By Kenneth Barbalace

For many Digg.com users, the removal of Digg's shout feature also meant they lost the ability to share articles and communicate privately with their Digg friends. While not an ideal solution, one work around to the loss of the Digg shout feature is to use Twitter.

Create a Twitter profile

To effectively use Twitter, however, you first need to create a Twitter account that uses the same user name as your Digg account and uses the same icon on both Digg and Twitter. This will help friends/followers keep track of who is who on both sites. You should also reference your Digg account on their Twitter profile and link to your Twitter account on their Digg profile. This will help friends/followers know that both accounts really are really the same person. Linking to your Twitter account from Digg will also help new Digg friends quickly find your Twitter profile. If you already have a Twitter account that has a different username from your Digg account, at least use the same icon for both accounts and cross reference them.

Tweeting effectively in 140 characters

One challenge with Twitter is that it only allows for 140 characters per "tweet"; as such, long web addresses can pose a challenge. The most common work around to this problem is to use a website that will create very short web address aliases. The site I tend to use is http://bit.ly/ because its aliased web addresses tend to be less than 20 characters in length. When tweeting an article try to use a short concise description followed by a shortened link to the original article then the comment "on #Digg" and a shortened link to the Digg thread so that Digg friends can easily Digg and comment on the article. For Example:

Effectively sharing articles with Digg friends via Twitter http://bit.ly/21aA6 on #Digg http://bit.ly/Sp06i

Don't use the Digg bar!

I know that Digg has their own link shortening feature that frames articles in a "Digg bar" but don't use it. Framing sites the way the Digg bar does is considered bad netiquette (bad Internet etiquette). The idea of framing other people's sites with one's own stuff was first introduced in the 1990s, and was fought against back then as bad netiquette when it was first introduced. Much of the revolt against framing stemmed from the fact that search engines, etc. that were framing other sites were also trying to slip ads into their frames and the frames were confusing users into thinking there was an association between the two sites. Others problem with frames is that they can trap the user in the frame and users can not see the actual web address of the website being visited. This means that when they go to share the article they are reading, they actually end up linking to the site doing the framing and not the site that contains the actual article. Also keep in mind that Digg does provide an option for users to turn off the Digg bar via one's profile settings so if you send tweets with Digg bar links your friends with the Digg bar disabled will be unable to Digg your articles. To combat framing, many sites actually implemented measures to break out of such frames (like our main site does).

Yes having to create two links in Tweets is inconvenient compared to the Digg bar, but if you want your followers to actually Digg your articles, you need to make your tweets as user friendly to ALL of your followers as possible. This is also nicer for your Twitter followers who might not be Digg users.

Digg should be absolutely ashamed of itself for framing sites with their Digg bar, it is very poor netiquette. I'd strongly encourage folks to turn off the Digg bar via their Digg profile.

Why the # marks?

Oftentimes tweets will contain words with # marks in front of them (e.g. #eco, #Digg, etc.). These are for yet another social networking site called Twibes, which allows folks to subscribe to specific interest groups that aggregate tweets based on subject matter. For instance, #eco is for the Twibe group "Green" (http://www.twibes.com/group/GREEN).

Summary

Digg shouts are dead to this dismay of many, but it is possible to still effectively share articles with your Digg friends if you can get them to also join Twitter and you are effective with the way you tweet. Just remember to use clear concise descriptions; provide links to both the original article as well as the Digg thread; and don't rely on the Digg bar.

By Kenneth Barbalace

In the past couple of years there have been a lot of product scares about lead in various products imported from China. But one product that normally contains lead that no one ever thinks about is garden hoses. Yes, for the most part the majority of garden hoses contain lead. The reason is that lead is used during the manufacturing process as a stabilizer for the PVC used to make the hose. This means, that over time, the lead will leech out of the hose and into the water passing through it. This lead laced water then goes into your lawn, garden, kids wading pool and/or is drunk by you, your kids and pets.

The loophole in consumer product laws that allow lead in garden hoses is that they are for outdoor use and are not for potable water. They also contain warning labels on the packaging that say not to drink water from the hose. The thing is who reads those warning labels, which are in tiny print on the back of the packaging and the warnings do no good after the packaging has been thrown away. Furthermore, every kid drinks water from a garden hose on a hot summer day, its just what kids do and lead is especially harmful to children.

Supposedly, plants don't take up lead so supposedly lead in garden hoses is not a concern in a garden from the standpoint of contaminating vegetables with lead, I don't know if this is true or not. Personally speaking, however, I don't like the idea of adding lead to my garden even if plants don't take it up. There is already enough lead in most soil because of the decades that lead was added to gasoline and then spewed into the atmosphere as auto exhaust.

Until consumer safety laws are changed, the only way to make sure your garden hoses do not contain lead is for their packaging to be labeled as drinking water safe and that the hose complies with RoHS standards restricting lead. If you have children around the home, you should throw away all of your existing hoses and buy new hoses that are lead free. My local Home Depot and Lowes do sell short 25' boat and camper hoses that are lead free, but I had to go to Amazon.com for the 75' long "family safe" hose I purchased for $39.95 with free shipping.

In both cases the hoses were manufactured by a company called Apex. If you go to your local home improvement store, the boat and camper hose is white with a blue stripe and labeled as "Boat & Camper NeverKink Self-Straightening Hose". The 75' hose I bought from Amazon.com yellow green and is labeled as " Eco-Smart & Family Safe Aqua-Pure NeverKink". The hoses are a little lighter and slightly smaller in diameter than standard garden hoses. The boat and camper hose seems to be lighter weight and smaller in diameter than the garden hose, but this makes sense as presumably one would want to store it in a small space. One nice thing about the 75' garden hose is that it has a permanent blue collar around female end of the hose that says "eco-smart family safe" so that years from now you will easily be able to figure out which of your hoses is the lead free hose if you have several different ones.

One really frustrating thing has been that I have been unable to find a lead-free RoHS compliant soaker hose for my garden. Granted all of the soaker hoses I have found are made out of 50%-60% recycled rubber, but again I don't like the idea of adding lead to my garden. If you know where I can find a lead free soaker hose, please let me know.

By Kenneth Barbalace

It is the season to start vegetable garden in the northern hemisphere and organic gardening is all the rage. As I've been planning and working on our garden I've been pondering the merits and limits of organic gardening. Something I've been thinking about is whether organic gardening is necessarily eco friendly gardening. To be an "orthodox" organic garden, one must use: certified organic everything (seeds, compost, etc.) and one must forego chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. I'm totally into the foregoing chemicals bit, but I'm not sold that buying organically certified everything is necessarily eco friendlier.

For instance, I bought my seeds from a local nursery, who buys them wholesale from a company that produces them locally here in Maine. For all tense and purposes, the seeds are heirloom seeds because the company has been cultivating their own varieties of seeds for around 100 years, however, they are not certified organic. From the seed producer to my local nursery, to my garden these seeds probably traveled no more than 50 miles. On the other hand, I don't know where the certified organic seeds came from. They could have come from hundreds of miles away and may not even be fully adapted for our local climate. Are seeds that have to be trucked hundreds of miles to me and aren't optimized for my local climate truly more eco friendly than locally produced heirloom seeds?

Compost is another example; I had my local nursery deliver three cubic yards of compost for my garden, which they get from local producers (lots of dairy farms and horse stables in the area). Again it isn't certified organic, but the nose can certainly tell what some of the key ingredients are. Is certified organic compost that would have come from a long distance away really more eco friendly than using locally produced compost?

When we look at growing our gardens, I just can't help but think that obsessing about buying everything certified organic isn't missing the forest through the trees. If we are trying to be better for the environment, don't we also want to cut down the transportation footprint of the stuff we buy for our gardens? Shouldn't we also be buying seeds that are optimized for our own local climates so that they can do well with minimal care?

By Kenneth Barbalace

Like so many folks on the Internet I have been building up social networks on various social networking sites. One of my favorite haunts is Digg. I like Digg because it is oftentimes a good way to find news articles and blog posts on issues I am interested in (progressive politics and environmental issues).

Many of the articles I read there are shouted to me by the "friends" I have built up in my Digg network. There is only so many articles I can read in a day so being able to find the most interesting articles quickly is important. The way the Digg system works is that folks can "shout" articles to each other or digg/vote articles up or down. Articles that reach some secret digg threshold get promoted to the front pages of their respective sections and or the main page. These are basically like the main pages of some online newspaper but the editorial decisions as to what made it to the front was democratically handled via the reader base voting on articles. As a result I can quickly find articles of interest from a wide variety of sources.

While these social networks are great things, their users are at the whims of the social networks' moderators and admins arbitrarily enforcing rules. This past weekend, some of my favorite "friends" to follow on Digg got banned as a result of a hit job done to them by their political opponents (Read more here). On Digg, as with any social network, certain terms of service rules are poorly thought out and easily violated due to the way certain features are designed. As a result these conditions are routinely violated by the social network's user base and very unevenly enforced. In this case political opponents set out hits on certain really vocal Digg members who were popular and had good track records of submitting political articles that made it to the front pages of Digg. These opponents laid in wait for the slightest infraction of DIGG's TOS and then colluded to file so many complaints on the infractions that the target of the hits ended up getting banned (it is unclear whether this was automated bans or moderator intervention).

There are some lessons to be taken from this by both the users of social networking sites and the maintainers of social networking sites.

1. As a user don't depend on a single social network as the sole point of contact for your most important friends. Make sure to connect with them via different networks (e.g. Twitter and Blogger in addition to Digg). This way if something happens to either you or your friends on a specific network, you can still keep in contact elsewhere.
   
2. Maintainers of social networks need to put more thought into their terms of service and not create rules that are impossible to enforce and exceedingly easy to violate. If a certain feature is designed such that in invites the violation of the TOS then maybe the feature needs to be redesigned or the TOS needs to be reworded.
3. Maintainers of social need to be very careful about how they enforce certain rules such that the rules don't become weapons used by certain groups to silence their opponents as happened in this case.
   
4. If a rule is constantly getting violated as the result of a certain feature then look at whether it is the rule or the feature that needs to be redesigned to eliminate the violations.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Recently, I noticed my Senator, Susan Collins (Maine, Republican), had introduced a bill called the "Energy Assistance Fund Act" (S.855) whose purpose is to help make the U.S. more energy independent by improving the energy efficiency of homes via weatherization (a really big issue here in Maine) and providing tax credits for consumers to invest in renewable energy like solar, wind, geothermal, etc. for their homes. What really impressed me about this legislation is that it addresses several issues in a very effective manner. By providing money to weatherize homes and tax credits for home based renewable energy consumers the bill will:

1. Result in immediate savings for families due to reduced energy costs, which will be a big help to many households in these tough economic times.
2. Improve our nation's energy security by reducing our need for imported energy.
3. Help reduce our nation's carbon footprint by reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn.
4. Help stimulate the economy by creating thousands, if not tens of thousands of jobs weatherizing homes and installing renewable energy systems in homes.

When we look at investments into renewable energy and spending tax dollars on economic stimulus, the most effective place to spend that money is at the individual home owner level via tax rebates, low interest loans, etc. because the money would almost immediately get pumped back into the economy creating a demand for related goods and services. Furthermore as a nation the impact on our energy needs would be almost immediate as every home that gets properly weatherized will see a very significant reduction in energy consumption (maybe around 40% on average). The money consumers save from the reduced energy consumption could be then spent on other household needs.

Unlike this bill cosponsored by Senator Collins, typical energy bills target big industry, pie in the sky projects that do little to help the individual consumer's energy costs. Furthermore, the projects funded by typical energy bills take years to to reach fruition and oftentimes turn out to be boondoggles that provide very little return on investment.

It is very heartening to see legislation that ties economic stimulus, energy security, household energy efficiency, sustainability and reducing our nation's carbon footprint into such a tidy common sense approach. This bill will rely on trickle up from the consumer instead of empty promises of trickle down from industry.

One thing I love about living in a state with a small population base like Maine is that our Senator's are so much more accessible. A couple weeks ago I wrote Senator Collins about her bill and this is the response I got back today. Even when I disagree with my Senators, which isn't uncommon, I appreciate the fact that they take time to respond to my letters. Here is Senator Collin's response to my inquiry:

Dear Mr. Barbalace:

Thank you for contacting me regarding our nation's energy policy and for including information about your website. I appreciate your interest in environmental issues.

I noted your support for my legislation, S. 855. In a bipartisan effort to help Americans overcome the challenge of our dependence on foreign oil and restore and strengthen our nation's economy, I introduced the "Energy Assistance Fund Act" on April 22, 2009, along with my colleague Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). This legislation, introduced on Earth Day, would assist people who want to invest in energy conservation and alternative energy technologies and help set the nation on a path toward energy independence by providing additional loan authority to support current federal programs that help families and small businesses finance energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements. This bill has not yet passed Congress. It was referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where it awaits further consideration. I have attached a copy of the bill and a summary of it for your review.

I also have supported legislation to provide tax credits for consumers to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency efforts like solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources in both new and existing homes. These renewable energy production tax credits have been extended through 2012, as part of the economic stimulus package. Also included in the package was $5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. For the latest Maine funding updates, I suggest that you visit the website: www.maine.gov/recovery/ For further information on renewable energy job certification, I suggest that you visit: http://www.efficiencymaine.com/certifications.htm

I remain committed to working to advance effective energy and environmental legislation that increases America's supply of energy and decreases our demand for foreign oil, which will help us to achieve energy independence and to stabilize gas and oil prices. As the Senate continues to consider energy legislation, I will work to advance these objectives and will continue to support policies that benefit Maine families.

Again, thank you for contacting me.

Sincerely,
Susan Collins
United States Senator

No bill can get passed without support so please take some time and write your senators and encourage them to support this bill. This bill does have bipartisan support. It will help stimulate our economy, it will help reduce our dependence on foreign energy (e.g. oil), and is good for the environment.

Download text of S.855 (pdf)