Several people have asked us both for a way to list their power prints on their blog, and also suggestions on how help spread the ideas behind WattzOn. To that end, this Thanksgiving, we’ve turned on the blog badge system. When you log in to your WattzOn account, on the top right, visit your account page and follow the link to “Blog badge” to get the code to paste into your templates. We’ve tried to write it in pretty unobtrusive HTML and Javascript so that it will work with any blogging system as it requires no server-side plugin.

Please drop us a line if you have any problems, suggestions, etc. — we’re actively looking for ideas on what else to add to the blog badge. Do you all want to have a breakdown of the different slices of your pie? Do you want to see how your power print changes over time? Do you want to have control over the “tagline”? All of the above?.

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I frequent this amazing coffee shop (within walking distance of Synthesis), and just watch paper cups leave that establishment in pounds. Every once in a while somebody (hopefully me) shows up with a travel mug — a reusable mug — and asks for coffee in that instead.

Its a simple question — which is “worse”? A paper cup, or a travel mug?

You can easily go either side on this debate: the paper cup is cheaper to manufacture, therefore it probably “impacts” the environment less; more paper cups are made every year than travel mugs (probably), so the impact of the paper cups as a whole are probably more; the travel mug is made of aluminum, whereas paper cups are just paper — mining aluminum seems more intensive than cutting down trees, the mug must be worse. What I think is missing from all these arguments is time.

Take a look at WattzOn’s energy labels for both of those: the paper cup and the travel mug. The travel mug clearly has more embodied energy in it — almost 30x the amount, in fact. In other words, it probably took 30 times the energy to get all the raw materials together for the travel mug when compared to the paper cup. But, your paper cup is disposable: a paper cup’s lifespan, while in your possession, is probably on the order of days whereas the travel mug, will stick around for years. Think of it this way - drink coffee five days a week? That’s about 250 cups a year, or 2500 cups for 10 years, the lifespan of that travel mug. Just looking at it that way, we’re talking about 90 times more energy in those paper cups over the 10 years. That 30x for the embodied energy is starting to look good, isn’t it?

This is why we use watts. We’re introducing time into the equation to give you a real way to compare these objects, services, and activities together. Watts give you a real and measurable way to have conservations about power usage and conservation. Crunching the numbers, and the labels show, the paper cup is 8.3 watts compared to the 0.06 watts of the traveler’s mug. The less powerful the better: buy yourself a travel mug and use that religiously instead.

This simple life cycle analysis is what WattzOn is good at right now (contribute by editing the paper cup or editing the travel mug, or creating a new item in the EED) — but it does bring up questions of how much water is being used to wash out that mug, the manufacturing processes involved in those two cups, and the shipping, marking, and distribution methodologies that are not being well accounted for now. But, these are all part of WattzOn’s mission. We want to give consumers the ability to ask these questions, come up with conclusions, and make informed choices that can affect change.

ps. Zing, the aforementioned coffee shop, kindly gives you a discount if you show up with a travel mug. Tell them Raffi sent you.

We have a new user here at WattzOn to help us celebrate the newly added support for international government data!  Let’s all give Mr. James Bond a warm welcome to the community!

Although there are numerous books and movies featuring James Bond, it would be insane to try to piece together a consistent lifestyle from all these sources.  So, let’s estimate his entire profile based on the actions of this film and this film only.

****SPOILER ALERT****

If you haven’t seen Quantum of Solace yet, please read no further – important plot points will be divulged in the name of power estimation!

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We mentioned it in a tweet, but we now have support for over 220 countries and territories in your WattzOn profile builder!

Now that we have all that data in there for manipulation, we can make images like the one you see on the left. The picture is a first draft, but we’ve taken our data (you can find it described on the government help page) and computed each government’s contribution of watts to it people. The lighter the country, the more power it’s government is using on behalf of its people (”the more light bulbs it has on”); the darker the country, the less its government is using on behalf of its people.

If you’re shopping for a new country on that basis, we can recommend Cambodia, Chad, Afghanistan, Niger, Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso. Another way to think about it, any country that hosted a Survivor season is also probably a good one.

Today we’re happy to say that we’ve launched two new features: an Atom feed for newly created “stuff” and histories for things in the Embodied Energy Database.  The Atom feed is really useful - when somebody creates something new, then its blasted out through this feed.  In it, you’ll find an “Add this to my stuff” link.  Just click it if somebody creates something that you know you have too and it will be added to your stuff profile page (and, its a pretty nifty way to discover new WattzOn users too as we have a link to public profile pages in the feed).

Check out the history page for the iPhone.  You can see that I tweaked the description a bit (or - I took it from the Wikipedia iPhone page), and, just to be more precise, I removed the 3G and GPS tags from the device.  I figured, looking at the mass that was created on it, that it deserved to be specifically the first generation phone.  And, I figured I would up the expected lifespan from 1 year to 2 years.

We first launched the site at Pop!Tech 2008 this year to a great session, and as the opening talk.

Download a MP3 or a M4V.

Fundamentally, we’re trying to build a calculator that gets better and better — we’re relying on the crowds to do it: to argue when they disagree about numbers, to fix numbers when they have mistakes, and to manipulate all the data in the system. Our principal feeling is we can’t make progress without the numbers to understand whether we are winning or losing the battle. And we don’t believe any one person has those numbers yet.

For those academically inclined, here’s a great paper (PDF, 151KB) from the Environmental Change Institute that agrees with us (even if they are focused on carbon):

The availability of social networking through carbon calculators could give all sorts of opportunity for data sharing, comparison, grouping, competition, and support.  As many of the social networking tools … are demonstrating, people gravitate towards these interactive experiences and enjoy being able to identify, connect and network with likeminded people.

Definitely one way to reduce your powerprint on the commuting page. Spotted on the street in the middle of Porter Square in Cambridge, MA. Which reminds me, have you noticed the small print on the commuting page: Commuting by bike does not affect your energy consumption, but you can use this value to compare yourself to other WattzOn users. Yup, that’s coming soon too.

We deployed a new comparison on your profile page: check out the ability to see how your life compares to lightbulb, both as 60W incandescent lightbulbs, and as 13W CFLs.  Somebody like Saul has a life that is equivalent to about 288 incandescents or 1327 CFLs.  Where do you stand?

ps. While we recommend, heavily, that you should be switching all your lightbulbs, its a drop in a bucket compared to the other things that you should be doing.  What percentage of your lifestyle comes from housing (where electricity currently is), vs flying or stuff?

In case you’re not at the Web 2.0 summit with us (or even if you are!), here is a copy of the slides (PDF, 5.6MB) from the talk yesterday.

Update (November 10, 2008): Also available on Slideshare.