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What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

• The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
• The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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If I understand (not likely) the way Google delivers search results and the way Facebook delivers its feeds, using algorithms to present what it is we’re looking for or what is of most interest to us, then I have a question.

Why not have an option to turn it off?

Why can I not get unfiltered search results? Why can’t I see my Facebook feeds without filtering?

I realize that, unfiltered, much of the practical benefit is lost. But I don’t want to eliminate the algorithms. I want them – they’re hugely useful. I just want to be able to toggle between what the algorithm presents and the unfiltered presentation.

My reason? It’s simple: sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been looking for something until I find it.

To me, some of the most interesting material I come across online is by accident. A word or phrase catches my eye, I ask, “What’s that?” and I’m off on a tangent that is thoroughly rewarding.

I look for many things online and I connect to many people. Without Google, Facebook, Amazon and other companies’ algorithms, I’d be lost forever. But for all the benefit they bring they do it at the cost of the happy accident, if I understand how they work correctly.

Let me emphasize that I want the algorithms. I need them. But I also want the option to see the non-algorithmic version. So why not an on/off option? Why not a way to toggle between the two?

I’m not a programmer but it seems to me it should be simple to do.

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With just about everyone weighing in on the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, I thought I’d add to the noise and toss in my riveting insight (or lack thereof).

First of all, I’ve no idea what it means. But then, no one else does either — there is interesting speculation, however. One of the first notions that was tossed out there on the Internet was that it had less to do with Facebook getting FriendFeed itself and more to do with getting the talent behind it. As one story (PC World) puts it, “… the team behind FriendFeed has quite the impressive collective résumé.” Many of them are former Google employees and worked on things like Gmail and Google Maps. So, yes, I could see why Facebook would want them.

And according to a BBC article, “As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company’s four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site’s engineering and product teams.”

From a user perspective, given how awkward, clunky and user bewildering much of Facebook is, I’m hoping this will be a good thing.

This morning the thinking appears to have shifted from yesterday’s and appears more focused on the challenge this acquisition poses to Google and Twitter. (See that BBC article, for example.) The business-tech world loves nothing more than to see these things in Stanley Cup playoffs terms.

I can, however, see this as an accurate assessment. For example, from that BBC item:

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr (Robert) Scoble told the BBC.

For me, someone who uses these social networks and the tools but who doesn’t spend much time understanding the technology, only enough to know it works, I’ve always seen these networks this way:

Size: Facebook biggest, Twitter smaller, FriendFeed smallest.

Theoretical usefulness: FriendFeed most, Twitter a bit less, Facebook least.

Practical usefulness: A crapshoot between Facebook and Twitter (for me), FriendFeed least.

Put another way, of them all, it’s FriendFeed I like most, though it’s the one I know the least about. Maybe I just haven’t used it enough to see all its flaws and maybe it does things the others also do, but I’m unaware of them. The problem with FriendFeed, however, is the old retail thing about location, location, location. So far, Facebook keeps winning not because it’s best but because that is where the most users are and most users means most useful (to me).

There are really two things about FriendFeed that I like: 1) the interface, which I find cleaner, easier to read and understand (overall) than either Facebook or Twitter and, 2) it aggregates all my other feeds so, for example, my Flickr photos show up without the need of using Facebook’s incredibly slow and frustrating photos tool or some clunky third party app.

Currently, however, no one knows what the real impact of the acquisition will be. One thought has been it’s the end of FriendFeed. If that’s the case, it brings up an interesting issue, one that hasn’t received much attention that I’m aware of: Data portability, as discussed here. What happens if, for example, Flickr were to end for some reason or other? What happens to your account? Where do your photos go?

Or, what happens if you no longer like Facebook and decide that’s it, I’m going elsewhere (maybe even drop social networks altogether)? What happens to your content? How do you get it, download it to your own computer or some other storage device?

How are you protected from data loss? Or are you protected? That’s a lot of data to just let it go “poof!”

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The Times Online has a story, Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches, which begins with, “Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.”

There was a Google response, Powering a Google search, where they say, ” … the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.”

Referring to CO2 and carbon footprints and carbon impacts generally gives me a headache because they are usually discussed simplistically or in an overly complicated, polysyllabic way that makes the eyes cross.

In the articles mentioned, it basically boils down to: “Web use has an environmental impact. Google is responsible for a lot of Web use. Google has an environmental impact. We say it’s this.” To which Google responds, “Yes, there is an environmental impact to Web use, so Google has an impact but it is this and not that – not as bad as you claim and, by the way, we’re also doing this to reduce the impact.”

Forgive the simplicity.

Now I came upon all this because I read Nick Carr’s, The strip-mined net, where he says he’s “dubious” of some of the data, and states why. He tells us:

Let me start by saying that I find those numbers to be mind-boggling. In fact, I find them to be so mind-boggling that I’m dubious of them. In addition to being a researcher, Wissner-Gross [Harvard University physicist whose research prompted the Times article] is an entrepreneur who has a start-up that sells a service for tracking the electricity consumption of web sites. So he has a commercial as well as an academic interest here. So far as I can tell, he hasn’t made public his calculations. If he’s going to throw his conclusions around, he should show us how he arrived at them.

Carr also touches on the notion out in the world that computers, the Web and so on are more environmentally friendly than print media. It’s not as simple as that, as he suggests, because there is an energy impact to using the Web. Let me add that there are also all those old computers, cell phones, MP3 players and who knows what all building up in landfills around the world.

In other words, the binary, black/white approach never quite tells us the truth. The debate is really about degrees of impact and, as this issue shows, there is usually disagreement on this as the truth gets obfuscated by numbers and decimal points, and opposing positions and their spins.

I believe most people now believe we (humanity) are making a significant, negative impact on the environment, though we’re not really sure how much is us and how much is natural, or how bad our impact will be, or just what it will entail – but we have a fair idea and it don’t look good.

Our response, however, seems equivocal at best. There’s a “stealing from Peter to pay Paul” quality to most of our approaches to the problem. We don’t want to give up air travel or, God forbid, cars – so we dream up “carbon offsets.” Maybe carbon offsets work but I suspect their impact will be minimal since we really don’t want to give up the activities that actually created and continue to propagate the problem.

I’ve no idea what the practical answer would be (”practical” as in something that takes human behaviour into account). But I find issues like paper vs web or the environmental impact of Google searches and so on, to all be a lot of niggling. Our response is always the same: keep the problem but try and make it less of one. Reduce, but do not eliminate.

Can that work?

(What would I do, other than pontificate from the sidelines? As I just wrote, I don’t know what the answer would be. But one thing I’d do is ban all motorized vehicles from downtown areas, except for public transit. Stops and starts, idling, traffic congestion … eliminate that and I think you’ve got something.

As for electronics and the Web … Perhaps it’s time to change our focus from more and faster to more environmentally efficient.)

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If asked what Google is, I suppose I might say it’s a search engine even though I know that would be like saying China is a place. There’s a smidgeon of truth in the answer but it doesn’t really answer the question in any meaningful way.

Honestly, I wouldn’t know where to begin to answer the question, “What is Google?”

Nick Carr, however, has a pretty good summary of what Google is in his post, The Omnigoogle.

By the way, Google was incorporated ten years ago yesterday.

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