Greenpeace is calling on Facebook to “unfriend” coal by Earth Day on April 22. The Greenpeace Unfriend Coal Facebook page has over 98,000 likes.

“Just as Facebook has revolutionised the way the world communicates, so it can revolutionise the IT sector’s current reliance on coal,” Greenpeace said in a blog post. “Facebook’s reputation for innovation means that wherever it goes, other IT companies will follow.”

Greenpeace is asking Facebook to develop a plan by 2021 to be entirely coal free. It is also calling on Facebook to educate its users about how it powers its services and its carbon footprint.

“At current growth rates, data centers and telecommunication networks – two key components of ‘the cloud’ that Facebook depends on – will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020,” Greenpeace says on its Unfriend Coal Facebook page.

“That’s more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. Facebook has a real opportunity to lead by example by extending this spirit of innovation to the environment.”

eSolar and Makani Power are scheduled to lead the charge along with the search engine giant.  What’s more, the initiative – known as Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, or RE<C – “is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas.”

There’s no guarantee that RE<C will have more luck than however many corporations and inventors have already tried their hands at this sort of thing.  Still, Google’s backing might really mean something – the company at times appears to have a golden touch – and cofounder Larry Page hopes the initiative will have results in “years, not decades.”

More information about RE<C is due out later today.  We’ll keep our ears open and eyes peeled as this potentially world-changing development is discussed.

Recently Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, said similar. Because of Blake’s market position, the exact same story was credible, important, spread, and is something Matt Cutts needed to make multiple blog posts about.

Based on the credibility and market position of an author certain stories may be important, or may be worthless. Even completely true stories may still cut at your credibility if you don’t later reference them again to remind the dismissive parties of how their thought process changed over time.

The media is largely owned by conglomerates tied to banks, geared toward selling ads and their business agendas, manipulated every day, but most authorities would like people to blindly trust the media as a representation of truth, even as that same media wraps self serving messages in a self-aggrandizing article that dismisses their competition.

Search is also a topic that is easy to love, but SEO has been painted as a scourge on the web. Any authority or authority based system has to pretend that they hate market manipulators to justify their own legitimacy, market position, and how they got where they are.

SEO is largely based on speculation and predicting market trends that most people do not see, so it is easy to be seen as having little credibility, so long as your brand is focused on SEO, even if you are 100% correct. At least one board member of a major search engine has called me for investing advice, though I guess it would be a bad idea to blog any specifics on that.

It is quite ironic that the main reason this site was worthy of press attention is because I was sued by an unethical business, and I can even get interviews published in the London Times as an expert on Black Hat SEO largely because I own the matching domain. But even after about an hour of talking, showing highlights of how search engines pay for much of the spam, and how they don’t stop paying for it even after they catch it, all I could get was a few sweet soundbytes like:

“Who is and who isn’t a black hat is dependent on what Google says is black hat,” said Wall. “They would certainly class me as a black hat.”

Nice.

And then you remember that stories need to sell ads. To do that they exposure. To do that they have to be controversial. They have to be pitched, sold, and then the matching facts have to be collected. Rarely is there ever enough column space to risk challenging conventional wisdom if you can be controversial and conventional at the same time.

Knowing that the whole polarized black hat vs white hat garbage was going to get more and more self serving press was probably smart marketing, but is it SEO? And, if a site that cost me a half a day and under $100 gets me featured as content in the London Times (with an HTML link) is that efficient marketing?

A year and a half ago I predicted that Google would eventually create an automated commodities trading platform where they could leverage their pure data. Since then Google has leveraged their market position and used predatory pricing to become a large payment processor. Just about anything without a brand will eventually be commoditized by cheaper communications, search, more efficient markets, and other forms of automation that are good enough. Google has already won the web. Don’t be surprised if you see Google Checkout offline in 2008.

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
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There were a whole lot of stories surrounding it, including that Apple had converted a coal mine like this to commemorate their 30th anniversary, “a mine Steve Jobs won during a poker game with the late publishing/ gaming tycoon Kerry Packer“. Of course, none of it could be true, since Amit Agarwal discovered the building looked exactly the same in 1999, before the first iPod was built.

Oh, well.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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