It’s a (green) blog’s world

Don’t believe everything you read. We have heard that saying for a while now regarding the internet. Print media may be suffering but the irony is that there are more readers and things to read than ever. We are brimming with information, and ideas, and “mashups” beyond control.

Web 2.0 is figuring out how to get all those words, ideas, stories, images, and musings to the people who want them and ignore the rest. Kind of like a mob rule for messaging. If the media was the elitists then blogs and twitter are the agitators. What the heck does this have to do with green building? As it turns out the folks who design and build often have a lot of ideas too, and as the industry lunges forward a lot of those ideas are going to be put forward as fact. The filtering mechanism will be the “green building mob”. We’ll give those ideas thumbs up, thumbs down or maybe just a thumb in our collective mouth. This has a great effect on how building actually happens.

Here are two ground rules:

If you celebrate mediocre building, then your building efforts will remain mediocre.

“If you have to make compromises in your design then you have not asked the right questions” -Amory Lovins

My long held belief has been that unbiased and engaged information based on building science and smart design will be of invaluable benefit to the building industry. This begins with a clear and direct dialog which speaks directly to the why, what, and how of sustainable and adaptive building. Ok, you heard all this from me before, so what does this mean in the real world?

I will be a regular contributor to a couple of websites that have moved the conversation on good green design into the public with great success. Inhabitat for the last five years has aggressively addressed how important green design is. As much a celebration as exploration, Inhabitat is the leading voice on investigating the world of sustainable living. The architecture magazine eVolo is the other site to which I look forward to adding regular contributions. Their focus is on the future of sustainable architecture and development, from the very solid to the way out. (Thank you Michael, Grant, and Bruno for the support)

Pretty cool stuff and I am always excited to say that I can do this entirely powered by the sun. The real limit is not our budget, our technology, or our time- the true issue is our commitment. My contribution to this commitment is small, but with you, and an entire community things happen. For now I will write about what I believe is the real thing for what I know is a dapper readership, and forget to use commas.