| on Apr 22, 2008, 02:12 PM E.S.T.
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Today is Earth Day, and you don't have to look any further than the
home pages of the top Internet companies to see it. Green is the
politically correct color of choice for firms that want to score cheap
environmental points online.
The bias is most blatant at Google and its video-sharing subsidiary,
YouTube. Google's logo has gone completely green, and the television
screen within YouTube's logo is a snapshot of the earth.
YouTube also has turned over the prime real estate on its home page to earth-friendly videos, with headlines like "5 Easy Ways To Save The Planet" and "Veggie Cars." Oh, and don't forget, "Paris Hilton Is Greener Than You."
But Google and YouTube aren't alone in toeing the environmental line
online this Earth Day. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Amazon.com are playing the
green game, too. Even the Weather Channel, whose founder in March made
the case for suing Al Gore to expose "the fraud of global warming," is making a big deal out of Earth Day.
This is par for the course in the technology world. As the former editor of National Journal's Technology Daily,
I watched with a mix of amusement and disdain the past several years as
tech firms rushed, like Kermit the Frog, to embrace their inner
greenness.
It's part of their lingo now. "Green technology" is all the rage in
Silicon Valley, the promise of bundles of a different kind of green in
the industry's wallets for years to come.
The assumption in the world these days is that if you call something
green, it's good. No debate allowed. All skeptics shall be ridiculed
into silence and conformity.
That's good to know because these days, I'm the executive producer of Eyeblast.tv,
a new video-sharing site designed in part to rival the bias that too
often rears its head at YouTube and other sites. Our logo is green at
Eyeblast this Earth Day, too -- but that's because it's green year
round.
Unlike the chameleons you'll see running everywhere else online for
the next several hours, we don't change our colors in order to pander
to the pet cause of the day. When the rest of the Web turns back into a
pumpkin at midnight, we'll be the same carriage full of conservative
video as we were yesterday and today. Source
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