The First Time You Were Surprised By Reality

Around puberty you begin to think about love.  Not the love for your mother or bone fetching friend Rusty.  You think about being in love.  Meeting that special someone to share your life with.  Walks in the park, smiles across a crowed room, tingles in the stomach, kissing as you suck a single strand of spaghetti.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being in love.

Also around puberty you become inundated by the mass media machine.  Movies, music, books, and paintings.  You read books about eternal love, listen to songs about true love, watch movies that end with  ‘and they lived happily every after’,  your favorite picture is of a couple feeding each other grapes under a large oak tree.  The concept of love, how beautiful it is, how perfect it is, how eternal it is, forms in your young mind.

You cannot wait to be in love.  Everything will be perfect.

And then it happens.  You find somebody.  It is exciting – just like your favorite song said it would be.  Always smiling and skipping – everything just like in the movies.

Unfortunately you do not live in Disneyland – things do not end happily ever after.  Reality suddenly  arrives with a kick in the crotch.  Just knocks down the door and storms in, no knock, no ‘can I come in?’.  Love turns out nothing like you though it would be; like they told you it would be.  Instead of butterflies and rainbows there are slaps and flying dishes.  There is jealousy, pain, doubt and sometimes lawyers.  Cupid’s arrow hits the pulmonary artery and causes internal bleeding. 

Fortunately you are older now.  Now you know that mass media simply doles out what people want to hear.  Songs about love eternal sell.  Movies that end with happily ever after sell.  Paintings of couples embracing in the sunset sell.  Perfect love is not real but it sells.

Now you know better.  Your expectations about love are more realistic.  Hearing a song about love eternal causes the eyes to roll instead of the heart to swell.  Teens walk out of the movie theater with tears in their eyes, you are holding your mouth trying not to laugh.

Surprised By Reality Again

One day browsing the internet you come across a website that catches your attention.  A big flashy header, ‘Start your own blog today!’, it is easy, make lots of money, be famous.  You start getting excited.  This is exactly what you have been looking for.  To write and be famous.  To work from home and make lots of money.  To sit on the beach with your laptop and a martini.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being a blogger.

The more you look into it the better it gets.  There are so many successful blogs out there – everybody is doing it.  And the best part is that it is so easy.  All you need to do is write a couple paragraphs everyday.  Visitors will adore your writing, they will tell their friends, your blog will have thousands of visitors in a matter of months.  No more nine to five at the office, goodbye idiot boss, time to get off your knees begging for a bonus.  Everything will be great – you will be a rich blogger.

Like a giddy little school girl on the first day of class, you start blogging.

Six month later you are a bitter old man feeding pigions in the park, cursing the cruel world with an occasional shake of the fist.  Without asking to come in, reality barged through the door again.  Writing everyday is not as easy as you expected.  You only have 50 visitors a day.  Instead of thousands of dollars you have hundreds of pennies.  Most of your time is spent deleting spam.  You dread the boring promotional tasks that need to be done everyday: commenting on blogs, writing articles, adding links to directories.  Being a blogger is nothing like you thought it would be.  It is hard work with little reward.

You were fooled by mass media again.  Stories of people making thousands of dollars a month.  Websites claiming that you can have a successful blog by working only a few hours a week.  Blogs claiming that all you need to do is buy their ebook and in no time you will be making a living from home.  They make these claims because they sell.

Now you know better.  Again.

Real Love, Real Blogger

Real love requires patience, persistence and hard work – so does being a successful blogger.

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality

Fossil fuels are bad.  By burning them CO₂ is released into the air.  People get sick, the earth heats up, and nature is thrown into a tailspin.  Do not use fossil fuels – use renewable energy sources like wind power.

Wind power is bad.  Birds fly into the rotating blades and get chopped up into small nuggets.  The swooshing sound of the blades creates noise pollution.  Due to the low air pressure around the wind turbines bats die – it is believed that the sudden pressure change around the turbine causes their lungs to collapse.

The environmentalism movement is full of such contradictions.  It seams that everything humans do has a negative effect on the environment.  If humans are doing it then it is bad – not natural.  And regardless of what solution you try to find there will always be a group of people who do a study showing how harmful  it is to the environment.

The problem is that environmentalists do not have a united front.  Thousands of  individual groups each fighting for their own chunk of the environment to save.  One group wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels and another wants to save the bats.  There is only one solution to satisfy every environmental group’s wishes – move the entire human race to the moon.

Although environmentalists are a threat to the existence of humans on this planet, there is a more pressing matter which directly concerns bloggers.  So far the environmentalists have not turned their gaze towards blogs, but soon they will aim their punitive eye towards us.

Blogs Are Bad For the Environment

Factories are an easy target for environmentalists.  Dark gray clouds of smoke hover around them revealing their evil.  The sun is blocked, trees covered in soot, squirrels coughing.  It is easy for environmentalists to rally up the public and force the factory to shut down or move.  All they need to do is point to the smoke stack.

Bloggers do not create smoke.  There are no smoke stacks to point at.  No dead birds, no three eyed fish and no confused wales.  But environmentalists are very determined – they will not give up so easy.  With will there is always a way.  Let’s give them the credit they deserve – they are awesome at discovering ways to show how humans are destroying the earth.

Here is how they are going to do it: Blogs are created on computers.  Blogs are read by people on computers.  Computers use electricity,  electricity that was generated by CO₂ emitting fossil fuel generators and bird killing wind turbines.

Environmentalists will look at the blogosphere and ask: how much electricity is being consumed creating and reading blogs?  Every blogger spends countless hours on the computer writing posts and promoting.  The readers of the blogs collectively spend more hours on their computers reading the blogs.  Environmentalists will add up all the electricity consumed by the blogosphere.  Then they will do some calculations and figure out how much environmental destruction is caused by generating the  electricity.  When this happens, we as bloggers are screwed.  The cross hairs of their big environment saving bazooka will be pointed right at our heads.

Of course, they will not try to shut the entire blogosphere down all at once.  They will start by picking off the easy targets  – the millions of low traffic blogs.  Blogs with a small following.  Blogs that nobody cares about.  Blogs that if they suddenly disappear nobody would notice.  They will argue that electricity is being wasted on these little blogs: are they necessary, do  these little blogs add enough value to justify the damage they cause the environment?

The problem is that the environmentalists would be right.  A lot of electricity is consumed on blogs that end up going nowhere – blogs that have their run for a couple months and die.  Earth heating up and birds dying for nothing.

How Much Electricity Does the Low Traffic Blogosphere Consume?

Although the environmentalists have not attacked the blogosphere yet, lets see what they have in their arsenal before they arrive.  Specifically lets focus on their first targets – the low traffic blogs.  Blogs that have a small amount of visitors and therefore do not contribute to the greater good – are not worth the electricity being consumed by them.  Individually these blogs consume a small amount of electricity, but taken as a group they consume a lot.

According to technorati.com in March 2006 there were 15.5 million active blogs (blogs that have been updated in the past 90 days).  Also according to technorati.com 49% of blogs have less then 1000 unique visitors a month.  This means that in March 2006 there were 7.5 million active low traffic blogs.  Blogs that the environmentalist will target first because they do nothing more then waste electricity and pollute the environment.

Here are the parameters we are going to use to get estimate of the amount of electricity consumed and CO₂ emission created by blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:

• Number of active blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month: 7.5 million
• Average visitors a month: 500
• Hours a month spent updating the blogs: 20
• Average time visitor spends reading the blogs: 2 minutes

Unfortunately I could not find reliable statistics for the average amount of time bloggers spend on their blogs.  Nor could I find the average time visitors spend reading blogs.  Fortunately, this blog is a blog that fits nicely in the ‘low traffic blog’ category so I used the stats from this site to estimate for the entire low traffic blogosphere.  It is not perfect but good enough for this general calculation.

Following are the results for the amount of electricity consumed, the cost, and the amount of CO₂ produced by blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:

As you can see, a lot of electricity is being used by blogs with less then an 1000 visitors a month.  Lots of waste, lots of money spent on electricity, lots of CO₂ emissions.  Environmentalists do not like wasted electricity and they certainly do not like lots of CO₂ emissions.

One of the tactics environmentalists like to use to persuade the masses to their cause is to take the numbers and create statements that people can visualize.  Like these:

• Every month low traffic blogs consumes enough electricity to light 385,416,667 standard 60W light bulbs for 1 hour.
• Every year low traffic blogs produces the same amount of CO₂ emissions as 36,513 passenger vehicles.
• Every year low traffic blogs produces the same amount of CO₂ emissions as 7,928,571 propane cylinders used for home barbeques.
• Low traffic blogs consumes the same amount of electricity a year as 27,750 average homes.
• It will take 5,045,455 tree seedlings growing for 10 years to absorb the CO₂ produced by low traffic blogs.
• 149,173,171 pounds (67,663,812 kilograms) of waste will need to be recycled instead of being sent to the landfill to offset low traffic blog’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions.

Should You Be Worried That Your Blog Will Be Attacked By Environmentalists?

Its seems that the environmentalists have a good case.  Blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month do cause a lot of damage to the environment.  They use up precious electricity that could be used for people (or preferably animals and plants) that really need it.  And by wastefully consuming the electricity these blogs contribute to the CO₂ emissions problem.

The environmentalists will argue: what good are these low traffic blogs?  Who needs them?  How do they benefit the planet?  Wouldn’t it be better if we shut them down and conserve the electricity?  They will caricature bloggers as big steel footed monsters stomping through a pristine nature scene and they will be on CNN stating that, “Low traffic blogs will cause massive hurricanes that will wipe out the entire eastern seaboard”.

There is no stopping them.  If they could have their way all blogs would be abolished.  Like a swarm of army ants – individually they are harmless but together they demolish everything in their path.  They will take down the entire blogosphere.  The only consolation for bloggers is that that it will take time.  They need to start at the bottom – attacking the low traffic blogs first.  You will never be completely safe from them but you can get off the forest floor, climb up a tree as the first wave passes by.  They will get you sooner or later, but you can keep your blog alive a little longer by working on getting more monthly traffic and not being the first in their path.

How Much Pollution Does Your Blog Generate?

Here is a online calculator you can use to find out how much CO₂ pollution your site generates.

Sources:

Number of active blogs in March 2006:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2007/04/blogging_growth.html

Percent of blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-how-of-blogging/

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Should Do