The Realist Idealist

As many of you know… and as many of you don’t know… I recently took up work in the clean energy field as the Internet Director/Chief Technology Officer/Strategic Communications guy of the Energy Action Coalition.
James Hansen has testified that Energy Action is one of the only environmentally or energy-focused organizations truly doing what needs to [...]

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“The current race is to see who will control renewable energy technologies, and we are in the race,” Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil told reporters. “We have the human and financial resources, and we have the will.”
Minister Khelil’s statement was made in the recent announcement that Algeria is undertaking a massive initiative to generate enough [...]

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A colleague just introduced me to BrightKite.com and as I’ve been playing with it all I can think of are the nearly infinite possibilties for it.
First and foremost the service is going to need to be integrated with others so that it doesn’t exist in a vaccum. Don’t know if they plan an API [...]

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…with me.

It does feel a little weird to post something from elsewhere that is essentially about yourself, but that said, I think the work that PIR/.ORG is doing to promote do-gooders on the web is great.  Put simply, I’m thankful to be a small part of it, and raise a bit of awareness of them [...]

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I’ve heard a lot of talk around the nonprofit sector in the last 6-9 months about “blogger strategy” and “leveraging the blogosphere.” That is to say, a lot of people are talking about how to get bloggers to write (positively) about them and/or their organizations.
The same has been true at my own organization as I’ve [...]

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No matter how much I try not to have the conversations about online fundraising - mostly because others who know much more about it than I should be having them - I sure do end up talking about it an awful lot.
Along those lines one of my colleagues at Idealist just sent me a link [...]

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To be perfectly honest, as much as I love the products that come out, I get a little tired of writing and talking about Google and Salesforce. I really wish some other companies would develop and innovate on the same level and provide some new tools to the folks out there trying to [...]

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And maybe sooner than we think.
Just about the time the entire world is starting to get access, the internet could possibly be made obsolete by a new “grid” system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections.
The Telegraph reported this morning on the new network designed by scientists in Switzerland.
Without an equivalent TCP/IP system for [...]

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My programmatic highlight of SXSW Interactive a few weeks ago, by far, was the keynote address given by Jane McGonigal - a noted game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive games and alternate reality games.
In all honesty, before the speech, I wasn’t in any way interested in games or what Jane had to say. [...]

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http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
As we all know Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So in true realist-idealist fashion Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first [...]

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