Congratulations to the MySociety team for their work and multiple-recognition in the Guardian’s Top 100 Most Useful websites. It’s incredible what such a small, dedicated team can do.

Theyworkforyou

Publicwhip

HearfromyourMP

and, of course, Pledgebank

Their xmas bash was lovely too.

I’m sure many in government must also be thinking “those pesky kids”…

Not to be confused with 1980s UK TV show “The Tube“, or the London Underground, we just launched http://www.global-cool.com/cooltube

With lots more content to come.

Quite heavy reading, but very, very good; “The Global Carbon Cycle” (Amazon link) has a great selection of research papers covering most areas from anthropogenic CO2 cycles in the Oceans to regional Carbon-flow based on global trade (e.g. did you know 174 billion tons of paper were Exported globally in Y2000? – that’s a lot of Carbon being moved about, never mind the fuel). Measuring Carbon flow in terms of physical trade is quite fascinating and a very different visualisation than ‘pollution’. I’m thinking of ways to capture that into some tangible measure of personal CO2e.

One of the many wake-up stats is that the measurements are made in PgC. That’s Petagrams of Carbon. A Petagramme is 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms. And then they talk about PgC per year…

The total world energy consumption is about 400EJ (that’s Exajoules per annum, Exa is a 1 with 18 zeroes after it).

It all really helps drive home the idea that relocalisation of all forms of production is absolutely mandatory. Not just a sustainable power-station on every street corner, or good insulation of your property, but all other forms of human consumption have to be legislated into local re-existence.

So, how to re-seed what we used to do… and fast?

Getting there?

http://www.relocalize.net/guide

http://climate.oneworldblogs.net/

So, we just launched the next iteration of Global Cool – a combination of a more funky redesign, the launch of donation system, and most importantly, the launch of the Global Cool Tonne (”A Tonne of Cool”)…

Thanks to Andy, Naresh, Dave, Ralph, Matt, Ryan, Jenny, Anna, Adrian, Chris, Joel, Dig, Marcus and Paul.

Donations will be used to support United Nations-approved projects such as renewable energy projects like building and running wind farms, and energy efficient initiatives such as buying power-saving light bulbs for third world hospitals.

Nothing is perfect, but I believe the UN endorsed schemes amongst the best and are geared to benefit those most affected by climate change…

As far as I know, we’ve managed to create one of the best frameworks out there. Each UN project has a barcode, and gets audited so, one of the things we can do is bring greater visibility to those projects (not all of them work, and need public scrutiny). Rather than being buried on the UN site, we can help bring broad public eyes to projects that may help apply the right kind of social/media pressure to monitor the evolution of this very important sector.

We’re watching. We’ll help other people with the watching.

We’re also retiring. I don’t mean shy, or due to fabulous wealth. One objective is to retire carbon from the markets. This potentially has a more impact than investing in “future projects”. Taking carbon off the existing markets reduces, and may even stop, companies from just buying their way out of the problem – the markets are currently capped. The sooner there is less for them to buy their way out with Carbon credits, the sooner they have to pollute less.

Now all we need is millions of people to join in with all the initiatives out there and we might just make a difference.

And now? Onto v0.3…

Following my presentation at Eurofoo on 19th Sept 2006, things have been moving along in “interesting ways”. It’s always frustrating not having enough time and wading through a lot of politics/copyright/etc, but we’re getting very close to making our first proper announcements (watch this space).

There’s going to be a huge amount of activity over the coming months and I’ll be updating this blog more frequently in a more open way, once a couple more bits of jigsaw are in place – Lincon’s “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” quote springs to mind, although in this case we’re not chopping the trees down.

One of the interesting areas I’ve been catapulted into has been in the area of “donations”, and how they should be used. Given that Man Group are one of the funders of Global Cool, and the GC board include Dr Steve Howard of the Climate Group; Dr Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management; James Cameron, Chairman of Climate Change Capital; it’s been amazing to work with some of the most knowledgable people in the field.

I was honoured, therefore, to be nominated Chairman of the Executive Committee to work out how donations should be used. This has involved a massive amount of learning on my part to really try and understand how the (controversial) Carbon Markets work, what goes well, what goes wrong, what the ‘least bad’ options are… and what messages should be sent out to the investment communities if they are looking to invest $trillions into renewable energies over the next decade.

The d::gen team have also been working hard on the “Carbon Calculator” project that I spoke of at Eurofoo and we’ll be making announcements about that over the next few weeks. Remember, we will release any useful software at least under a General Public License (ie. free) and any content under a Creative Commons “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike” license (ie. free for any non-commercial use).

In particular I’ll also be getting back to all the great open-source folks & enthusiastic people who’ve emailed me offering to help – I’ve not had time to reply to yet, apologies to all, and we do need you!

Please do get in touch (gavin [at] dgen [dot] net) if you want to get involved.

Having watched this unfold since the beginning I’ve been trying to not post anything until YouTube announced who the buyer was.

Now we know it’s Google, and the amount (£883m).

I have to say I’m surprised (like some thougthful others), depressed by the inevitability of a company being shaped by its message to the markets (”oops we missed MySpace”) than solid strategy, unhappy about the sheer waste of money on vapour, confused by the need to buy something that is popular because it “ignored the copyright issues” and, franky, isn’t that hard to beat/dilute (over any reasonable timeframe), annoyed by the fairly explicit exploitation of individuals and creatives (given the size of the deal and it being based on UGC), bored of the repetitive short-sighted nature of the Dotcon 2.0 “boom” and amazed that people still think that this approach is a good one. I thought we’d moved on (but then I keep forgetting about human nature).

The whole idea of “buying customers” in this age is nuts. We’re at a point where there are no customers, they’re their own customers and shift like sand on a whim.

There’s not much point in deconstructing this further, but just think. If you were amongst the most important “glue” in the Internet Communications age, and had $1bn to spend on something, what would you do to make a difference to the world?

Even if a generic video file sharing site is a good long-term investment, YouTube cost just $13.5m to “make”. For $1,600m you could set up 120 competitors, each in a different country, and stop being so Team America.

Being led by the capital markets is fatal in our emerging world. “Do no evil” is simply not good enough any more.

You. Tube.

Roll on Web 3.0.

those chaps at MySociety have just gone and done it again…

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

brilliant stuff.

Amazing turnaround from my old employer (I was part of the Virgin Net startup team) ….

Today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5368194.stm

Last year (almost to the day):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4255156.stm

This is the scale of change to expect over the coming months and years. The world is changing, but we still have lots to do.

I’ll explain more soon, but just wanted to capture the phrase I’m now using to describe what I think we are building.

wow. we did it. we built and launched it on time. to the minute, as they walked off stage…

It finally (soft/beta) launched with a couple of “people of fame” (Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth). After years of planning, we ended up getting the funding “weeks” ago and built everything online in 4 weeks from scratch.

http://www.global-cool.com/

So, the 20 hour days will now cease and my time will now be occupied with marginally less (or more) busy days dealing with the ongoing development of the project.

A huge thanks to everyone on the web development team, who have proved (again) that we can actually achieve impossible tasks.

Special thank you to;

Diggory, Chris, Joel, Francis, Anna, Andy, Andrew, Peter, Enrico, AdrianP, Phil, LeeA, Joanna, Gage, LeeM, Rakesh, Matt, Dan, PaulH, PaulM, David, Richard, John, Athol, Steve, Ashley, Marc, Ben, Tom, Chris, Tara, Laura, Fahaad, AdrianH, Matt, MySociety.org (Pledgebank.com), VTR, Jerelang, Makeni, Counting Thoughts.

I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve been able to implement Creative Commons and GPL licensing as a core part of the project, integrate with Pledgebank (which is superb!)

I’ve got the responsibility of being “head of internet” which seems to translate into more and more every time, so if you have any ideas about what you think we should add, tell me.

I want to build this into The Place where you manage your carbon lifestyle and make a difference to the world.

I’ll write up some more about *how the hell we did that* soon … but first, sleep….

Oh, but did I mention we launched in English and Japanese?