We talk a lot about our environmental, or ecological footprint. How much of the Earth is required to support our current lifestyles. If you live in North America, it’s probably quite huge.
I’ve been working the past few weeks to reduce my Internet footprint. No, I’m not trying to delete those Kiss pictures from a few years back. I am trying to reduce the number of bits being thrown around on my account.
I’ve unsubscribed from a few mailing lists I don’t actually read, I’ve taken the time to unsubscribe from probably 10-20 different corporate lists that I don’t actually care about. All in all, that was probably a couple of megs of traffic a day that I wasn’t using, that I just trimmed off in terms of consumption.
In the finest stylings of modern journalism, I’ll fake some “Back of the Envelope” math, and state that “If everyone cut their useless traffic consumption in half during the Month of march we will Save the Internet, cute puppies, and the rain forest.” Additionally, we will waste less brain power on things we’re don’t care about.
I’ve been working the past few weeks to reduce my Internet footprint. No, I’m not trying to delete those Kiss pictures from a few years back. I am trying to reduce the number of bits being thrown around on my account.
I’ve unsubscribed from a few mailing lists I don’t actually read, I’ve taken the time to unsubscribe from probably 10-20 different corporate lists that I don’t actually care about. All in all, that was probably a couple of megs of traffic a day that I wasn’t using, that I just trimmed off in terms of consumption.
In the finest stylings of modern journalism, I’ll fake some “Back of the Envelope” math, and state that “If everyone cut their useless traffic consumption in half during the Month of march we will Save the Internet, cute puppies, and the rain forest.” Additionally, we will waste less brain power on things we’re don’t care about.
So, March is cut your useless bits month
- Unsubscribe from mailing lists and RSS feeds you don’t actually care about
- Tell that company that you ordered one thing from back when, and have no intention of doing business with again to piss off.
- Ensure your browser has sufficient cache space, so you’re not grabbing the same images for no reason.
Comments »
Why wouldn't it be? If anything, it wont do any harm and if enough people do it.. who knows.
Alternatively use it as a reason for yourself to decluter your online self.
Alternatively use it as a reason for yourself to decluter your online self.
Hey Paul,
I agree with you idea, but it is not always a good practice to destroy the information from the internet. Rather the approach should be destroying the duplicate info and sharing the similar info from a single resource.
At the user level I can give u an example with Orkut. This google's socialnetwork service gives user choice to tag someone in a picture and after tagging the picture will be linked to the profile of the tagged person.
Let say X and Y have 100 common snaps. Out of the 100 40 is hosted in X's orkut photo album and 60 is in Y's album. Now X tagged all his album photo with Y's name and Y did a vice versa. So all the Y's album photos are now shown in X's profile, similarly Y got all his photo linked to his profile. So effectively the no of the photos remain 100.
In reimplementation level you can reduce the information redundancy by implementing little AI in the app.
If you are really want carry on the idea and trying create a mathematical model of the problem, then I will love to assist you as much as I can do.
There could be another possibility of creating a bot that notify its user about his/her Internet Footprtint Status (IFptS) in a predefined frequency and may also clean it up
I agree with you idea, but it is not always a good practice to destroy the information from the internet. Rather the approach should be destroying the duplicate info and sharing the similar info from a single resource.
At the user level I can give u an example with Orkut. This google's socialnetwork service gives user choice to tag someone in a picture and after tagging the picture will be linked to the profile of the tagged person.
Let say X and Y have 100 common snaps. Out of the 100 40 is hosted in X's orkut photo album and 60 is in Y's album. Now X tagged all his album photo with Y's name and Y did a vice versa. So all the Y's album photos are now shown in X's profile, similarly Y got all his photo linked to his profile. So effectively the no of the photos remain 100.
In reimplementation level you can reduce the information redundancy by implementing little AI in the app.
If you are really want carry on the idea and trying create a mathematical model of the problem, then I will love to assist you as much as I can do.
There could be another possibility of creating a bot that notify its user about his/her Internet Footprtint Status (IFptS) in a predefined frequency and may also clean it up
I don't understand how unsubscribing from mailing lists, corporate lists, and deleting unused links in your RSS feed reader "destroy"s information?
The information is still out there, still being propegated and produced, it's just no longer being sent to you wastefully.
It's like unsubscribing from a newspaper, the driver isn't wasting gas coming to your house (bandwidth) but the paper is still being produced. No information has been "destroyed"...
The information is still out there, still being propegated and produced, it's just no longer being sent to you wastefully.
It's like unsubscribing from a newspaper, the driver isn't wasting gas coming to your house (bandwidth) but the paper is still being produced. No information has been "destroyed"...
Hi Paul my previous comments has two distinct part.
First I want said:.. that the reason you don't want to delete the "Kiss pictures" can have solution.
If they are already exist in some other location in the web, u can share them and delete the duplicate copy. Obviously if u can implement it it will save lots of web spaces
In the second part I am totally agree with what you told about reducing (*"the number of bits being thrown around on my account"*). I also think about creating a service that will Internet Footprint based on your mathematical model ...
I am also very inquisitive about how your trying to confined the problem in a single mathematical equation.
First I want said:.. that the reason you don't want to delete the "Kiss pictures" can have solution.
If they are already exist in some other location in the web, u can share them and delete the duplicate copy. Obviously if u can implement it it will save lots of web spaces
In the second part I am totally agree with what you told about reducing (*"the number of bits being thrown around on my account"*). I also think about creating a service that will Internet Footprint based on your mathematical model ...
I am also very inquisitive about how your trying to confined the problem in a single mathematical equation.
I think it is good to do this. Remove your personal data from the Internet and companies and organisations you don't want to have any relations with. This and also it increases your privacy. If you use the same alias on the Internet for all accounts and google it you will find (if the alias is a unique name e.g. not Phoenix or Pikachu02) it will not be hard to track all the sites your a member of, the messages you've wrote in forums etc.
I think by that the footprint is privacy risk and reducing it is to keep the area (in cyberspace) of possible data stored about you smaller and more maintainable.
The question is, how do you remember what the user name and password was for the site you joined 4 years ago just to have a chance at winning that free laptop? or the ease of the process of removing your data from the company.
Despite having the rights under the law to remove any data you wish from organisations, it is not always an easy or fast task.
I think by that the footprint is privacy risk and reducing it is to keep the area (in cyberspace) of possible data stored about you smaller and more maintainable.
The question is, how do you remember what the user name and password was for the site you joined 4 years ago just to have a chance at winning that free laptop? or the ease of the process of removing your data from the company.
Despite having the rights under the law to remove any data you wish from organisations, it is not always an easy or fast task.
Tracked: Jul 06, 00:42