SOCIAL BOOKMARKING: A Look at the Bookmarks of "Newearthling"

Newearthling’s bookmarks focus on a few core environmental issues, and the government and corporate policies that impact them; their main topics are energy conservation, food crises and carbon footprinting. As a whole, this collection is tightly focused and serious-minded; it offers a select list of primary and secondary sources that are heavy on facts and light on editorializing. As such, it is a useful tool for researching current eco topics and debates.

Dismissing Newearthling’s occasional forays into arts-related subjects, of the 54 bookmarks, five are food or agriculture references, four are energy conservation references, four are carbon footprinting references, and the rest are policy and statistics references on those subjects. Each of the bookmark categories has a balanced mix of practical tools, objective information and analytical reportage.

For example, on the subject of carbon footprinting, there is the “Life Cycle Assessment Calculator,” which calculates the carbon footprint of any product you plug into its formula; the “Terra Pass,” which allows you to purchase carbon offsets for the environmental impact of your daily activities; guidelines from a European industry consortium for designing eco-friendly products; something called “EXIOPOL,” which is a mathematical framework for environmental policy analysis; and, finally, an essay on Economist.com which analyzes why people avoid convenient energy savings. No speculative essays, no angry diatribes—just straightforward and relevant information for original, in-depth environmental research.

Despite the scholarly nature of Newearthling’s bookmarks, his bookmarking practices are casual and erratic. Less than half of the 54 bookmarks (23) are annotated, with brief comments—lifted from the source’s text—that give just an inkling of what lies within. There are over 100 pages of bookmarked text in Newearthling’s collection, so there is a wealth of material, but it requires laboriously opening and then skimming most of the links to determine their topic and gist.

The tag list for Newearthing’s sources is also surprisingly random and unhelpful. It cites over-generalized words like “development” and “quality,” and nonsensical words like “of” and “uncertainty.” Tagging is definitely not a priority for Newearthling, and the tag list should be ignored.

These procedural lapses aside, the strengths of Newearthling’s bookmarks are two-fold: they include a half-dozen primary sources for hard environmental data and statistical models, that can be drawn on to construct and support an eco-oriented argument; and they offer important corporate and government websites on environmental policy, that provide useful economic and legislative contexts for green issues. Clearly Newearthling is an admirably serious thinker, interested in the practical, social and political aspects of the environmental crisis, and the complex mathematical models which shape them.