The Offline Cost of our Online Lives
This is my latest column for the BBC News website, where I write about technology issues each week. I thought it might be of interest to fellow wattwatters.
The next time you want to search for something on the web, try going to www.blackle.com instead of your usual search engine.
The page you get looks remarkably like Google, and queries are fed through to Google, but there's one obvious difference.
Instead of the generous amount of white space which has characterised Google's home page since its 1998 launch, the page is mostly black.
Heap Media, the Australian company behind Blackle, claims black pixels take less power than white and so using its search saves energy. It believes that small things matter when it comes to reducing our energy use, limiting our CO2 output and reducing the likely extent of global warming as a result of human activity.
Read the rest on the BBC Website.

1 Comment
#1 by Gyorgy Borbely on March 31, 2008 at 2:32 p.m.
It is absolutely true, that we can spare energy reducing the illumination of the screen. But we have to take into consideration the other “power robber” units of desktop computers. The high speed processor(s), large capacity hard drive(s) and a huge amount of memories getting lots of energy – sometimes for nothing. These resources required only for DVD watching or for computer games. For the daily regular operation like word processing, spreadsheet calculation as well as for CAD application!! enough much less resources. Let’s compare the power consumption of a medium size notebook with the high capacity desktop.