Earth Equity News

NY Times' Climate Blog Pauses to Assess Feedback. Andrew C. Revkin, DotEarth Blog, NYTimes, April 25, 2008. "Six months, 212 posts and 15,932 comments ago, Dot Earth was born. It's been a wacky ride, kind of like jumping behind the wheel of a vehicle that's still being designed and assembled and has no driver's manual -- and which is already rolling down a busy highway that's also still being constructed and has no good maps... MIT's Mark Klein... [and colleagues are] designing an 'argument tree' in which contributions must fit into one of four categories... They lay out a vision of a visually and logically rational wiki-blog approach with moderation and other mechanisms providing some quality control... So even as humanity is in the midst of conducting the vast 'geophysical experiment' of rapidly altering the global greenhouse, a growing array of people... are also experimenting with new ways to consider and respond to this problem... That said, I will be shifting a bit more of my workday back into reporting and writing for print in the coming months, so my post rhythm here may slow a bit. Themes I'll be exploring, both on the Web and in the paper, include the question of whether the next (and necessary) green revolution can be 'green' in the environmental sense. I'd be happy to hear from you on that. This is also a good moment to hear suggestions from you on how Dot Earth's comment threads and categories and themes could be improved. I have a decent list already that technical people here are working on, including a 'print' function to format pages for printing, a possible way to label and highlight commenters who are not anonymous and a ranking system for comments. What else should we work on?"