Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Excuse Me While I Go Blackle That






Okay. So thanks to my "Live Traffic Feed" tracker thingy (see lower right hand of blog), I discovered the existence of "Blackle" yesterday. Has everyone known about this since 1997 or something?

According to the "About Blackle" information page:
Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.
So what do you think about that? Feel-good self-important computer-hippie virtue-enhancement project? Or is there something to it? I'm especially curious about what the Angry Young Man might have to say about this.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to train myself to start "Blackling" all those fun facts I have to look up about 18,249 times a day.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Every little bit helps, Joe. Like this, for example:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7241040.stm

M. Knoester said...

I'm not very technical, but I heard about this a few weeks ago and someone who seems to know a lot more about such things informed me that it doesn't matter on any of those newfangled thin screens, only the old, fridge-sized ones...

TigerYogiji said...

I used Blackle for awhile, but then I made the discovery that when you do a search on Blackle, you get different results than on Google! I thought that the results would have been the same, but, they weren't.

BigAssBelle said...

blackle? who the hell knew?? seriously. never heard of this.