The Oil Drum: Canada

Before we leave the topic of the ASPO-USA Conference in Sacramento, I wanted to make sure a few things didn't get missed. The big one was that The Oil Drum was one of the recipients of the M. King Hubbert Award, for Excellence in Energy Education. The other recipient of the Hubbert award was Global Public Media.

In this post, I include Dr. Kyle Saunders' (Prof. Goose's) acceptance speech. I also show photos of TOD participants and give brief summaries and links to the presentations TOD folks gave.

Noon EDT on http://www.kzyx.org. Have a listen!

Over the past few months, several users pointed out that the submit button on the comment preview page wasn't working in Internet Explorer. It turns out that the cause is a bug in the comment rating module (you can read more about it here). I upgraded the module, but that seemed to introduce more problems than it solved. So now I've reverted to the comment rating module that has the comment preview bug. To get around the bug, you can copy the text from the comment preview form into a fresh comment window.

TOD:Europe also broke its monthly record--over 150k visits in the month! Talk about a "wow." Congrats guys, well done.

TOD averaged ~28k unique visits a day and ~61k views a day. Google analytics estimates that around 336,000 different visitors (by IP) came through here in the month of June. Wow...

The whole TOD enterprise doesn't happen without all of you coming here and taking part. We thank you for your patronage, your helping spread what happens here around the web, your civilly intelligent participation, and your enforcement of the norms we have created here. People can inform and learn from each other, and we thank you for making it happen.

More site stats under the fold, including our top referrers, which are sites you should patronize at every opportunity.

My colleagues here are pretty amazing people, aren't they? They work their rears off. :) Thank them the next time you get a chance--they deserve it, at least in my humble opinion!

You all are one hell of a community.

For the next week or so, we're going to be conducting a trial of a comment rating system.

Here's how it works: At the bottom of each comment, there is a form with a number, an up arrow, and a down arrow. The number is the comment's rating. To rate a comment up, click the up arrow. To rate a comment down, click the down arrow. Once you've made a rating, the arrow you've clicked will get filled in. You can change a rating as many times as you want, but at present it is not possible to "unrate" a comment. In other words, if you accidentally rate a comment down, the only way you can undo it is to rate the comment up.

Many readers have reported that they have not been able to access The Oil Drum since we moved to upgraded servers on June 1. So far, we have determined that access is blocked from the European ISPs BlueWin and UPC. There are also sporadic reports of blocked readers in the United States.

Readers can circumvent this problem for the time being by using proxy servers such as Pawxy or Anonymouse.

Thanks to all of the users who responded our requests for routing information. We have passed it on to our upstream internet provider who is working to solve the problem.

We would like to find two or three contributors for TOD:Local.

What do we want? TOD:Local should be kind of laboratory/testing ground/etc., for others to learn about ideas and solutions and failures, whether they be policy, political, or technical. It should also be a place where local and state policymakers can come together to talk about these things.

Some ideas:

1. Best Practices - Demonstrating how local communities are adapting or can adapt to peak oil by becoming more sustainable.
2. Cultural essays - with or without a local bent, but something about challenging misconceptions or misguided behavior given the implications of PO
3. Policy Process and Alternatives - What are we doing at a local/state level, and how are we doing it?

Email me at the eds box if you are interested...

The Ohio State University Department of Public Health is sponsoring a web-based teach-in today, which they would like TOD readers to help publicize.

Converging Environmental Crises:
A Teach-In on Energy, Climate Change, Water, Agriculture and Population

Thursday, April 10, 2008
11:00am to 4:00pm EDT
http://sg60.oar.net/Environmental_Crises/

It's free!! Gail's talk is up already at the link above, as are (or will be) talks by Friends of TOD Rep Roscoe Bartlett, Dan Bednarz, Jason Bradford and Bill Catton. There is also a live link to the teach-in as well. If you are having difficulty connecting, the last page of this PDF gives some troubleshooting tips. It doesn't work with Safari, and you cannot be using pop-up blocker, among other things. It may not work if you are behind a firewall.

More information about the Teach-in at this link: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3781