Not only are deadheads bad for business, but they're bad for the environment, and technology is working to wipe deadheads out completely. New services, like Austin-based uShip, are working to match carriers and customers in ways that are good for the environment.

uShip is an auction-based market place for shipping where customers put up their shipments and carriers make bids on them. The service not only makes it easy for customers to ship goods, but get them the best price. Beyond that, uShip makes it easy for carriers to fill all the gaps in their shipments, reducing the number of deadheads and increasing efficiency. In the case of shipping, efficiency is good for the environment.

"The trucking industry has historically been inefficient," said uShip CEO Matt Chasen. "You've have truckers that haven't had great access to loads and customers. A lot of these truckers are running trips anyway and they use uShip to find customers to fill in the gaps."

uShip has run a green shipping program since 2004, which it says has helped to offset more than 210 million miles and 300,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

"It's a part of our mantra," said Chasen. "A key part in creating uShip was to efficiently match excess capacity in the form of empty trucks with customer demand."

At a recent Google summit on wireless sensors, Deborah Estin, director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at UCLA spoke of three simple ways our phones already work the way the future Internet of Things will work. Estin's presentation, Participatory Sensing: An Emerging Driver For The Multidimensional Internet, explains what we'll one day be able to do for not only our own health but for the health of the world we live in.

The first project Estin explained is about how UCLA investigated garbage on campus by getting students to use their phones to take pictures of garbage cans, then geo-tagging and loading images to Flickr. With this system the school learned where it needed more trash and recycling bins, as well as how the flow of garbage changed over the academic year.

IoT for Personal Health

Using a phone to track what you eat is not exciting or futuristic. Yet what if that data was working for you online and it suggested nearby locations for healthy food it knew you liked? This project currently only exists as a way for your phone to regularly ask what you eat and then store the information online in a secure way. But in time your phone will read RFID tags so you can be alerted to stores that feature foods tailored to your dietary needs.

IoT for Environmental Hazards

The third project gathers your daily location data and cross references it with air pollution reports. As air pollution monitoring in the Los Angeles Basin becomes more sophisticated, so too does your awareness of your own health. This system of data gathering is what Estin calls a Personal Environmental Impact Report. This leads to more accurate data to review with your doctor if you're in need of diagnosis or treatment.

These sensors systems that are currently in your phone will soon be everywhere. Now more than ever the need for open-source standards is a necessity. If we're ever to feel comfortable about more and more machines monitoring us, we have to be sure that the machines don't violate our rights. We need as much transparency as possible as to how we share control of all these machines.

Photo from Wikicommons

Crowdsourcing the measurement of environmental data could make it possible to create a real-time map of current ozone levels, for example. Through the Citypulse platform, the Green Watch project wants to make this data available for free. Citypulse was developed by the members of Citu, a group of French university labs, startups and government organizations.

How Do You Convince People to Wear These?

Of course, in order to turn this project into a commercial success, the developers would first have to persuade users to buy these devices for completely altruistic reasons. The prototype is also rather bulky. Also, as wrist watches are slowly being displaced by mobile phones, the developers will have to give users a good reason to wear a watch again. Air quality sensors, after all, don't work very well in trouser pockets.

Disclosure: The author met with the Green Watch team during a lunch that was sponsored by Cap Digital and Invest in France.

It's the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out.

It's very nice to see YouTube leveraging its audience to try to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the degradation of all life on earth. Hopefully there will be a big ad on the front page pointing to the campaign. It's not hard to imagine other very large websites doing something similar. It could make a difference!

Allesina and Mercedes Pascual first wrote about utilizing PageRank in their recently published Googling Food Webs: Can an Eigenvector Measure Species' Importance for Coextinctions?.

Said Allesina, "In PageRank, you're an important website if important websites point to you. We took that idea and reversed it: Species are important if they support important species."

The biologists use PageRank by multiplying the rate of extinction for one species and determining the rate at which others are affected. The animals and plants that link to a large number of connectors are considered keystones. In other words, if you're an integral player in either preparing or being dinner for a large number of species, you are the keystone for an entire ecological network.

Because many species need others to survive, the worst possible case for an extinction is a domino-style co-extinction effect. Allesina and Pascual aim to determine these worst scenario cases and encourage conservationist intervention. For more information read the entire report at PLoS Computational Biology.

Photo Credit: Michael Gäbler

1. Atlas of Our Changing Environment: The United Nations Environment Program uses Google Earth to exhibit time lapse and environmental changes. From the effects of coal exploitation in northeastern Wyoming's Powder River Basin, to controlled burning in Australia's Wyperfeld National Park, to the growth of the aquaculture industry in Ecuador's Guayaquil - the map shows human implications on the environment. One of the great things about this tool is that in addition to negative effects, you can also see how proper urban planning can help preserve large sections of forest.

2. Stopping the Coal Rush Map: The Sierra Club also utilizes Google Earth to make its case for environmental responsibility and clean energy alternatives. The organization has mapped the country's planned coal plants in recognition that the air pollution pumped from these plants is likely to increase public health issues and global warming. The colored pinpoints on the map signify the building status of the coal plant and the details behind the site's permits. In some cases you can read where Sierra Club has lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency to overturn air permits.

3. Earth Knowledge: This site mashes up Google map information with news stories on biodiversity, climate change, geology and water pollution. News sources like Science Daily and Reuters offer stories on global sustainability and alternative energy. Users can also discuss topics with other community members.

4. Home Project Maplet: For this year's World Environment Day, Google launched the Home Project- a full length feature film on climate change. Shot by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the movie is an aerial look at the planet and climate change. In conjunction with the movie, Google released an amazing map applet, complete with geo-tagged Wikipedia, video, web cam and photo layers. Users can also find tagged information on biodiversity, global warming factors, water and poverty.

If it had been available then, I would have used the website GreenReportcard, just launched today by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, in my college hunt.

The site is very usable and includes the option of posting personalized comparisons to social networking sites. The service could certainly be more read-write based but it is a great example of a large organization making effective online use of its database.

Users can line up any number of schools to compare, though with a list of 300 schools tracked you're quite likely to find some gaps. Above are comparisons of the school I wanted to go to during that first Nirvana era (Macalester College, I wanted to study cultural anthropology) and the school I eventually graduated from (the University of Oregon, in political science).

I knew that the University of Oregon had a good reputation for recycling, green building, etc. but hadn't thought about its lack of transparency with its endowment as an ecological issue. A huge portion of the school's money comes from Nike founder Phil Knight, who's allegedly helping fund an Orwellian super-soldier research program that combines the jewel encrusted football facilities, nanotech research and a hyper-corporate urban planning regime. That's the word on the street, not information available from GreenReportCard, unfortunately. Apparently, Macallester College's money from the Readers Digest Foundation is used in a similarly non-transparent way. Who knew?

Hopefully the next generation of college students can find out this kind of information ahead of time using this new website. Don't forget, kids, to listen to Nevermind while perusing it. You don't have to listen to Emo - and you don't have to pick your colleges uninformed.

Green Maven: Green Maven is a search engine designed to specifically search the "green web." They focus on helping you find the best green, conscious, and sustainable web sites. There's also a Green Maven Firefox plugin to make those searches even easier.

Green Maven

Ecocho: Ecocho is a green search engine, which is essentially just a wrapper over Yahoo search. The site gives its users the opportunity to contribute to the purchase of carbon offsets by performing searches. For every 1000 searches, Ecocho grows two trees. They are not a charity, though - 30% of their revenue goes to running costs.

Ecocho

Blackle: Blackle takes everyone's favorite search engine, Google, and turns off the lights. By using a black background, Blacke saves energy since monitors require more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen. How much energy is saved? Blackle references a blog post that claims that a black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours per year.

Blackle

searchgreener: Like Blackle, searchgreener has a black background to use less energy. They also donate all profits to the purchase of carbon offsets.

Searchgreener

Eco-find: Another black-background search engine, Eco-find also uses Google search.

Eco-find

Earthle: Because apparently, we can't have enough darkened engines, Earthle also conserves energy.

Earthle

EcoSeek: The tagline at EcoSeek is "the search engine for all things green," but unlike Green Maven, EcoSeek is a product search focused engine. The site helps educate buyers and connect them to eco-friendly products, manufacturers, and retailers.

EcoSeek

Greensie: Another green search engine is Greensie, whose mission is to "organize and deliver the world's best information about green." Using the bullets below the search box, you can narrow your search to web, images, news, shopping, articles, videos, jobs, audio, or blogs.

Greensie

Greenona: Greenona is yet another green-focused engine that helps you connect with green resources on the web. Their site features many stats, like a large tag cloud of the past 500 searches and the top 100 clicked results.

Greenona

Green Link Central: Another attempt at a green-focused engine is Green Link Central. This one is the Mahalo of green engines, with every link hand-picked by human editors.

Green Link Central

Green Terrior: Green Terroir is a project of Green Consensus, a nonprofit organization that participates in land trusts and offers several services including carbon neutral web hosting, agribusiness consulting, and technological support for social entrepreneurs and fair-trade cooperatives. 100% of the profits of the web site go to land conservation activities and carbon offsets.

Green Terrior

EcoSeeker: It's not the best-looking of the green engines, but EcoSeeker is a one-woman effort, which is impressive. The site, made by Susan Landes of California, is a directory that helps you find green products, services, and info.

EcoSeeker

Friends Green: Friends Green is a simple search engine wrapper, with Yahoo search as the back-end. Proceeds from searches go towards fighting global warming by funding various reforestation projects. The site also tracks the amount of rainforest they've saved at the bottom of the main page via a constantly updating ticker (3,882,253 sq ft as of now).

Friends Green

greenlinking: Greenlinking.com is a search engine wrapper that lets you search using Google alone or by using the results from Yahoo, ninemsn, and Google combined. The site purchases carbon credits via Carbon Planet with the revenue they earn, which averages to an offset of 20 kg of greenhouse gases per user per month.

Greenlinking

ClimateGift: More than just a search engine, ClimateGift is an engine and portal for green content. When you first visit the site, you pick an organization to support before being redirected to the homepage. From then on, your chosen organization receives the money from your ad clicks. The site also functions very well as a personalized homepage, very much like iGoogle, with the ability to add tabs and content.

ClimateGift

Bonus: Google.co.uk users can add a Carbon Footprint tab to their personalized iGoogle homepage thanks to the UK Carbon Footprint Project. (Hey, where's ours?)

The most noticeable difference between the Eco-edition of Flock and the standard edition is the new green theme. Instead of blue, the background and browser buttons are now green, which is a nice change of pace for regular Flock users, who have probably been checking the "Themes" page for a while now to no avail.

Eco-Edition

However, what really makes this new version of Flock green isn't the background - it's the content. In partnership with Discovery Networks, New York Times, Yahoo, TreeHugger, Grist, Ecorazzi and AllTop, the Eco-edition comes pre-loaded with all the best environmental content and features from these varied resources.

The customizable features where you'll find the pre-loaded content includes the Flock Media Streams, where photos and videos from the partner sites will be updated daily, the News Feeds, which come pre-subscribed to 50+ leading environmental sources, and the Favorites, where top environmentally-focused sites are organized for you.

Even if you're not that into environmental news and opinion, you can always just download the new version and remove the pre-loaded content while still enjoying the new green Flock theme.

The Eco-edition will be made available for download from www.flock.com/eco.

Great Idea, More Please!

We love the idea of a pre-customized version of Flock built around a specific topic, and would great to see other themed versions of Flock in the future. (A tech-themed one would be nice!) If you look through all the topics available at Alltop, for example, you'll see there are plenty of ideas for future themed editions - crafts, travel, tech news, moms, sports, photography, music (oh wait, that's Songbird), or design, just to name a few. Even better would be if these customized editions could be loaded and unloaded from within the standard version of Flock somehow.

Would you like a pre-customized version of Flock? Share your thoughts in the comments.

But now, students, journalists, and everyone else can access data straight from the source - the actual statistics published by the UN.

Using UN Data

Underneath the search box on the homepage are a few popular searches, based on what users are searching for the most. You can either click on those or enter in your own keywords to begin.

For example, to see data about a country, you just enter in the country's name and click "Search." The search result will take you to a landing page where some general information about the country is provided, like population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. You can click the link to "view full profile" to get the full details of that country's statistics.

To the left, is a box where you can apply filters to your search by specifying that you want to include or exclude certain information from your search.

Below the country's profile are all the search results for that country. Each result has a "Download" link to download the data, but there is also a handy "Preview" link which will open a small window displaying the data, so you don't have to navigate away from the page you're on to see if that data is what you were looking for. Another link, "Explore," allows you to delve into to related data sources around that topic.

You can do more than search for data on specific countries or regions, though. You can also search for data about global statistics, like greenhouse gas emissions or global solar production statistics (well, that's what I looked up).

What's great about the UN Data site is not just the ability to access this huge database of statistics (currently 55 million+ records), but the well-designed way that such massive amounts of data have been provided to the public. Anyone can use this database - school kids, techies, even mom and dad. This is one site that is definitely worth a look.

Bergman begins by notating that Goodwill already has the only non-profit online auction site at ShopGoodwill.com, a site that provides another avenue to sell the organization's donated items, which fund its charitable works. The site, with 35,000 daily visitors, is a popular online destination for bargain hunters who are looking for alternatives to eBay.

Additionally, Goodwill has just launched, MyGoodwill, located at www.goodwill.org/group/my/home. This site is a new collaboration portal offering e-learning and best practices for Goodwill's employees and members of affiliate organizations worldwide. Using concepts and methodologies similar to social networks, Goodwill allows its MyGoodwill members to collaborate with communities of their peers in order gain access to specific knowledge and resources. The portal was created with open source software, a decision that Goodwill made based on the functionality, capability, and maturity of the open source model, but primarily, the cost savings it provided.

MyGoodwill Login Page

The public web site for Goodwill Industries also recently partnered with SpatialPoint to provide geo-spatial mapping capabilities to help visitors locate the nearest store and donation center. Powered by Google Maps, the store locator is available from locator.goodwill.org.

Internally, Goodwill is focused on "going green." They are looking into consolidation and virtualization technologies for their data center, but they are also focused on their new business unit that is dealing primarily with donated computer equipment. Goodwill receives tens of thousands of donated PCs, only some of which are worthy of reselling. For the rest, Goodwill is taking the computers through a de-manufacturing process, working with partners to make sure that the computers are either e-cycled or that they are broken down into components that can then be resold and reused.

With these latest offerings, specifically the online portal, Goodwill shows itself to be yet another example of how web technologies are finding their way into the enterprise. Instead of sneaking in web apps via the backdoor, Goodwill has chosen to control the type of interactions they want their employees to focus on via a portal whose primary focus is knowledge-sharing.

Bergman definitely sees the value in innovation, commenting, "Last year, Goodwill helped a million people find vocational services and get back into the workforce and technology was a major driver for that."

This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.

The company uses a proprietary array of still-images cameras to take photos in stereo at regular spacial intervals while driving through city streets. The resulting 3D images can be measured with an accuracy that corresponds to measurements of the physical objects and distances they represent.

The company says it covered San Francisco in just three weeks. Each day's data is processed automatically and is available before the next day begins.

The initially self-funded company recently took an investment from CalTech and secured an exclusive liscence to use 3D image processing technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Generating dense, accurate 3D data from wide-angle images is a serious technology challenge but one that the JPL worked on to process data returned by the Mars Rover.

What it means

Just as we here at ReadWriteWeb are excited about the potential offered by a machine-readable, or semantic, web - so too are the possibilities countless when thinking about a data rich, accurate and machine-readable 3D representation of the urban environment. earthmine offers a usable looking web interface but that's just the friendly wrapper around a dataset of far greater consequence.

From urban planning to mobile services to security applications, this kind of data and interface has a lot of potential. If the value of mapping and of GIS are clear, the value of a geospatial 3D dataset about urban environments should be clear as well. Combine all three and you'll be able to assemble some very interesting resources on almost any topic.

It is important to me to say that I don't care for the way the company talks about the technology, as "reality mining" and "indexing reality." To call that tasteless would be an understatement. I'm concerned that such reductionism could have substantial adverse political consequences. Maybe I'm just old fashioned to believe that there's far more that's important in "reality" than the things that can be digitized - and that much of it ought not be mined. I should probably stop, though, before a corporate exit puts me in thumbscrews listening to a well-fed Dr. Evil laugh. This technology itself could be put to use for good or ill, I'm sure.

Either way, this is fascinating stuff and worth some thought no matter how you relate to it. In addition to the very well produced company-produced video below this interview with the young earthmine CEO and this one of his time on stage at the DEMO Fall conference is worth a watch.

For every $1000 you spend with the Brighter Planet credit card, the company purchases 1 ton of CO2 offsets. Through the end of 2008, Bank of America will match this by 50%. BrighterPlant is a for-profit corporation, but given the state of the environment I'm not going to quibble with anyone for starting a private company aiming to improve things.

The company was started as a project in an environmental economics course at Middlebury College in 2005 and launched in the US last month.

How Data is Collected

The most interesting part of the Brighter Planet service is its method of tracking your personal ecological impact. The website doesn't ask users to fill out a lengthy questionnaire to gather information for processing through any of several available carbon footprint calculators. It also doesn't track individual purchases and their respective impact.

Instead, the company starts with an average and works backwards. "We take the total US carbon inventory as determined by the EPA and divide that by the population," co-founder and Director of R&D Andy Rossmeissl told me. "Inside of that average we've identified how it breaks down into average flying, average driving, etc. so when people decide to tell us about themselves, we're refining our previous average assumptions by using real data."

Users can provide as little or as much information about their activities as they like. Brighter Planet uses postal codes cross referenced with a local power system database to determine the percentage of a person's power that's likely produced through various means.

When you tell Brighter Planet what kind of car you drive the service imports data from the EPA's fuel efficiency tables to determine that car's carbon output. The site offers steps you can take to further reduce your impact. Incorporating monthly utility bills is next on the list of additions to the data set.

Next Comes the Social

Brighter Planet says the next step in implementing group functionality. While privacy is a concern when dealing with financial data, the company believes this is an obstacle it can overcome.

Watching your group, or multiple groups you belong to, work to decrease their collective carbon footprint could be another powerful means of motivation.

I would really like to see things like imported Attention Data be used to personalize carbon reduction tips. Working with personal data like this begs the question about how a company like Brighter Planet can leverage some data portability to improve its services.

I like what Brighter Planet is up to. I think their approach to data, motivation and aggregate personal change is very interesting.

Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnership like this looks like.

MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content.

• There's no mention of Green on the MSN front page. There's a whole lot of links to a whole lot of content projects there - but nothing pointing the bulk of MSN traffic to the option of learning about this oh-so-important initiative. The Green page itself is all about links to other MSN content - it's enough to make you think that Green is nothing more than a niche marketing tactic to drive marginal eco-engaged yuppies to the entertainment and financial news sections of MSN. Of course this is no surprise, but then it's no surprise that the whole project is a joke, either, is it?
• Less than 25% of the content on MSN Green is from independent environmental specialists. There is no shortage of content available, but these celebrated partnerships are really just window dressing while MSN selects a handful of old, politically safe content from partners that publish hundreds of new articles every day. Ask anyone who's been acquired in a content deal and they'll tell you it's an awful struggle to get any of the formerly grass-roots content featured meaningfully on a big media portal - even if that portal paid a whole lot of money for the content. I imagine this distribution deal is one the independent partners will just try not to let themselves think about too often, until they need to pull it out for bragging rights or to secure similar deals.
• The content hasn't changed since the site launched three days ago! The content could never change and Chevy would likely keep renewing that huge ad on the site. Mission accomplished. What a joke. It's a good thing this is the only MSN site I've been able to find that doesn't offer an RSS feed - because nothing would likely ever come through it.
• The videos section of the site is almost entirely populated by licensed VideoJug content. VideoJug is a great site for evergreen tutorials, but there's a world full of timely environmental news video available, even from existing partners. Perhaps this way no one will notice when the the video section doesn't change for 6 months or a year, though.

Yahoo! at least pledged to go carbon neutral when launching their environmental portal back in May (see our review). It was very nice of them to take time out of their busy schedule turning reporters over to the Chinese government for decades of imprisonment in order to launch a green portal and go carbon neutral.

Moral of the story? At least some of these deals, but MSN Green at the very least, are worthy of nothing but disdain. If ecological crisis were no big deal then this wouldn't be either. As it is, this kind of big media eco-cynicism is strikingly offensive.

BadBuster is an online search engine of companies and products that displays information to consumers about whether those companies are environmentally friendly. BadBuster aggregates information on companies from a good number of publicly available databases of environmental ratings, including the Carbon Disclosure Project, Calvert Online, Knowmore.org, and ClimateCounts (who we wrote about in July). BadBuster then condenses the numbers from those sources into a single score for each company.

BadBuster has also released a browser plugin that underlines any company name it finds on the web and pops up a condensed report on that company on mouseover. I mentioned that BadBuster also rates products, and as you can see in the screenshot below, the word "Ford Focus" is also underlined. However, to be precise, the site doesn't actually rate individual products, but rather associates each product with the company that makes it and shows that company's report. That the color of the underline correlates to the company's overall score is a nice touch -- green is good, yellow is not so good, and red is bad.

Unfortunately, the plugin only works for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP or Vista. BadBuster plans a Firefox version by the end of the year and other browsers in the beginning of 2008. No word on if other operating systems will get any love.

The site does have some issues. For example, if you search for "Ford" or "Google" and press enter, you won't find a listing. Instead, what you need to do is wait for the drop down selection box to appear as you type and choose the company you're looking for. It's a small issue, but they shouldn't call it a search if it doesn't behave the way we expect a search box to behave. Another issue is that the browser plugin doesn't understand context -- it just underlines any keyword it finds. For example, it underlined the word "carefree" in a document I was reading because Carefree is a brand of gum it told me is made by Johnson & Johnson (though actually, I think Hersey Foods makes it). This is something that BadBuster is aware of and says it will work on over time.