The Greening Of The Internet

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Today is Earth Day, and you don't have to look any further than the home pages of the top Internet companies to see it. Green is the politically correct color of choice for firms that want to score cheap environmental points online.

The bias is most blatant at Google and its video-sharing subsidiary, YouTube. Google's logo has gone completely green, and the television screen within YouTube's logo is a snapshot of the earth.

YouTube also has turned over the prime real estate on its home page to earth-friendly videos, with headlines like "5 Easy Ways To Save The Planet" and "Veggie Cars." Oh, and don't forget, "Paris Hilton Is Greener Than You."

But Google and YouTube aren't alone in toeing the environmental line online this Earth Day. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Amazon.com are playing the green game, too. Even the Weather Channel, whose founder in March made the case for suing Al Gore to expose "the fraud of global warming," is making a big deal out of Earth Day.

This is par for the course in the technology world. As the former editor of National Journal's Technology Daily, I watched with a mix of amusement and disdain the past several years as tech firms rushed, like Kermit the Frog, to embrace their inner greenness.

It's part of their lingo now. "Green technology" is all the rage in Silicon Valley, the promise of bundles of a different kind of green in the industry's wallets for years to come.

The assumption in the world these days is that if you call something green, it's good. No debate allowed. All skeptics shall be ridiculed into silence and conformity.

That's good to know because these days, I'm the executive producer of Eyeblast.tv, a new video-sharing site designed in part to rival the bias that too often rears its head at YouTube and other sites. Our logo is green at Eyeblast this Earth Day, too -- but that's because it's green year round.

Unlike the chameleons you'll see running everywhere else online for the next several hours, we don't change our colors in order to pander to the pet cause of the day. When the rest of the Web turns back into a pumpkin at midnight, we'll be the same carriage full of conservative video as we were yesterday and today.