Along with other edglings, I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0 technologies and especially the frequently borked Twitter. Most folk I know are addicted to Twitter so that despite its many failings, we keep hanging on in the hope that one day, the management will hire a team of engineers that actually knows what it’s doing. That won’t wash in enterprisey land where buyers expect services to be at least fit for purpose and not suffering continuous outages and glitches. This morning for instance, the only way you can reliably see @ replies is to use Summize and enter @username as a search term.

Anyhoo - some enterprising people are thinking of building an enterprise class Twitter clone - well not a clone exactly, an enhanced version that works for enterprise. What makes this project interesting is that it arose almost spontaneously as a result of this Plurk conversation that spilled into Twitter. I found out about it because a person I was searching upon in Twitter mentioned it.

It turns out that a number of the players are people I know through my involvement with SAP’s community network as an un-remunerated mentor. (Disclosure: I do some paid work for SAP’s business process expert community.)

The other day, I wrote a post about Carbon Accounting as articulated by BT for the SAP Community Network:

I am dismayed. While I appreciate the efforts being made by companies like BT to promote the notion of solving sustainability issues, imposition of what are arbitrary standards and methods is not the way to go about it. In looking at BT’s approach I note they are attempting to apply a model that can be summarized from this reporting in Computing:

Developed by BT director of sustainable development Dr Chris Tuppen, the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) model links data on a firm’s carbon emissions and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), to global emission reduction goals recommended by the UN, to work out an appropriate emission reduction target for the firm.

The nub of the problem lays in the fact that it is almost impossible to arbitrate across industries on standards of this kind without an understanding of the different inputs and outputs that constitute a particular carbon footprint. At the same time, what matters to one company may not matter to another when it comes to discussing carbon emission reduction effectiveness. For example, if the cost of adding solar power requires a payback that’s outside the company’s usual rate of investment return do you do it for the sake of going green? The answer to that is clearly ‘no.’

It might instead be more effective to lobby local politicians to pressure solar companies into finding ways to reduce their costs so that you can justify the investment.As I say plenty and often, carbon emission reduction may be a top C-level item in boardroom discussions, but it has to take place within the context of an economic environment.

I have an upcoming trip to the UK which involves going to both Bangor and Leeds. There are two of us on the trip. Trying to figure out the most cost effective way to manage the trip is hard enough but then I also need to factor in the carbon emissions element. Here’s how it goes:

• Booking with RyanAir from Granada to Liverpool comes in at

Two entirely unrelated posts caught my attention today. Tom Raftery asks whether SaaS saves greenhouse gases. Quick as a flash, Chris Yeh from PBWiki does some back of fag packet calculations and comes up with the startling conclusion:

That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Tom is sceptical of the assertion, qualifying it to say:

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki