Hanging out my laundry this today, it suddenly hit me: I may never get around to fixing that clothes dryer.

For me, this is a big deal. I’m totally a guy when it comes to taking care of clothes, and my teenage son is even worse. He thinks nothing of announcing he’s out of clean laundry jut before going to bed on a schoolnight, which used to mean many of my days would end with a frantic laundry run. Finding his clothes still wet in a cold, broken dryer one morning last autumn was an unpleasant surprise.

It’s not as if clothes dryers are complicated machines. I knew the problem was a burned-out thermostat or heating element, both user-replaceable items if you have the right tools. But I’m the guy who writes about reducing your environmental footprint, so I decided to untangle my clothesline and give outdoor drying a shot.

The humble clothesline

We take appliances for granted. Your parents — and certainly your grandparents — got along just fine without a thousand dollar washer-dryer combo. I’m in no hurry to learn the lost art of washing clothes by hand, but drying is another matter. All you need is a piece of line and a handful of clothespins.

Rather than buying dryer parts, I decided to invest that money in an aluminum-framed, parallel clothesline. These are handy, offering plenty of room to hang one or two washer loads in a very small footprint. They can be folded down or taken indoors for storage when not in use, a necessary feature here on the hurricane coast. Mine cost about $50, plus another $10 for the gravel and quickcrete required to properly anchor its base.

An extra clothes basket, a sunny day, and you’re ready to go.

Your clothes dryer is an energy hog

Take a look at this estimate of residential energy use, compiled in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Energy (click to enlarge):

In terms of energy use, clothes dryers are a big-ticket item (this chart does not apply to gas-fired models, which are cheaper to operate). Electric dryers are one of the home’s hungriest energy centers, ranking immediately behind refrigerators, climate control, hot water heaters, and lighting.

The best estimate for my personal use is around $6 on my monthly power bill. Yours could be higher or lower, but the message is clear: A commercially produced clothesline and all the little conveniences to go with it will pay for themselves in their first year. I’ll be well ahead if I repair and sell my old dryer.

There’s something great about line drying

Which brings me back to my laundry day epiphany: I’ve come to genuinely prefer line drying. There’s something worthwhile about cooperating with nature. Every morning I hang laundry, I get to feel the sun and wind which will do the former job of machinery in just a few hours time. It takes about ten minutes to get things properly hung, and perhaps another ten to check on things during the day.

And then I fold and gather the clothes. Time well spent, I think. Since our local power grid is largely dependent on coal, I’ve kept the air a little cleaner than if I’d simply thrust everything into the dryer.

Tomorrow morning’s breeze will be all the fresher.

Despite my sparkling new social media diet — which is off to a shaky start today — I’m still using and enjoying my key networks. Twitter remains my favorite. If you can look past the occasional Fail Whale, it remains the simplest gateway to and active and diverse online community.

One of the things I’ve ignored of late is EcoMonday. Now that we have the ability to make lists on Twitter, it’s easy to display groups of recommended users: just put them on a themed public list. People can browse and follow as they wish, and we avoid cryptic-looking posts with the #ecomonday hashtag and long groups of Twitter screen names (a tactic spammers have learned to slip into your Mentions column).

But I miss the opportunity to highlight Twitter users from whom I draw high value in the areas of environment and sustainability. So I’m going to start recommending them here. It will give me the opportunity to be a bit more specific about why I’m singling out particular users. Let’s give it a try, shall we?

The list

@hyperlocavore: This is Liz McLellan, a Brooklyn transplant now living near Portland. Liz runs Hyperlocavore, a cool site about yardsharing. It’s a brilliant idea: If you’d like to be growing some of your own food, but don’t have the space to do it, Hyperlocavore might be able to connect you with someone nearby who has a few feet of humus to spare. Liz is fundraising to improve her online community, and her Kickstarter project page is worthy of a look.

@DerekMarkham: Derek is an eco blogger I’ve known for quite a while, and the publisher of Natural Papa. He writes about green parenting from a male perspective. He’s also amazingly active and consistent on Twitter, with lots of high-value links and real conversation. Derek is a big-time rock climber, which is why he’s currently hobbling around on these.

@guardianeco: The Guardian has become my primary source of online news. While I’ll generally tip people, not sites, the Guardian’s environment feed is of such high quality, I’m happy to recommend it. The writing is sharp, the editing is solid, and someone is taking the time to actually participate on Twitter, not just broadcast links. The Guardian’s environment page is here.

@gfriend: Gil Friend is one of the people helping define the green economy. He’s the CEO of Natural Logic, a company which provides Sustainability consulting services to business, and the author of The Truth About Green Business. On top of all this, he runs an active, low-noise Twitter stream with an emphasis on business, science, and progressive politics.

@lutzfernandez: Being entirely carfree these days, I’ve become interested in transportation issues. Anne Lutz Fernandez is the co-author of a book at the top of my reading stack: Carjacked. It’s about how we’ve largely built American society around cars, and the enormous cost of car-centric culture in terms of money, energy, real estate — and lives.

Got anyone to add?

I’d love to see your #ecomonday recommendations. If there’s someone you think deserves special attention, drop me a line through the Contact page or shoot me a @reply online. Of course, I’d love it if you’d follow me on Twitter. Have a green and healthy week!

I consume a large amount of online content. By “consume,” I mean actually reading things. My RSS clients — I use both Google Reader and a nifty, self-hosted program called Fever — are real rivals to the browser as my window on the web. They allow me to search and sort content far more efficiently than clicking from site to site, and fresh information is what powers my writing and thinking.

Naturally, I enjoy sharing what I find. To a fault, in fact, and there are plenty of great venues for this. The latest is Google Buzz, a promising new service which has generated an amazing amount of participation and discussion (some quite heated) since its introduction last week. Buzz can also be a huge time suck, and its convenient presence in Gmail — upon which I depend — hasn’t helped my writing output over the past few days.

It’s kind of like opening a bag of potato chips. Sure, you could eat just one and save the rest for later. But most of us don’t stop until we get to the crunchy bits at the bottom. That’s where I’m at with social media. It’s time to brush away the crumbs and go on a content sharing diet.

Eliminating rich and fatty foods

Any real diet starts with cutting the most calorie-rich foods. You know — the good stuff. To me, things like Buzz and Friendfeed are the most hypnotic. They’re full of rich content, smart discussion, and realtime goodness. They are the strawberry cheesecake of the social media world.

I’ve already bid farewell to Friendfeed. I’m not going to leave Buzz (which, based on open standards, is likely a first step toward the sort of social media nirvana I ranted about last month). But I am going to turn it off for a bit. I’ll certainly be back. By that time, Google will have added the service filtering and simpler contact management it needs to be less noisy.

I’m enthusiastic about Google Buzz. But I’m going to leave that bag of chips sealed for now.

Fewer, smaller meals

Nutritionists will tell you that eating six small meals is a better idea than gorging once or twice. I’m going to try this with social media. Rather than “holding court” a couple times a day on a given service, I’m going to split my activity into six or so timed periods. In fact, I’ll schedule these.

This technique seems particularly conducive to Twitter, which is my best-developed and best-organized network. Buzz and Friendfeed are essentially asynchronous. You can pump several items in at a time, and they’ll keep rising to the top of your followers’ queues as people comment. The conversations which form around items can go on for days.

That’s not the case with Twitter. Sure, people who maintain very small lists or check their friends’ profiles may reply to older tweets. Generally, though, Twitter is as perishable as it is synchronous. Most conversations happen when you’re present. Jumping on for short, regularly spaced sessions will likely improve my engagement — without creating productivity roadblocks.

More exercise

My most important social networks are actually email and my sites. These are where I interact online with the people who mean the most to me: my family, closest friends, professional associates — and my readers.

So that’s where I’ll invest my time. There are more social destinations and services than one person could ever serve without extensive automation and duplication. I’d rather prioritize and put the essential first. This isn’t just a digital diet — it’s an exercise in minimalism, something I write about quite a bit these days.

If I were writing this in the practical manner of More Minimal or Lighter Footstep, my Social Media Diet would boil down to these things:

Look at where you’re spending your time. Set aside services consuming the most attention.

Establish limits. I’ll be splitting my social media time into 10-minutes blocks, six times a day. Your numbers may be different, and mine are certainly subject to revision.

Concentrate on what’s important to you. In my case, that’s Twitter and Facebook. I’m hoping all this will give me more time for writing, answering reader comments on my sites, and keeping my inbox clear.

Like all diet plans, monitor the results. For me, the bathroom scale will be the successful launch of my next site, The Minimalist Century, and an uptick in the number of articles I publish each month.

Be prepared to cheat. What’s the point of a diet if you can’t have a slice of pecan pie now and then? If you’ve got some extra time, indulge. Don’t forget the ice cream on top.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. And Google Buzz, for that matter. I’ll be back as soon as I can fit into my skinny jeans again.

Post image by Lee Carson, distributed under a Creative Common license.

So yesterday’s post regarding my departure from FriendFeed was not well-received. That’s fine: I wasn’t submitting the decision to referendum, and how people take things is really up to them. I’ve gone out of my way not to look in on the discussion of the matter at FriendFeed, but the indignant blowback in my site comments and email inbox seem to center around how inappropriate it was for me to depart, and that I must never have really understood the service in the first place.

I’ve said about all I care to regarding FriendFeed, other than restating my respect for its capabilities and most of the community. I’m glad to remain connected to many FriendFeeders through Twitter and Facebook — and, of course, through my own publishing. But the angry feelings I seem to have stirred have an anachronistic feel to them, rather like the partisan spirit of old-school BBS wars.  This isn’t social media, which is about the sharing of content. And that’s where social media belongs: welded to the content itself, not built on the shifting sands of Silicon Valley web services and startups.

Baby talk

The content, not a service web address, is the destination. Content can be a lot of things: text, media, discussion — whatever people wish to share and consume. Social media is still in its infancy, and, like a child, remains dependent on the parental auspices of those with the resources to bring it to maturity. That’s why it’s still napping in the cradle of commercial web services. But as social media learns to toddle and eventually wonder about the world beyond its front porch, it will become time to leave.

This won’t happen immediately, and there will be plenty of skinned knees before social media learns to walk on its own. The day will come, however, and given social media’s rate of growth and the increasing portability of technology, it will happen long before its mentors wish. Very few people want to belong to Facebook — they want the benefits Facebook provides. They want to easily locate and share with their friends. Very few people want to belong to Twitter — they want to chat with their buddies and exchange content links. These services are the current state of the medium, not its purpose.

There’s one thing most content has in common: It’s shared (or can be shared) in the browser. And this is where social media must go: directly attached to the content, wherever it is consumed.

Out of Babylon

There is nothing inherently necessary about social media services — nor is being tied to the beneficence of web destinations necessarily a good thing for anyone beyond the owners of these services. I’ve said this before: using services such as Facebook, Flickr (and, yes, FriendFeed) amounts to digital sharecropping.

It’s all fine and good to be provided with an acre and a mule in exchange for a portion of the yield (our personal information, social graph, pageviews, and advertising actions). It’s not so fine and good when a web service fails or is sold to another master, or when we’re summarily kicked off the land by a change in terms of service, API, or paywall.

This is why social media will break free from its current Babylonian captivity, and the promised land is probably to be found directly within the browser. It’s here that will both share, consume, and discover content. Browsers are going to get a lot smarter, learning our interests and gathering them in the form of both content and personal connections. Really, this is the only way we’ll be able to sort the torrent of realtime content becoming available to us. Social networks will become increasingly granular and transitory, taking form and dissipating with our shifting needs. The process will be agile, intelligent — and simple. Much of this sharing can be automated, and it probably will.

Into the great wide open

I’m not sure exactly how all this will look — I’m a content creator, not a coder. But if you want a glimpse of what’s to come, pay attention to folks like Chris Messina and Dave Winer. These are the people who are doing more than pontificating about the future of social media: they’re imagining it. They’re developing the standards and protocols we’ll take for granted in five years. They’re helping to liberate us from the soft chauvinism of social media web services.

And quit bitching (or not) about something so utterly trivial as my departure from a single social media service. I’m still writing and curating the same content I was this time last week. That, presumably, was the reason you paid attention to me on FriendFeed in the first place.

Hand image (detail) by Armadil060, distributed under a Creative Commons license

FriendFeed is a brilliant social media service. Perhaps you’ve not heard of it: With only about half a million unique visitors a month, FriendFeed is dwarfed by its publicity-savvy competitors. But you’ve seen FriendFeed, even if you’ve never visited the site. Part Twitter, part content aggregator, FriendFeed’s realtime technology and features have deeply influenced other services. Facebook found FriendFeed so compelling that it acquired the company and its technology in a $50 million transaction last August.

I was involved with Friendfeed for a long time. To be honest, it was probably my favorite social media tool. But this weekend, I deleted my account. When you do this, all your posts disappear into the ether, so I thought I’d write a few words of explanation in case someone should someone notice my absence and wonder what happened.

Living without a car

I’m a fulltime bicycle commuter. I love being on my bike, and have been effectively carfree since last June. Cycling is a healthy, fun, and environmentally friendly way of getting around. Though I live in a small city with few amenities for non-motorized transportation, it’s quite possible to get by without the burdens of a car note, auto insurance, and all the costs associated with fueling and maintaining a vehicle.

That’s not to say there isn’t some risk in being a cyclist. Don’t get me wrong: I feel pretty confident on the road. I’m an experienced rider, understand the risk factors which lead to most bicycle-car incidents, obey traffic laws, and my bikes are properly lit and maintained. But one thing cyclists don’t have any control over is impaired or aggressive drivers. The same can be said for motorists, though any time a bicycle and a car try to occupy the same space, the automobile always wins.

What happened

Which is why I was horrified to see someone post a photo of a particularly terrifying crash on FriendFeed this Saturday. I’m familiar with the image: a tragic incident which happened just after the start of a cross-border bike race near Matamoros, Mexico, two years ago. A photographer captured the instant a drunk driver plowed head-on into the peloton, killing 38-year-old Alejandro Alvarez and seriously injuring ten others. It’s a frightening picture, with broken bicycles and broken bodies flying through the air.

Someone had grafted the photo to one of those motivational-style posters with what they considered a witty caption. I am absolutely humorless when it comes to violence against cyclists or those who find death amusing, so I added an angry comment. By this time, several prominent FriendFeeders had “liked” the post, signifying their approval.

To the credit of the original poster, the image was removed shortly after my complaint. But the damage was done, and I was as concerned about the community’s endorsement of the post as its appearance. I started a new conversation voicing my displeasure.

Incredibly, someone attempted to equivocate the death and maiming of cyclists with the annoyance motorists suffer in large cities when they come across the occasional Critical Mass demonstration. I don’t support Critical Mass, and only a tiny minority of cyclists are even aware of the organization’s existence. Most of the miles cycled in this country are ridden by folks who are just trying to get to work, run errands, or get some exercise. They’re business people, moms, children — regular people, not activists. Even if this had been an illegal Critical Mass rolling roadblock, the riders would have deserved traffic citations, not headstones. So after stewing about things for a while, I found the FriendFeed account deletion link and erased all trace that I’d ever been a part of the service.

Could I have handled this differently?

Of course. Social media — like the rest of the world — is filled with cretins. That’s why there are tools to ignore such people. I could have blocked the barbarians and continued as if nothing had happened.

But I think there are times appropriate for making a statement. The picture at the top of this article is of a Ghost Bike: roadside memorials to cyclists killed by automobiles. I’m dedicating my ghost account to Alejandro Alvarez. I’ll miss FriendFeed, but not as much as Alejando’s family must miss him.

[tweetmeme]I‘ve received several responses from designers and fashion writers regarding 20 New Eco Fashion Designers! But Do They Have a Future? Rather than publishing the longer replies as comments, I’ve offered their authors the opportunity to have their thoughts appear as guest articles. The first is from eco designer Gretchen Jones of MothLove.

As one of the designers highlighted in the aforementioned photo essay, and after reading this article, I thought I might comment with the questions I myself pose as a creative using the extremely wasteful fashion industry as my medium.

Eco fabrics: Not so sustainable when you break down the energy necessary. Tencel, bamboo,and any of the cellulose genre — how sustainable is a fiber that is not one? What energies are necessary to produce it? And what about the the breakdown of materials? Real organic fibers — cotton, silks, etc. — have a real thread versus faux threading of overly processed materials.

Taking the uniform project to the next level. Sustainable design: Do the garments have relevancy beyond the date of production? Are we, as designers, really asking the questions about conscious/sustaining designs?

Sustaining our economies. What does domestic production really mean? Are we fostering our own production community within actual geographic communities, or just outsourcing within the states? How connected are we to the production process? Can’t sustainable design mean sustaining proper relations with your sewers in an environment that you can step into on a regular basis?

Aren’t they basically pricing out their independent boutique competition? High markdowns, let alone the charge backs to the brands (which in itself can kill a label), are totally killing the small business end of retail. Independently owned and operated boutiques cannot and — in my opinion – should not be carrying mass marketed and sold products. Its hurts both ends.

Isn’t this the perfect time to be launching a well made, well focused and eco minded label? I believe that the time is now for us to ask this, rather than having the answer dictated by big box corporate retailers and department stores . If our own community refocused its attention on the small, unknown,and highly sought-after unique pieces that make one feel so special, I think we would all gain. We’d gain from being independent, rather than losing from it.

These questions are ones I pose daily as I tread waters towards a successful career. I believe in conscious consumption. I think we need to be more present in the way we purchase. Buying timeless pieces with clean lines and then adding interesting accessories each season is the most sustainable way to dress. And that is how I approach my own designs.

Portland-based designer Gretchen Jones’ ol’ fashioned “hunter & gatherer” approach begs us to reverse and reevaluate our methods of production. The earthy pieces of her design label, MothLove, reject the current state of synthetic production and reflect the traditional methods consumer’s once demanded. Each piece in Jones’ collections are hand crafted. In a Lewis Carroll-esque twist, MothLove is inspired by different caterpillars (accessories) and moths (garments).

As it turns out, a 30 pound sack of dog food will fit on the back of my longbike. Max the Rottweiler will be pleased.

Here I am, almost halfway through my car-free July. So far, so good. I parked the car on July 1st in honor of Lance Armstrong’s return to professional bike racing and the cancer-busting work of his LIVESTRONG foundation. At the end of the month, I’ll make a small donation as a token of the money I will have saved on gasoline.

While I would use my car in the case of genuine emergency — a hurricane evacuation or something medical, for instance — lugging dog food home doesn’t qualify. It makes no sense to buy small bags with a big dog in the house, so I had to give it a go.

To be honest, that’s as much weight as I’d like to carry so high on the bicycle. Next time I’ll bring one of the rack’s side extenders and strap the bag closer to the axle. It would have handled better in the dark — particularly on wet pavement.

But bicycle living isn’t proving that difficult. Last night’s grocery run was about 50 pounds. My Xtracycle Free Radical (the rear extension of the bike you see in the photo) sucked it up with a minimum of drama, and no fossil fuels were harmed in the short trip to and from the store. Living car-free could become a habit.