UI puts Moscow’s best green footprint forward

The University of Idaho has produced a Green Map of Moscow, a way for the locals to navigate that city and leave a tinier carbon footprint.

Developed by the school’s Sustainable Idaho Initiative, the map is at greenmap.uidaho.edu.

The map highlights some 157 different green features. It includes parks – both dog and human – arboreta, Valley Transit bus routes, recycling venues, bicycle lanes and parking, environmentally friendly buildings like the University of Idaho power plant on the corner of Sixth and Line streets.

“This map is interactive, which makes it very cool and certainly different from most maps,” said Bruce Godfrey, a geographic information specialist for the UI Library’s INSIDE Idaho Project.

Each icon on the map can be clicked for more information about the green feature.

Most have pictures of the area, and some have links to separate Web sites.

Small number use most bandwidth

Noted blogger Om Malik did some digging into Web traffic (not unlike those traffic reports called in from a helicopter).

He concluded that a small proportion of Web users account for a vastly disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

Ten percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth, Malik wrote in his blog GigaOM. A very tiny 0.5 percent of broadband users swallow 40 percent of bandwidth, while the silent majority, or 80 percent, consume less than 10 percent.

Moreover, it turns out – again, quoting Malik – that file-sharers are not the busiest traffic hogs. They account for 20 percent of total traffic. Streaming video sites, like YouTube and Hulu, now account for 50 percent of total traffic.

Google top corporate brand worldwide

For the second year in a row, Google sits atop the list of most favorable brands in the world, according to an industry survey.

Arranged by research firm Millward Brown and called the BrandZ ranking, the list of most impressive corporations for 2008 includes Google (now valued at $86 billion, up 30 percent over last year); General Electric; Microsoft; Coca-Cola; and China Mobile, all registering increases between 15 and 39 percent from the previous ranking.

Apple, ranked 16th in 2007, moved up nine places to seventh, with its brand value estimated at $55.2 billion, a 123 percent increase over last year.