I’ve always wondered when the glory days of publishing prosperity were going to come crashing down into some CEO’s pocket.

Here’s a little preview of things to come.

Click here for more.

The natural and digital worlds combine to help decrease the global impact of today’s internet addiction.

Nowadays it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without the internet when just over a decade ago, the internet itself was scarcely a thing of the imagination.  With it’s billions of users, the earthbound mechanisms that keep this digital universe expanding are showing signs that surfing the web can lead to an environmental wipeout.

The bulk of the information that flows through our computers is stored and powered by a network of high-tech data centers.  The hardware used at these sites needs shocking amounts of electricity that generates lots of heat.

New green data centers like Oregon-based Taproot Hosting, power their boards on 100% wind energy.  They even tell their employees to stay home, opting for tele-commuting over terrestrial commutes.  Other centers bury their gear, taking advantage of natural geothermal cooling instead of conventional air conditioning.

For more on how to reduce your carbon e-print, have a look at some of these sites:

Sun’s take on green data centers in 2009 (GreenTechMedia.com)

Green Data Center Blog

Google: Our green data centers get a lot greener (GreenerComputing.com)

Photo by ibmphoto24.

Why am I suddenly so obsessed with Rocketboom?

Maybe because it’s a little too glib… just a hair too clever for its own good.  Or perhaps those stunning femme digitales on camera are so sincere and seductive that Rocketboom.com’s daily dose of internet noggin fluff succeeds in whacking you upside the dome with a light saber and leaves your dismembered memes sputtering about on the floor gasping for air.

“Meme, you say?”

Yes, meme (MEEM).  First coined as a philosophical neologism of ontology in 1974, the term now describes a bite of culture, like an amino acid in the double helictical spiraling chains of DNA that encode our digital life.  Memes are identified by the good folks at Rocketboom, posted, linked, and later examined in the labs of the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Findings reveal the social significance of such memes as Star Wars Kid, Technoviking, fail, pwned, owned, Magibon, and the Rickroll phenomenon.

Rocketboom spares no expense with fancy taped maps as backgrounds and generously provides supplimental hand-drawn diagrams on marker board to help make difficult concepts like “WTF factor” and “KUWAII ^___^” easier to understand.  Here, the hyper-future is propagated through a phonograph with video segments that are fun to watch and written just snarkily enough to have some spice without an over-saccarine saturation.  As far as talking techhead digital video digests go, Rocketboom totally boomed me.

I discovered this floating balloon thingy in the corner of my daily go-to Green product site, GreenUpgrader.com, and thought, “Hmm… that’s cute.”

Clicking further I thought I’d get involved and post the available widget and embed my own little floating balloon thingy.  Keeping in constant with the “air” theme we’ve got going here, I thought Green Air might make a natural home for some of the balloon racers to be… and so did Orange, the masterminds behind Balloonacy, a surprising and fun way to float around the internet.

Still uncertain how the whole thing would pan out, our site was accepted as part of the Race Map and is now on the float path of those cute animal-shaped animated balloons that you can boost and move as you go.

There’s a whole bunch of prizes you can actually win from this like a luxury private villa with a pool and tennis court, your own private chef, spending money, jet skiing, windsurfing, para-sailing, speed boat rides… DANG!

Other than prizes, I haven’t yet unraveled the purpose of this whole thing other than it looks cool and it’s fun but then again, what more purpose do you really need in a web thing these days?  Float on balloons!

Background site from Alan O’Connor.