VCom Blog|The life of a simple mind in a simple digital world.

WTF? Yeah, well that was my response to the person who told me about the existence of ecology on the internet. As far as I know the internet is one of the most energy-insufficient things there is; millions of servers; websites that run on them and hardly ever have a single visitor? Ok, there are a few websites that have quite a few visitors; but what to think of those pages on the net that hardly anyone ever visits? They all run on servers, and most of them are quite energy insufficient…

So Ecology on the internet? What about it?

It exists. If you have a homepage that is visited regularly and you have a black background (not gray or dark blue, but plain black) you could be the proud owner of a energy-saving site already… The idea is based on the fact that every pixel on the screen needs to be lit in order to produce white light and thus use up a lot of energy. The other way around is true as well: a black website doesn’t need a pixel being lit up in order to render the background and thus saving energy. Strange? Not quite, in fact if Google (you know, the famous search-engine) would use a black background, it’s estimated that worldwide they could save up to 15kW of power each day, which is significant…

I’m not saying google is to blaim because you can easily make an HTML page with a black google search-bar in it (will try and do that on this stie as well); but there already is a site for eco-nerds available if they want to go for it right away: Blackle. It’s using the Google search-engine, but with a twist: searchbar and resultpages are all black and gray…

I don’t feel a need to abandon my google page so all of a sudden, but hey, if someone is inspired; feel free