Web 2.0 Asia

This year's Web 2.0 Summit will be themed "Web meets world", in an attempt to look into the web startups that can leverage the web to actually change the world and solve our society's difficult problems, whether that be energy crisis or poverty. (Check out this O'reilly piece - highly recommended.)

From Umair to O'reilly, the big thinkers these days seem to be onto the meme, "Can the web change the world - our physical world - in a meaningful way?" The thing is, there's a Japanese web widget that does just that.

I stumbled upon this Japanese widget via a blogger based in Japan (who writes about Hatena and other Japanese web stuff). It's called Gremz.

Gremz is a blog widget (which are called in Japan "blog parts") that displays a tree, which grows as you write more blog posts. When the tree grows to a certain level, you are planting an actual tree (physically), in areas like Inner Mongolia or West Africa.



From looking at the website only, it's not very clear how the economics work here - namely who pays for trees etc. I can only imagine the blog companies are subsidizing this in return for their added content, but this is only a guess and I'll appreciate it if someone clarifies on this.

Anyhow, this is indeed a good idea. When we surf the web or watch online videos, we don’t necessarily think we are contributing to global warming. But surprisingly, the Internet revolution is increasingly becoming one of the biggest culprits of climate change. This is because servers that power the internet consume massive amount of electricity, and the majority of electricity is still being generated by burning fossil fuels.

For example, according to a latest study, a virtual character or “Avatar” on Second Life (a popular internet game) consumes nearly as much energy as a real-world Brazilian does, and annually emits similar amount of CO2 as driving an SUV for 2,300 miles.

With Gremz, you don't have to feel guilty anymore - keep on blogging, and you are planting a tree in Inner Mongolia! Now, who would have thought blogging could make the world... greener?