Dear Google Org, Amazon and Linden Labs People:

I submit this idea for your consideration:

It has been posted to the Internet via Google docs, its URL is:

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcjvvpr5_2frhqm6

ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World:

The idea for ZON dollars has its roots in three things I read as the final moments of 2006 played out:

1. Allision H Fine's wonderful new book: "Momentum-igniting social change in the connected age.", which can be purchased at Amazon. 2. Amazon's new project that uses 37signals Ruby on Rails to build a new application called Unspun , which is based on an application Amazon has called the mechanical Turk. 3.An article called: "What is Second Life?" Of course, the reference to a virtual currency comes directly from Second Life's "The Linden dollar".

I guess the challenge delivered by Allision Fine in her book: "Momentum" is how do we harness technology and the economy to do good?

ZON dollars is my attempt at doing just that through the creation of a virtual currency that at its core involves both voluteerism and doing good throughout the world.

ZON dollars can only be earned by:

1. individuals or corporations donating to recognized charities(those that can issues tax receipts) for conversion into ZON dollars, for the sole purpose of motivating people to do good. through the use of those ZON dollars. 2. doing virtual work through participating companies like Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service, a portion, determined by the worker goes to charities in the form of ZON dollars, while the remainder goes to the virtual worker, to be used as they see fit. 3. corporations who are so confident of the worth of their product that they openly invite comparision by consumers, donate ZON dollars to encourge concensus rankings of their product using Amazon's new Unspun service. People are encouraged to vote on the best products i in those categories, and the ZON dollars are distributed to the charity that the sponsoring corporation names when they open the community concensus on their product category.

ZON dollars can be converted to:

1. real currency for use to purchase goods at Amazon.com or via Google's new ecommerce system. 2. they can be converted to Linden dollars for use in Second Life.

So I guess those are my inititial thoughts related to the ZON dollar concept, I will now publish this, and also email the concept to the above named entities that could actually implement the concept, a. Google.org, Amazon's Unspun & Second Life.

As Allision Fine's book title says, I wonder if this concept will:

'ignite social change in the connected age"

Sincerely

Gregers Ritzer-January 1, 2007
4:36:47 PM    

This week at Treehugger: A Weapon of Mosquito Destruction: The Mosquito Magnet. A Hand-Powered Night Vision Monocular that allows you to see in the dark without batteries. Hewlett Packard decides that having toxic flame retardant on the outside of its laptop casings might not be such a good idea. Also, from the Crazy But Cool Department, a man builds a private island out of empty soda cans (can this be called a Do-It-Yourself island?), and finally, we have a look at how Google and PowerEscape fight runaway energy consumption.

The person who invented this cross between a barbecue and a motorboat really hates mosquitoes! Lucky for us, he or she also had a dislike for insecticide and these glowing traps that vaporize insect dust in the air we breathe. The way this "biting insect trap" works is by emitting a fake "breath" of CO2 with a scent that is attractive to the little vampires (mosquitoes locate their victims primarily with exhaled carbon dioxide). The device then sucks in the bugs in a radius of up to 1.25 acres (around 5,000 square meters) and dehydrates them (and then turns them into MREs?).

This device is a night vision scope, and quite fortuitously, it doesn't require any batteries. Instead, it's has a lever-activated power supply, so you can generate your own power ad hoc, and thereby see in the night, without fear of energy failure (that is, unless a sudden lassitude engulfs you).

Hewlett Packard has announced that it will remove a bromated flame retardant (BFR) from the outer case parts of all new products released after December of 2006. BFRs have been associated with endocrine disruption and impairment of mental skills, and have been found in women’s breast milk. Bromated flame retardants in electronics can also make e-waste more hazardous. For something that is supposed to make the product safer, it sure seems dangerous.

We couldn't make this stuff up: this man, Reishee Sowa of Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, apparently grew tired of trying to live self-sufficiently on dry land, and did what any of us would have done. He built his own island out of used pop bottles. 250,000 of them, plus some construction leftovers and bags of leaves, make up "his island," though he's quick to point out that it's technically not an island by traditional standards. "You see not even the president is allowed his own island in Mexico," he says, "but technically I don’t have an island, I have an eco space-creating ship."

Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle told us in a TG Daily article a little about Google's energy efficiency problems and how it tries to solve them, and this post is about PowerEscape Insight, a way to optimize software so that the hardware it runs on requires less power. It can of course be applied to computers, but also certainly to all kinds of electronic that might run software that makes chips run hotter than they should.

Treehugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.

5:12:32 PM    

In winding my way through email from the past few weeks, I find that several people sent URLs to help Linda in her quest to find blogs devoted to the topic of water and the environment. Amazingly, out of the eight emails I received, there was only one duplicate URL. Major score to the blogosphere, and muchos gracias to everyone that responded!

For the Google cache record, here are the links folks sent in:
http://www.wilsdomain.com/blogs/environmental-blogs.html
http://earth-info-net.blogspot.com/
http://www.badlani.com/blog/weblog.php
http://www.oceanjournal.org/
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/waterlib.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101170/categories/coloradowater/
http://northwestwatch.org/
http://cascadiascorecard.typepad.com/blog/
http://www.eco-portal.com/blog/
http://www.waterconserve.info (particularly http://www.waterconserve.info/blog/)
http://www.polizeros.com/categories/thePoliticsOfWater/
http://www.rtumble.com/
http://www.keepersofthewaters.org/

7:00:40 PM    

Google Local. Better than the yellow pages [Cool Tools]

like the man says, my wife and I like East Indian food, typed in that put in our city, Edmonton, Alberta and bingo bango a map with a list of East Indian food restraunts.

I will never let my fingers do the walknig again!!!!YAHOO FOR GOOGLE LOCAL!!!

8:17:57 PM    

nixMoneyMachine-sticking it to the status quo!

this new category, came about as a direct result of my disgust with a recent headline about Microsoft releasing a product which has been called an iPod Killer! Fuck it, I have had with this kind of BS, where monopolies that don't have an innovative fiber in their being, watch the market and wade in after an innovator like Apple creates it out of nothing, and then ends up losing it, just because of the monoolie's sheer size and money reserves!

Microsoft did this against the Mac, then against Netscape! Do we as consumers have to keep supporting greedy monopolies!

I remember when Mosaic first came out and for me the Internet was a place where the little guy could innovate and create a decent living, and in some cases create fortunes based upon creativity, hard work and luck! The iPod Killer headline is so cynical, and it assumes that the only thing the consumer cares about is money, and that the only thing the producer concerns themselves with is money too!

Well how bout this, why don't we come up with some truly innovative business models that put the power in the hands of the content producer, and in the process create cheaper content, get more people producing digital content, and get more developing nations into the digital economy as well!

Accoring to Robert Young found of Red Hat:

"You can't compete with a monopoly by playing the game by the monopolist's rules."

Well fuck the old models, the old rules and the old approach to operating systems, software and digital content!

I have just had it with this bullshit, and this is what nixMoneyMachine is about, proposing new economic models to stick it to the status quo!

Stay tuned!

11:16:36 AM    

An interesting theory that facial expressions affect blood-flow to the brain and are not just results of emotions. The assertion is that these blood-flows affect our emotions. So SMILE! :-)

Zajonc, R. B., Emotion and Facial Efference: A Theory Reclaimed, Scince, 1985, 288, 15-2

He also asserted that elation follows the smile, not the opposite. The blood flow changes caused by contracting the facial muscles in the smile alter cerebral blood flow and cause an emotional change. He extends this reasoning to account for all kinds of other bizarre facial habits associated with emotions -- wrinkled forheads, rubbing one's eyes, hand on forehead, pulling earlobes, licking lips, etc.

Via Jonas

10:35:22 AM    

I gotta say that this title, about a Microsoft iPod Killer for me is depressing, in that wherever there is a market created by a true innovator like Apple, that Microsoft is able to through its sheer size and market dominance, steal that market away from the ture innovator!

Think  Mac vs Windows, think Internet browser, Mosaic then Netscape.

The only ray of hope I can see on the horizon is Open Source Business Models, that create new opportunities for innovators!

Microsoft's iPod-Killer: Portable Media Center?. securitas writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop reports on what's billed as an iPod-killer: the Microsoft Portable Media Center line of digital ... [Slashdot]

10:30:43 AM    

Thank heavens I can finally announce it! As many of you know, I've been trying to get a group purchase of Audible content for my libraries for more than two years, and I am thrilled to finally be able to say it has happened! It's been a difficult road to get it off the ground, but we leap-frogged many of the normal startup problems we would have faced thanks to the fine folks at the NOLA Regional Library System in Ohio.

NOLA has been running the original Audible group purchase since October, 2001, at ListenOhio, and I've been tracking their project for some time. Last year, NOLA offered to let Illinois libraries join their program, and I jumped at the chance before they even finished the first sentence. It's taken six months to get to a point where we could go live, but the day has finally arrived and you can visit the ListenIllinois web site to see what I mean.

We currently have 12 Illinois libraries in ListenIllinois, 11 publics and one high school. Right now Wheaton Public Library is the only library circulating titles/players to patrons, but we expect the others to go live this month. To give them full credit for their foresight, the 12 are:

• Chicago Ridge Public Library
• Coal City Public Library District
• Downers Grove Public Library
• Downers Grove South High School
• Homer Township Public Library District (my home library, yay!)
• Joliet Public Library
• Lemont Public Library District
• Northlake Public Library District
• Oswego Public Library
• St. Charles Public Library District
• Thomas Ford Memorial Library (Aaron's library!)
• Wheaton Public Library

Thanks to NOLA, we start with a catalog of 1800 titles, and we collectively purchase pretty much every title that Audible releases each month. Right now, each library is circulating Audible Otis players and patrons use the ListenIllinois web site to browse and choose titles. Of course, the overall goal is let patrons download files directly from online catalogs onto their own players, but for us this is the first step in that direction. In fact, I hope that one of Illinois' contribution to the project will be MARC records for everyone's catalogs.

I'm pretty sure that this collaborative group purchase across two states means we're the largest library buyer of Audible content, and personally I hope we can use that clout to push publishers to release more material in this digital format. Once the dust settles a little, I plan to pursue circulating titles to patron devices and I want to contact publishers directly to prove to them this can work. The time for being scared is over, and we need to move forward now.

I'll provide periodic updates for ListenIllinois, especially once we start getting some concrete numbers. The initial opportunity to join was open to only three Illinois Library Systems - Suburban (me!), DuPage, and Heritage Trail. My own kudos to DLS and HTLS for their willingness to take this to their members! However, in a few months, once we have all of the kinks worked out, we'll open it up statewide to any Illinois library that wants to join. I can't provide details here, but trust me... it's an incredible deal. If you're interested in joining when we get to that point, feel free to email or IM (cybrarygal on AIM) me.

10:24:12 AM