaged material is often best for the environment since it avoids even the energy necessary to recycle.
- Manufacture: Materials that require less processing use less energy, and so have less impact. Ceramic tiles must be fired twice, consuming great amounts of energy, while untreated wood only has to be sawed and planed, using far less.
- Transport: The distance a material travels translates directly into air pollution from vehicle fuel combustion, which is responsible for emissions of sulfur and nitrous oxides, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. Local materials from within a 500-mile radius are always preferable to reduce air pollution, since emissions can lead to acid rain, ground-level ozone formation, increased asthma rates, and breathing difficulty, according to the U.S. EPA.
- Installation: Dust from sawing and grinding as well as VOCs and other chemicals from adhesives can make your home inhospitable during and after installation. Check with your installer to minimize these impacts.
- Use and maintenance: In place, materials may offgas formaldehyde, VOCs, or other chemicals, but selecting specific materials with low impacts on air quality will cut emissions. For example, look for laminates without formaldehyde in their particleboard backing. Durability is also a major factor, directly linked to a material’s lifespan and how often it must be replaced. Laminates are not very durable, but can last 20 years with conscientious care. Using low-impact cleaning materials will ensure that this care is not at the expense of your indoor air quality.
- End of life: Where will your countertop end up when its life is over? Can it be recycled, reconditioned and reused, downcycled into other products, or will it simply be sent to a landfill? Making your unwanted materials available for other uses helps avoid the extraction impacts of mining and keeps harmful chemicals out of the environment. For example, crushing concrete for use as aggregate in new concrete avoids mining of more aggregate.
When choosing a countertop material, keep in mind that “being green is not a black-and-white issue. All products have some green and some not-so-green characteristics. There is no material with zero impact on our planet,” says architect Eric Corey Freed.
CONTINUED ON GREEN HOME GUIDE…CLICK HERE
September 3, 2009 By Green Home Guide Staff
Amazing Homes and Offices Built from Shipping Containers
June 4th, 2010
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Not just for resourceful squatters, container architecture is taking the world by storm. Recycled freight containers bring efficiency, flexibility and affordability to innovative green buildings, from small vacation cabins to movable cafes, schools and skyscrapers.
By Olivia Zaleski for thedailygreen.com
These are so cool. Check out the slide show here. There are so many more already in use than I realized!
Love Me, Love My Brand
May 16th, 2010
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I think this is both hilarious and true. I found the eulogy reference to particularly insightful. If you brand yourself well, it will be a lot easier on whoever has to write your eulogy.
The woman seated next to me on the plane told me her name was Stefanie but that she went by Adventure Girl. This was a moment I had been prepared for since I got married, thanks to Hall and Oates. But it turned out, I discovered without asking, that Adventure Girl was just her Twitter name. It also turned out that she had 1.5 million followers. Eventually, I told her that I too am on Twitter and waited for her to ask how many followers I have. When I told her I have more than a million, her eyes got wide, and she leaned in, listening closely. This, I realized, must be what it’s like to have money.
Then Adventure Girl asked me what my brand was. No one had ever asked me that before. “My brand used to be ‘Finding the adventure girl in you,’” she said. “Now it’s ‘Living life’s adventures.’” After a career as a model for tool companies and as a freelance writer, she became “funemployed” in 2009 and trademarked the name Adventure Girl™. Now she’s paid for speaking gigs, for public appearances and by the Cherry Marketing Institute to brand cherries as a natural cure for jet lag. Meanwhile, I was running around yelling random stuff like a brandless idiot, sleeping in and paying for my cherries.
So Adventure Girl™ tried to help me find my brand. She started by asking me what my passion was. Now I didn’t have two things. “Until you figure out what gets you up in the morning, you’re throwing money away,” she said. I had no idea I was already throwing money away on this. I was getting scared.
Back at home with my baby and lovely wife Cassandra, I realized that I was sometimes funny, sometimes serious and a lot of the time staring at the television. This was not a brand. So I called Adventure Girl™, who was in Rwanda giving the tourism authority advice on rebranding the country as a tourist destination instead of a genocide destination. She had already come up with an angle: “‘The Switzerland of the African countries.’ It’s incredibly clean. There isn’t a paper on the ground.” If it was this easy for Rwanda, I was sure I could do it too.
Adventure Girl™ suggested I ask my Twitter followers and Facebook friends to help me find my brand. This, it turns out, was not a good idea. Many people thought I was looking to create a line of products to sell, and one woman suggested toilet-seat covers with people’s faces on them, like Sarah Palin’s. Another guy came up with “Joel the Mole.” The nicest observations anyone made involved the words snark and self-deprecating. I hope for Rwanda’s sake that it didn’t try the same experiment.
I called Sandra Carreon-John, senior vice president at M&C Saatchi, the advertising and public relations firm that handles Coke and Reebok, for advice. She thought I needed a handle, like Bill Simmons’ Sports Guy or Howard Stern’s King of All Media. We came up with the Sultan of Snark™, since we both felt sultan is way underused. If I branded myself correctly, I’d soon be selling a line of Sultan of Snark™ T-shirts, hats and key chains that said things like “Yeah … in 1997!” The first step, Carreon-John said, was to call myself the Sultan of Snark™ a few times. Once the Sultan of Snark™ had done that, the Sultan of Snark™ should try to get other people to call the Sultan of Snark™ that too. “Insult someone on Fox, like Bill O’Reilly, so he’ll say, ‘The Sultan of Snark™ talked about me in his column,’” she said. The Sultan of Snark™, I let her know, has no interest in starting a fake fight with a balding, jowly gerbil whose job has been reduced to wiping Glenn Beck’s whiteboards.
To get my brand out there, I consulted Amy Jo Martin, whose company, Digital Royalty, creates social-media strategies to increase the reach of people like Shaquille O’Neal. Martin wanted to define my brand further and asked me to describe myself. I told her I was lazy, self-involved and sexually frustrated. Martin, who is very good at her job, turned “lazy” into “needing stimulation,” which she then turned into “dynamic” and finally “rock star.” She transformed “self-involved” into “open.” Starting to get it, I suggested that “sexually frustrated” is really just “sexy.” “I think the first two for sure,” she said.
By the end of our conversation, Martin had convinced me that in the age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, putting out an exaggerated version of your personality is necessary. Sure, we want the people in our lives to have a full understanding of us, but controlling our shorthand is a good idea. It’s like our superhero costumes, only not necessarily supergay. If you don’t give your brand some thought, you become the guy whose funeral is all about how much he loved the Mets. “A funeral is the ultimate brand evaluation,” Martin said. Luckily, it’s not hard to find a rabbi who is into snark.
By Joel Stein for Time Magazine
Jay’s Green Garage
May 14th, 2010
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Jay Leno and his solar panels bask in the sun on the roof of the Big Dog Garage.
Everybody knows Jay Leno loves cars. He loves working on them, looking at them and, most of all, driving them. But these days, more than 300 cars and motorcycles in a cluster of four adjoining garages totaling more than 25,000 square feet mean he has a whole lot of CO2 to answer for.
Or so you’d think. When Leno took the initiative to green his Big Dog Garage in 2006, it wasn’t because he’s a hippie tree lover who thinks the glaciers are melting but because he wanted to be self-sustaining. “To me, it’s a matter of living your life more efficiently,” he said, “and if you want to sustain this hobby, you’ve got to come up with more efficient ways to do it.”
Leno said that when he was a kid, he was told that “if you take the oil and you dig a hole and pour it into the ground, it goes back into the earth where it came from.”
Times have changed, and Leno has changed with them, embarking on a significant ongoing effort to green the space where he stores, maintains and renovates his collection.
“The first really big change was about three or four years ago with the solar panels,” he said. “And then we added the wind turbine.” Between the Southern California sunshine and the breezy evenings, the turbine and 270 roof-mounted panels cover almost all of the facility’s power needs, even feeding power back into the grid during hot fall days when the Santa Ana winds pick up. “My electric bills have dropped by three-quarters,” he said.
But it’s not the financial rewards that motivate this car enthusiast, it’s the thrill. “We just started to get into it. It’s like anything else; you become competitive and try to figure out ways to become more and more efficient.” The same gearhead instinct that drives Leno’s car obsession expanded to making his garage more environmentally sound.
For example, alongside early cars such as a 1906 Stanley Steamer and a Baker electric car, Leno is renovating a circa-1900 natural-gas-engine generator that was used to make power in Malta a century ago.
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The green technology in Jay Leno’s garage includes a water-jet cutter.
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At the other end of the spectrum, Leno invested in the latest environment-friendly technologies for running his shop. For instance, aerosol cans are out. In their place is an air-powered device called the MX Factor. “Basically,” Leno said, “you fill it with compressed air and put your cleaners in it and use the same one over and over again, so you’re not throwing away 15 or 20 cans that have propellant in them.”
No more dumping the oil back into the ground for Leno, either. A BioCircle cleaner uses bacteria that literally eats the oil, grease and other hydrocarbons off of dirty engine parts, converting them to water and carbon dioxide. Other cleaning tasks are handled with an ultrasonic cleaner, which uses high-frequency waves to scour the dirt from filthy engine parts.
Even hand washing is done in an environmentally conscious way, using waterless cleaners that don’t wash toxic oils, solvents and other workshop chemicals down the drain and into the water system.
“I think it’s a fascinating time to live,” Leno mused. “The technology is limitless. I remember one of the first fuel-cell vehicles I ever saw. It was a Mercedes SUV-type vehicle towing a huge trailer–that was the fuel cell! And now they’ve managed to put that under the hood of a car.”
Where some see stricter environmental regulations and rising fuel prices as the end of enthusiasts’ love affair with performance cars, Leno is optimistic. “It’s a good time to be a car enthusiast, not a bad time. We’re seeing these incredible breakthroughs in technology. I mean, I have a Corvette that has 505 hp and gets almost 30 mpg on the highway. That was unheard of when I was a kid! When I was a kid, a car with 500 hp got 6 mpg. Maybe.”
Is the man whose friends include prominent politicians across the spectrum concerned about taking a stand on an issue as controversial as global warming? Not at all.
“It’s not a matter of global warming for me; it’s a matter of living your life more efficiently. It doesn’t really matter why. Whatever the reason, the final end product is good. I tell people, “Whether you believe in global warming or don’t believe in global warming, do it to be self-sufficient.’ “
And Leno has one more argument up his sleeve: “If you don’t believe in global warming, do it to screw the oil companies.”
Contributed by: Logan Kugler for AutoWeek.com
7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook
May 13th, 2010
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Using a weak password
Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!
Leaving your full birth date in your profile
It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.
Overlooking useful privacy controls
For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.
Posting your child’s name in a caption
Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.
Mentioning that you’ll be away from home
That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.
Letting search engines find you
To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.
Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised
Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.
Screenshot of Facebook
Provided by: ConsumerReports.org, May 2010