Digital Renewable Energy Production
What does “Digital Energy Renewal” look like? Wait, that’s a little too abstract. What I’m trying to communicate is the potential to harness bits and bytes on the Internet that are either being underutilized or not used at all. Just as a windmill harnesses unused wind, is there a similar potential for unused bits and bytes on the web?
An immediate example the comes to mind is domain parking. Another example might be an application that cleans hard drives of old backups. Of course both of these already exist. Sedo.com helps you monetize your unused domains by collecting the traffic that would otherwise receive an error message. The collected traffic is monetized and returned to the owner in pennies per clicks.
Lots of hard drive cleaning applications exists that function with varying degrees of effectiveness. To my knowledge this only happens on your local drive. So if you were to send your hard drive cleaning utility to your myspeace, picasa, youtube, flickr or other repository, it would be blocked at the firewall. A trusted application could be developed that made sure you were only duplicating your files rather than triple or quadruple back ups. I’m not against regulating the amount of backups you can have. I’m just wondering what the impact would be if you had more accurate information that you could trust. Gee, what if we could just “identify” all of the duplicate files on the web? I’m sure I’m late to that party already.
For example, if you knew you had your videos stored at two sites online and on two drives at home and you knew these backups were all of high integrity, would you then be willing to let software clean your files off a fifth backup location? If so, would you get a credit of sorts for the amount of drive space you’ve saved? This is important but not the effect I’m looking for.
I’m more interested in the bits and bytes that have energy. The bits and bytes that are used in a manner that is not helping anyone or anything. For example, the web pages that are indexed by bots but never seen or used by humans. Can the energy the bots use to index these pages be harnessed by a windmill kind of a contraption? Like a digital windmill? Or a digital solar panel? Let’s call it digital renewable energy production. I know, thinking about this is ridiculous. Thank goodness, these things can be archived for later examination. If anyone has any relevant research or is interested in collaborating on this, please comment below.
