I asked Al to share his thoughts about how publishers and retailers alike can benefit from building an online community.  You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of these interviews as soon as they’re published.

In this short video, I focus on an useful technique for deciding how to organise the content on your site: Card Sorting. By getting several customers to group the content and label it in a way that makes sense to them, you’ll come up with a scheme that’s likely to make sense to everyone – not just you.

Online card-sorting and analysis tools: Optimalsort, Websort
Windows-based tool (and card templates): SynCaps

Of course, as Richard Pope emphasises in the video, the beauty of this technology is that it’s really flexible – you’re just using the barcode as an entry point to related information.  As it’s user-editable, people can put anything there.

Still, I thought it’d be interesting to have a vague idea of what people might use such a device for, i.e. what unsatisfied informational needs they are aware of during their shopping process.  So I gathered a team (including ethnographer Charles Armstrong) to go to the local supermarket and pounce some unsuspecting shoppers!

Here’s the presentation showing some of my research results, followed by a live demo of the software:

Thanks to The People Speak for shooting the original footage and patiently transferring it all to my laptop for me.  Here’s their video of me attacking one of the techies and trying to pin down some use cases for this technology, and then going on to explore the potential for promoting ethical information.  Here’s my photographic exploration of ideas surrounding attaching objects to information.  The source code for this project is still available for anyone to build on.

You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of all these interviews as soon as they’re published.

As well as publishing a series of podcast interviews with many of the projects, we’ve been organising online teleconferences almost every week.  In December, we organised a couple of general conferences to allow everybody to get to know one another.  These were very successful and gave us an idea of the topics we needed to discuss.  In the New Year, we’ve so far run two conferences, both addressing specific topics.

The first of these conferences dealt with data collection, representation, summarisation and presentation.   It uncovered many of the fundamental issues that we all face in implementing these systems, and led to useful discussion of different approaches. Some were in favour of a very quantitative, algorithmic approach whilst others considered that only qualitative analysis can do justice to the complex issues under examination.    The key issues of transparency and trust in relation to data sources was also discussed.

The second conference (video) looked at how we could make our projects financially sustainable.   A commercialisation consultant, Gbenga Kogbe, kindly gave us an overview of the main options for generating revenue around a free product.   It seems that there are a plethora of  opportunities that will arise when an ethical information system becomes successful,  but nevertheless we need to focus on developing a convincing business case in order to convince funders and existing businesses to get on board.

The next conferences will focus on involving the academic members of our community and keeping up the momentum we’ve developed in the early conferences.  This collaboration seems to be off to a promising start, but there is still a long and winding road ahead!

Recordings and transcripts of previous conferences, dates of upcoming conferences and other related information can be found on the conference information page.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get these interviews the moment they’re published.

You can download an Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all these interviews as soon as they’re published.

Untitled from Jonathan Melhuish on Vimeo.

Guardian podcast excerpt:

The fact that there were significantly less people at the second CarrotMob than the first supports our suspicion that perhaps CarrotMobbing is a bit of a fad and that the attraction will fade over time. The Porkkanamafia have been having a lot of success in Finland recently, it’ll be interesting to see if they can repeat that success in the same city or whether it’s a one-off that succeeds mostly due to the novelty of the idea.

Meanwhile, we’re working on ways to take the core ideas behind CarrotMob and form it into something more sustainable, effective and less labour-intensive. Not as fun, perhaps, but less of a passing fad and more of a useful weapon in the battle against climate change. Watch this space.

You can watch the interview below, get the Mp3 audio file or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all of these interviews as soon as they’re online.

I recommend also watching the short demo video and accompanying article on TechCrunch, both of which provide a good introduction to GoodGuide.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the interviews as soon as they’re published.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to stay up to date with the interviews as they’re published.

Ethical Consumer have the most comprehensive high quality researched company information database in the world. They have been going for 20 years using a subscription model, magazine and extensive B2B work and are extremely well known and connected in the UK. They cover 50,000 companies, take articles from over 50 publications and use around 10 researchers / investigators.

Rob Harrison, a founding member of Ethical Consumer, has now stated that they are “genuinely considering moving into a Web 2.0 model with free content (for not-for-profits and non-commercial use), community contributions (continuing with the researchers as well) and commercialising around the data”. And furthermore that they are “extremely interested in joining with an international Web 2.0 collaboration on ECIS”.

Download the Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all future interviews as soon as they’re online.

I asked Terry to give a brief history of ethical consumerism, and problems that it faces, such as the “words-deeds inconsistency” and whether a purchase is really a vote.  I also got him to talk about his current areas of research and give some advice on how we can encourage consumers to shop ethically.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all future interviews as soon as they’re online.

Download the Mp3 audio version or even better, subscribe to the the podcast feed and get all future interviews as soon as they’re published.

The first interview is, naturally, talking with Annesley about our own project, EasyEthical.  I also mention the CarrotMobs that we’ve organised.  It was recorded in a noisy cafe with my digital camera but hopefully the audio is clear enough for you to decipher our ramblings.  The video was shot using Annesley’s Microsoft webcam on his Windows laptop, which probably explains why it randomly stopped recording for about a minute

Video version is below (feel free to embed elsewhere / re-distribute).  Alternatively you can download the mp3 audio version for your portable listening pleasure.  Even better, subscribe to the podcast feed and you’ll get each interview as soon as it is published.

I outline some of my key research findings regarding Facebook usage and suggest alternative interface concepts for browsing social news, making use of machine learning techniques and incorporating an understanding of social psychology.

For more details, please refer to the accompanying paper in Volume 2 of the conference proceedings, page. 115. The talk and paper are based on my undergraduate dissertation.

This talk won the Best Student Paper Presentation award for the conference.

In retrospect, perhaps The Foundry wasn’t the best place to start, simply because it’s somewhat atypical. The interior is strewn haphazardly with a motley assortment of donated second-hand furniture and outcast television sets. This isn’t really a bar – it’s an artist’s lair that happens to serve alcohol.

Jonathan, the bar’s long-term owner, sat in unnerving silence as we explained the concept in detail. When he finally spoke, his strongly-worded reaction took us aback slightly: “I don’t think I like you telling me what to do. I’ve been doing a lot of things here for a long time”. He pulled a bottle of “Eco Warrior” beer from the fridge and told us how he had supported a local brewery for years, and encouraged them to convert to Organic. He told us that he didn’t like the idea of being judged only the basis of electricity consumption or the idea of environmental “assessors” snooping around his establishment. And finally, he rejected the idea of being in competition with other bars in the area – “it just doesn’t sound like a good way of doing business to me”.

Things weren’t looking good. Uneasy looks were shooting around the table. He had made a lot of good points which seemed to cut right to the heart of the CarrotMob idea. Maybe we’d failed to appreciate just how American this idea was? We’d already received strong criticism that we were encouraging unnecessary consumption, a claim that’s hard to deny when the event revolves around getting people to come out drinking on a Tuesday night. Now a republican was strongly attacking the fundamental ideas behind CarrotMob.

We hadn’t been shown the door yet, though, so we tried hard to praise his past achievements and explain why the competition was necessarily simplistic, allay his fears about energy-efficiency advisors and even suggest that it didn’t need to be a competition if he wasn’t comfortable with that. He seemed to slowly warm to the idea, and eventually started suggesting ways in which we could spend the money – like pedal-powered generators to power the TVs!

Encouraged by our eventual success, we proceeded to an altogether-different venue – the brand new Roadtrip bar. They’d obviously spent a lot of money on the shiny interior but clearly hadn’t given a moment’s thought to energy efficiency. As soon as the manager realised we weren’t intending to simply hire the venue he lost interest and told us to email to make an appointment. We decided that it probably wasn’t worth it. The response in the Bricklayer’s Arms was also to come back later, but was at least accompanied by a friendly smile.

The friendly Irish barmaid in the Barley Mow seemed very keen to find out what CarrotMob was all about and informed us that the pub was run by a couple who lived upstairs. She thought they might be interested, although they were out. Annesley went back the next day to meet the owners and found that they were indeed very keen on the idea, although the pub was part of a chain of 12 pubs and restaurants, so they’d have to ask the chain managers first. We followed-up by email and are waiting to hear back from him.

We were distracted at this point by a drunk guy who interjected and insisted on buying us all drinks while repeating in a loud voice “look guys, I’m not a jerk, I’ve got a PLC!”, as if the two things were mutually exclusive. He proceeded to tell us how he is an ex-commando and that the course of his life had been changed when he sat down for a beer with a Greenpeace activist he’d previously forcibly removed from an oil rig. It was a gripping tale, I really hope it was true.

After we’d drunk up, we went over to Favela Chic and gave a slightly-slurred but very successful explanation to the manager, who quickly understood and seemed keen to participate. Perhaps having a little blood in the alcohol stream had relaxed us a bit and seem less like nervous salesmen!

Cengizhan, the owner of Aquarium, didn’t seem to speak a lot of English, although I’m not sure his permanently bemused expression was entirely due to the language barrier. He seemed to be open to the idea from a commercial perspective, but energy efficiency obviously wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to.

Cocomo is a cosy little retro bar that we’d stand a good chance of completely packing out. The bar manager, Chris, told us that the owners were abroad but that he had “completely free reign” so he wouldn’t necessarily have to agree it with them first. He seemed really positive so we agreed to keep in touch.

Motherbar was completely empty apart from the barman, who was listening to vomit-inducingly cheesy pop music. Annesley phoned the manager the next day, got some interest and followed up by email. I guess they could use some publicity.

I’m not sure why we bothered going into the Electric Showrooms really. The bar is characterised by an enormous sign above the door, lit by a hundred lightbulbs. Something tells me they won’t be switching them to low-energy bulbs no matter how hard we try.

I think the response I got when I pitched to the owner of Jam was the closest to what I was expecting before I started – although he didn’t exactly tell us to get lost, he did use the opportunity to complain about how Hackney council made him pay for recycling collection and how it was pointless to do anything about climate change when China was building a coal-fired power station for every lightbulb we replace. He suggested we go pitch the idea at the monthly pub landlords meeting, but I think it would only take a couple of people like him in the audience to make us cry

Our first and only flat refusal of the night came from the owner of Kick. In no uncertain terms he told us that he was already doing as much for the environment as he wanted to in order to keep his concience clean, and that no amount of our hippie gold would persuade him otherwise. A brief glance around would suggest that his conscience was easily-satisfied.

We got completely the opposite response in The RedChurch. The owner was a real intellectual who obviously thought deeply about environmental issues and was yearning for a way to help. It was really refreshing to talk in depth with him and we got a real feeling that he would do everything he could to support us. He even offered us use of the bar during the day as office space. He also gave us our first firm offer. This wasn’t just mere acceptance or friendly positivity, this was wholehearted commitment to the idea.

We were a bit taken aback by how quickly the owner of Verge understood the idea. He didn’t say a lot, but we could tell he absolutely understood by the way he got straight to the point – “What percentage do I have to offer?”. We told him that he’d have to come up with the figure, and left him to mull it over.

Bar 2012 is owned by a friendly young Asian guy. He understood the idea and although he wasn’t exactly brimming with ideas about how he could spend the money, he seemed to really look forward to the opportunity to learn: both from an energy-efficiency advisor and from environmentally-aware people at the event. He had almost exactly the opposite attitude to the owner of The Foundry, where we had started the evening – he knew he wasn’t doing much for the environment right now, but he was quite happy to take our advice.

We certainly couldn’t have predicted the enormous range of reactions we received, but by listening to the concerns of different business owners, we gradually refined our explanation until we could quickly and successfully communicate the idea. It was an enormously rewarding, albeit slightly exhausting, evening and I’m really happy that we got a handful of very positive responses. The hard part could actually be deciding between them – just going to the highest bidder seems like such a cold, American way of deciding. Environmentalism is much more about having the right attitude and applying that to everything you do than it is about simply investing in energy-efficient appliances. Do we vote with our head or with our heart?

Photos by Annesley

The trouble with Bodder, like many new technologies, is that its true benefits are not immediately apparent, and hence are rather tricky to explain. Another key challenge is that, like other systems that rely on network effects, a social network isn’t much use until a considerable proportion of your friends are using it. Bodder neatly sidesteps this issue by focussing on groups – before you use Bodder to keep track of your friends, you can use it to stay in touch with other members of the same organisations, or to become connected with others who are in the same location or context.

Photo by Simon Hammond

We decided to boil the latter Bodder concept down to its core and ensure that every message had an audience, right from the word go: in exactly 7 days and on a limited budget, we created our own system to allow people to text a message to a large LED ticker display. It’s a fairly well-established concept, but it gets people over the first hurdle – deciding what they want to shout out to the crowd. As soon as they’ve posted a message, they receive a message informing them that they’ve just become the latest member of Bodder, linking them to a page where they can see all of the latest updates from the crowd… and can explore the rest of the Bodder site. Progressively disclosing Bodder’s functionality should make it easier for people to grasp, and increase the likelihood that the hook bites.

Simon wrote a fairly detailed account of how it all went, so I won’t repeat that here, but instead give my interpretation of the results. Although the technology itself worked well, we picked the wrong location to place it in. We chose a prominent, high location that was visible from a large area near the main stage and on a busy route. However, by choosing a position where we were potentially visible to a large number of different people, primarily those who were only passing by briefly, we automatically detached ourselves from any specific audience. This meant that the author of a message had no idea who he was addressing, if anyone, and destroyed any possibility of having a conversation via the screen.

This is probably a good lesson for any internet business to take onboard. On the Internet, it’s tempting to think of your audience as “the world”, but in most cases, you’ll actually attract quite a specific subset, even if the technology is sufficiently generic that it could really be used by anyone. Twitter, for example, is mainly used by the social media crowd, whereas MySpace has long been the home of independent musicians. In a Web 2.0 world, the community is key – not only do you need to know who you’re addressing, your users need to know who they’re addressing too.

This experiment was very successful in teaching us some hard lessons about social dynamics that we could never have learnt sitting at our computers. With these lessons in mind, we’re now planning on taking the same setup to a smaller indoor event where the screen can be visible to the whole crowd. We hope that by making this key change, we’ll get a much better idea of how technology can initiate and support conversations between strangers in the same location. If we can just get them over that first hurdle, who knows what could happen next.

VCA Technology is a young company developing intelligent video analysis software, primarily for OEM manufacturers of CCTV equipment. The OEM then sells to another company that brands the goods, which often go to a regional distributor before being sold to the final customer, often on the advice of a system integrator. Within the customer’s organisation there are different people involved in the purchasing decision, such as the head of security, marketing, finance and senior management. The trouble is, any of these people could potentially land up on the web site, so it was essential to understand the complete supply chain in order to ensure that the concerns of every visitor are addressed and that they find it easy to find the information they require in the language they understand.

Although it took a couple of days of discussions with the CEO, I think this time was well invested as it allowed me to be confident that content I wrote was targeted correctly and that the Information Architecture was appropriate. I enjoyed the challenge of going into a new business, developing an understanding of how their business works, and developing a solution to suit their needs. It was particularly rewarding as I was playing an unfamiliar role and yet still received very positive feedback about the end result.

Perhaps it was a bit unfair to unexpectedly stick a camera in their face and demand some feedback on how I’d done, but I wanted to play with my new toy, so here it is!

What if you have a goal in mind for these conversations, such as to persuade or build rapport? Then there’s an extra challenge – not just to keep the conversation flowing but also to steer it in a particular direction.

Of course, these are skills we’ve all been practising since we were born, but ones that we’re rarely consciously aware of. Although they’re crucially important to our lifelong success, we’re never taught these skills at school. The trouble is, that means that we tend to develop certain bad habits that impede our communication and give people the wrong impression, such as not making enough eye contact or standing with hunched shoulders.  We tend to assume that some people are just generally much better than others at these things.  I think that some people have personality traits that make it come more naturally, but also that with practice, we can learn how to behave so well that it becomes second nature.

I decided to make sure that the way I present myself allows my ideas to shine through, and enrolled on a series of training sessions that covered professional presentation and interpersonal skills.  Through a series of practical exercises, we practised how to present ourselves effectively, both verbally and non-verbally, and how to understand others. We learnt how to stand, sit and speak in order to command respect and make ourselves heard. We looked at how to communicate effectively by understanding which type of person is listening and altering how we present the ideas appropriately. The non-verbal exercises were particularly remarkable, as they demonstrated just how much we can tell about what others are thinking by subtle clues in their body language.

More than anything, I feel this course has made me significantly more self-aware about how I act while talking to people, and empowered me to alter my style to suit the situation. This means that I can be a better manager and team member, who can understand, persuade and motivate more effectively. I am now more confident approaching unfamiliar business and social situations and with selling myself, my ideas and my business.

So that it’s not so empty, I duplicated some of the relevant posts from orangejon.com but from now on, I’ll post work-related things only to this blog, so you might like to follow both if you wish to stalk me effectively.

In my dissertation, I suggested interfaces that group the stories according to the person they relate to, then arrange these people in two dimensions according to:

• their social context (by looking at shared friendships and co-appearance in photos)
• how much interest the user shows in stories about this person (by observing the user’s behaviour)

Here’s a short video I made to show one of these designs:


For more interface designs and details about how they could be implemented, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

In my research, I proposed five categories of friends:

• a close friend whom you see regularly
• a friend who was close but whom you now don’t see or contact regularly
• family
• a new friend whom you see regularly but don’t know much about
• somebody you don’t know well or meet regularly (face-to-face), but publishes good news

Although they seemed like sensible categories, the respondents to my survey only succeeded in categorising an average of 41% of their friends. In retrospect, I was probably rather naïve in assuming that people’s Facebook friends were people they’d with whom they’d had some meaningful relationship at some point in time. In any case, when asked how interested they were in seeing news about each of these categories, there was significantly lower interest in those not covered by these categories, suggesting that I’d not missed out anyone important.

So perhaps these categories have some value in helping people find the news that’s most interesting to them, but they have a key flaw. Not only is it tedious to try to categorise all your friends (the average respondent has 212), but friends will inevitably move between categories.

Facebook takes a different approach – when you add a new friend, they ask instead how you met. This comes back to the idea of friends existing within a social context, something which can actually be quite successfully inferred automatically by simply grouping people according to shared friendships and co-appearance in photographs.

I suggest that there’s probably a link between how much news you’d like to see about a given person and the social context into which those people fit. For instance, you might be quite interested in what your university friends are up to whilst you whilst you’re at university together, but when you graduate you might prefer just to hear about them occasionally – the 21st-century equivalent of the “christmas letter” some of my parents’ friends write.

Trouble is, online social networks such as Facebook don’t do anything useful with this information. Social context is ignored and all your “friends” news is presented you in one big heap. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which the user interface might be re-designed to help you find the news that’s important to you.

For more survey results and discussion of how the social models underlying social networks might be improved, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

I’ve got 167 “friends” on Facebook. According to my research, that’s pretty normal – actually it’s slightly below average. We all know, though, that of those 167 people, only a handful are “friends” according to the old fashioned meaning of the word – people who you enjoy hanging out with, people whose name you remember, etc. It’s true that online social networks are probably flattening social hierarchies somewhat by allowing us to easily maintain some level of contact with a much larger number of people than we would otherwise, but to think that they blow away 10,000 years of sociocultural evolution is hard to believe.

This gross over-simplification of social structure into a binary “friend” or “not friend” has two major implications. Firstly, it has major implications for privacy and impression management – if you added your mum as a “friend” (and it would seem rude not to), she’s just as likely to see those photos of you stupidly drunk at a party as your mates are. Or your boss, for that matter. Real friends tend to exist in a certain contexts – social boundaries that are rarely crossed, and for good reason.

Secondly, the news you’re presented with in the News Feed is flooded with all the latest gossip from the school-friends you added out of curiosity to see what they became. Sure, you could manually construct a friends list with only your closest friends in and only view their updates, but who can be bothered with that? Before they were removed, the feedback buttons and filtering preferences (where you could opt to have more photos, for example) promised to give you some influence over what appears in your News Feed, but my research showed that very few users had even noticed them, let alone used them regularly. There also seemed to be a great deal of uncertainty about what they were supposed to do or if they were actually having an effect.

By grossly oversimplifying relationships, ignoring social context and failing to give the user any way to effectively monitor and filter news from friends, online social networks are missing their golden opportunity to bring people closer to those they care about. In my next blog post, I’ll look at whether this situation can be improved by adding a little more realism to the social model.

For survey and interview results regarding the number of friends people have on Facebook, their level of interest in the News Feed and usage of the filtering facilities, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

• trust (for both parties): it seems that we are becoming increasingly distrustful of our fellow citizens, and especially of strange-looking people who stand by the roadside. Sharing a car requires a fair amount of trust in your passengers.
• lack of incentive for the driver: a good friend of mine (who is quite active in Christian groups) shocked me somewhat by admitting that when he sees a hitch-hiker, he thinks “get a job and get your own car, you freeloader”. Whilst not everyone is so selfish, many people won’t give up their comfortable solitude without a reason.
• more comfortable alternatives for the passenger: many people in our developed societies are rich in enough to run a car, or at least afford the occasional taxi. Why stand in the rain waiting for some kind soul to take pity on you?

For a regular commute, car-sharing with colleagues doesn’t pose these problems. But for those who work flexi-time, and for all other journeys not covered by good public transport, driving your own car is often the only practical option. The effect is obvious, with UK traffic estimated to grow by 26% on 2000 levels. By that point, congestion is predicted to have grown 65% overall (from 1996) and motorway congestion by a whopping 268%. (source)

But we have the technology to solve these problems and make ad-hoc carsharing a viable alternative to driving solo – especially if you factor in a bit of ecological guilt and fuel price increases.

• trust: as eBay has shown, many people are prepared to make risky financial transactions with complete strangers, so long as they can see the seller’s past history. A similarly simple reputation system could work here, too.
• driver’s incentive: many lone drivers might take trustworthy passengers just for company or to alleviate their eco-guilt, but others could be tempted by a bit of petrol-money. Or if they’re too proud for that, perhaps they could request a donation to their favourite charity instead.
• passenger comfort:no need to wait in the rain, you can be notified by SMS when your ride is approaching.

By integrating transport “offers” from mini-cabs, shared taxis and public transport, a joined-up transport service emerges that could really compete with the car on both price and convenience.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you really have to drive there. Perhaps it’s technically possible to get there on public transport somehow, but it’s hardly convenient. And then when you got there, you could only buy as much as you can carry, making the journey hardly worth the effort. Most people will drive and then fill up with enough food and supplies to last them several weeks. Of course, if your food has to last for such a long time, frozen or tinned is really the only option. As well as being less tasty and lacking in micronutrients compared to fresh alternatives, a significant amount of energy is invested in keeping food frozen from farm to plate.

The biggest advantage of traveling to a big store or retail park is that you can be fairly confident that they’ll have what you want. In a couple of hours, you’ll have filled your freezer and can merrily tick “shopping” off your to-do list. But present-day technology has the power to change that process, giving you fresher food and reducing your carbon footprint.

Imagine that instead of anticipating your needs weeks in advance, you were instead able to browse through a selection of recipes selected by a combination of your tastes, your culinary experience, the contents of your fridge and what’s currently available in your local shops. On your way home, you stop by a couple of smaller stores (guided by your mobile phone), where you pick up your pre-bagged shopping. By ordering in advance, you help the store manage their stock more efficiently. Easy access to real-time information has allowed you to change the way you shop – in a way that’s better for you and for the environment.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how more efficient and flexible logistics can reduce the cost of deliveries of your more exotic culinary requirements and other items, and how better information can make shared transport an attractive choice.

But there’s good news, too: we can solve it. Not just through alternative energy sources and more efficient devices – they will play a big role, but they aren’t the whole solution. We need to change how we live, and go back to what some call the “urban village” – urban lifestyles that don’t involve travelling large distances. At the same time, we can even use this social upheaval as an opportunity to solve some of the problems that plague our modern cities:

• traffic noise
• social isolation
• ineffective transportation
• declining food quality
• throw-away culture

Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing a series of short posts exploring how communications technologies can change the way we travel, shop, work and socialise. I’ll show that in this process, we’ll not only save our planet, but also make our cities nicer and more exciting places to live.

To some extent, they might be right – but at the end of the day, it’s every one of us who makes decisions that dictate what these groups do. Even if it might not feel like it sometimes, they’re all servants of the people and their salary comes out of your pocket every time you purchase something or pay your taxes. Happily, green is fast becoming the new black in some parts of the world and politicians and businesses alike have started battling with each other over their eco-credentials.

The trouble is that most people trust neither what politicians nor multinational corporations tell us, and don’t have the time to figure out whether they are making empty promises or are really making a difference. Occasionally, environmental organisations will expose the worst offenders or produce a ranking for a particular product type. But who goes to the bother of seeking out these reports? I know I don’t.

Perhaps the solution lies in giving consumers a trivially-easy way to check the “green-ness” of the products they are considering purchasing and allow them to make an informed, environmentally-aware purchasing decision. These ratings could be produced by a community process, amongst those concerned enough to spend the time to research and compare several competing manufacturers. The resulting eco-friendliness score could even be embedded into online shops, so that every customer can shop with a clear conscience.

The internet gives us such huge power to easily cross-reference information that few of us now make any significant purchase without checking a few product reviews first. Isn’t it time that we started using that same power to encourage companies to stop bullshitting us and really “go green”?