Surface Computing – Not Just For Geeks

Even if you have never heard of surface computing, you will soon start to see it everywhere. Initially in retial stores and businesses, they’ll soon come to the home. The following video explains what this is, but if you’ve seen the movie Minority Report then you may be familiar with it. there are more videos available on the Microsoft Surface website. I wonder what the energy consumption is like…..

[Via TechCrunch]

Smoking Ban May Increase Global Warming

Whilst personally I can’t wait until the smoking ban comes into force in England (July 1st 2007), it may have a series of unintended consequence according to this BBC article.

As well as potentially causing people to take up smoking (all their friends are outside), increasing passive smoking in children (due to more smoking in the home), and increasing chef’s wages (as pubs turn to food to keep customers), the ban may also have an impact on gloabl warming.

A lot of money is being spent by pub chains on outdoor smoking areas. With the wonderful British climate being as it is, this means for at least half the year it is cold and wet, so the installation of gas powered patio heaters is essential to some. However, according to Friends of the Earth using a gas-fired heater for just one hour can waste enough energy to make 400 cups of tea.

With multiple heaters and thousands of pubs, that’s a lot of “wasted” energy!

[Via: BBC]

Cotton Versus Polyester

Cotton uses about 23% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides, according to the Sustainable Cotton Project and Pesticide Action Network North America. On average 200kg of nitrogen is added to the land for every tonne of cotton picked. 33% of this is lost into the atmosphere, though 98% of this is harmless, the remaining 2% is nitrogen dioxide which is 300 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Meanwhile, polyester is created from petrochemicals and requires twice as much energy to produce as cotton does to grow. However the total cost for producing a cotton shirt and a polyester shirt is about the same, at 3.25CU (a Carbon Unit (CU) equals 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere).

So is cotton or polyester best?

Of course, it depends! The difference between the two is more apparent over the life of the garment. Polyester can be washed at a lower temperature (40 degrees Celcius as opposed to 60), dries more quickly and usually doesn’t need to be ironed. Therefore it contributes approximately around half of the CU a cotton garment does. You could of course wash your cotton items at a lower temperature, hang them to dry and not iron them, then there is no real difference.

[Via: BBC Focus Magazine]

Calling All Bloggers – Top 10 Blogging Tips

For those of you who have yet to hear, blog guru and friend of Life Goggles, Yaro Starak has released his Blog Mastermind class. For a behind the scenes preview of what his class entails and what resources are available, watch the video.

You can also download his FREE Blog Profits Blueprint eBook, it’s worth a read to see what you’ll be getting.

The links are affliate ones, i.e. we get paid if you decide to sign up. However many blogging courses do that, but this is the only one (besides Rich Schefren’s occasional courses) that we recommend. Why? Because it’s great, and I’ve known Yaro for a while now and the guy knows what he is talking about. The video is proof of that.

The early bird special, for $47 per month (no minimum contract I think) ends tomorrow (Thursday 27th June), so get in now if you think you need some help to make some money blogging. Frankly, who doesn’t?!

As a sneak preview, here are Yaro’s top ten blogging tips:

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

Visit Blog Mastermind for more!

Green Gas And Free Energy Saving Lightbulbs

British Gas is the latest company to jump on the green bandwagon as it were. In July the company will be taking over parks in London and holding “a fun summer fete with a modern twist” whatever that is. Fete for the Future will be all about being green and include traditional fete games, a British Gas Sustainability Station (woooo), organic food stalls and live music.

Go to their Make It Green Now website to find out more , get a free green ’survival pack’, which includes energy saving lightbulbs, and try and win VIP tickets to a fete. You have to live in London though.

Whether gas can actually be green is another question and soon we’ll be doing a comparision of which are the greenest energy companies.

Google Launches RechargeIT.org

Google has launched support for a new project – cars that plug into an electric grid powered by solar energy. “Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (“plug-in hybrids”) can achieve 70 -100 miles per gallon, quadrupling the fuel economy of the average car on the road today (~20 mpg).”

Watch the video below for more interesting details, and check out the RechargeIT.org website.

Would You Drink Green Beer?

Whilst your brain may explode from their incredibly green website (yes, even greener than this one), Green Drinks International are a group of people who work in the environmental field that meet up for a beer at informal sessions known as Green Drinks.

Currently active in 244 cities worldwide, according to their website “These events are very simple and unstructured, but many people have found employment, made friends, developed new ideas, done deals and had moments of serendipity. It’s a force for the good and we’d like to help it spread to other cities. Contact your local node to get the latest info about coming along.”

There are plenty of press articles (“Stories”) to read, and a guide to the next meeting in your area. Why not take a look at Green Drinks International?

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