It was surprising to find that most of the connectivity between Europe and North Africa was provided by 4 cables that run along the same route across the floor of the Mediterranean, where they can all be taken out by 1 incident. The internet was conceived as a way of delivering electronic communications that could survive whole cities being obliterated by war, with the data always finding a way around the break to get to its destination. While that’s the theory, in practice there are lots of places where we find single points of failure. There are facilities in London’s Docklands that, if they broke for some reason, would take out a significant percentage of the UK’s internet connections. A fire in a tunnel in the North West of England 4 years ago impacted a very large number of people and businesses for several days, melting the only route many of them had to their favourite websites. The theft of some communications equipment from a Cable & Wireless facility took out Sainsburys online presence and many others. Single points of failure seem commonplace, in fact.

As the internet takes on a more crucial role for all of us every day, this seems like an increasingly serious risk. How is any small or medium size business supposed to keep its online operations going, if Sainsburys can’t? Even if it’s technically possible, costs would surely be prohibitive?

One interesting answer to this question lies in the increasing availability of fully managed hosting and connectivity in what’s referred to as Cloud Computing. Companies paying hundreds or thousands per month for dedicated servers in data centres may well find that it’s just as cheap (or cheaper) to transition to a service like Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud. This offers virtual servers on Amazon’s infrastructure (you don’t get a physical box: but a share of some of their kit) at interesting prices, and it’s possible to specify the set-up so that different servers are on different continents. If a box fails, it has no impact, and if you need another one, it’ll be there in minutes.

This is going to be a fast-moving area of development over the next few years. Amazon’s offering is attractive, but others are on their way, and it could mean more resilience, more performance, easier management for the same money. Soon many companies that have their own servers, racks and suites in data centres might find they don’t need them any more.

It might even be good for the environment, as the data centres these cloud businesses are building are among the most efficient that there are.

I had a small part to play in getting Green Thing going, and have followed its progress since launch keenly. It’s managed to meld creative genius, great humour and a really important message brilliantly. Well done!

I wanted to post a link myself because it’s an amazing personal account, about something important, and also because it shows the power of online when it’s done with authenticity and honesty. There are a bunch of very brave people in a remote part of the Congo, who are keeping the rest of us in touch with what’s going on in their efforts to save the mountain gorilla (only 700 remain in the wild) and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with a blog. The BBC, CNN, AP, Al Jazeera have all picked up this blog and are reporting. Some have sent camera crews to spend time with the rangers.

You can sign up for their RSS feed here, if you want to stay in touch.

Someone was surely trying to create an “all environmentalists are insane” story when they announced this morning that the UK Government was trying to get us all to switch from fresh to UHT milk. Had this story been true (apparently it isn’t) the outrage would’ve sent greens throughout the UK scurrying into holes, thus ruining Blog Action Day.

Personally, most of my activity in this field is about helping people to do the green thing. Sign-ups for the project are going really well, and it’s exciting to see something I’ve been involved with for almost a year come to such a successful fruition.

Thanks to Slasheco for reminding me (via Facebook, how web 2.0 of us) about blog action day… None of my reminder emails having arrived.

In preparation for Blog Action Day on October 16th, there’s a quiz that tells you what kind of blogger you are. I’m a purist expert socialite, apparently. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not…

Do the green thing! The project that I’ve been helping a little bit, to launch a creative, fun environmental website called http://www.dothegreenthing.com, went live on Thursday. The content and idea are really lovely, and it’s bound to generate lots of interest and action.

Well done Andy and Naresh, and everyone else who’s been working so hard on it. Now it’s up to the rest of us to use the site and take the suggested actions.

I’m going to join in Blog Action Day, a day when thousands of bloggers will be writing about the environment. The idea is to create as much noise and attention at once as possible. If you have a blog, join in!

020 8568 0022 is the number for Green Tomato. They’re a taxi company that only uses hybrid cars, and I had a ride in one last week. The driver told me he spends 20% of what his non-hybrid colleagues spend on fuel. Toyota can’t tell stories like that because of regulations around fuel consumption calculations, but I think it speaks for itself.

The only downside I can see is that the cars are so quiet when the engine is off that pedestrians don’t hear them coming!

http://www.greentomatocars.com/ is the URL.

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.