Alexis writes:

In 2000, California consumed about 60 million gallons of ethanol.
That grew to 100 million gallons by 2002 and 600 million gallons by
2003, according to the California Energy Commission. In 2006,
California consumed about 970 million gallons of ethanol. That’s a
1,500% increase in use of the biofuel in seven years.

Some in the energy debate say that this type of transformation is
impossible. Other say radically changing our energy infrastructure is
necessary. Many realists seem to suggest that both statements are true.

Read the rest for more. This is journalism you can be proud of. It’s only accountable to the folks that funded it, and it’s good and necessary. A taste of good things to come.

Merlin Mann to the rescue. In yet another awesome post, the man who made it cool to think about things like todo lists breaks down nine things that “help make for a good blog.” The post is itself a good example of what makes a good blog post — it’s funny, it presents information as a must-read list, it’s unorthodox — and includes essential nuggets like this:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

And this:

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.

Note the (added) emphasis. Mann highlight two important aspects of good blog writing — focusing on obsessions and carefully crafting your posts — but it sure to interject some teenage-level dirty humor. The result? I get what he means, I laugh, and it sinks in. Again, the actual form of his post illustrates his points. Although why only nine, and not ten, items on the list?
As we at Change.org develop blogs about nice and light topics like genocide, human rights, criminal justice, and global warming, it’s key to remember that your best points often are made with humor. I’m not sure how funny we can make Darfur, but we can try.
If I could, I would have every blogger read this post for breakfast for a month. I really would.

…there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom…

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior….

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

I tend to disagree with Brooks on, oh, nearly everything, but methinks there’s something here. There’s a lament for the old, “refined” version of culture buried in this piece (which is supposed to be “funny”); he seems flabbergasted that our culture obsesses about the means, rather than the fruits, of production. The iPhone (or, more accurately, the techo-cultural change it represents), says Brooks, has turned tastemaking on its head, making those of us that bookmark, aggregate, and share content the thought-leaders and those of us who make the content second-class netizens. (What about those us that do both?)

Take out the linkbaiting references to iPhones and Gizmodo, however, and you’ll see that what Brooks is describing is the gradual democratization of popular culture. To use his example, to be able to quote and dissect “The Waste Land” took an expensive upbringing of fine schools, absorbing literary taste via familial osmosis, and an impressive knowledge of the English language. It wasn’t for the masses, and it wasn’t meant to be.

But networked culture — in whatever form it takes — gives us the chance to move on from T.S. Eliot’s show-offery and to point to those things that we find valuable, deep, and interesting, and to share them with people in our social network.

In 1960, as today, “The Waste Land” was meaningless to most of us lacking an Ivy League education. Yet it sat atop the cultural pyramid, the pinnacle and symbol of higher learning and refinement. Now, a post on Boing Boing about bike seats that give cops “penile numbness” and erectile dysfunction is also meaningless to most of us, but it may be read by half a million people in one day. For some, in order to prove your intellectual credentials, you need to be reading posts like this on Boing Boing.

The truth is, there are a billion other things you could be doing or reading that also bolster your credentials. Most thought-leaders start out by asserting that whatever obscure-but-interesting thing they know about is actually important. Though the network, many of them rise in popularity. Others never do. Either way, this system usually has nothing to do with traditional learning or upbringing but by having something unique and different to say. That seems like a much more natural unfurling of culture than being force-fed cultural treasures by over-educated white men.

I’m not making a qualitative comparison between “The Waste Land” and Boing Boing (though that would be interesting…), but a distinction in the way we receive and transmit meaning and culture. That’s been changing for a long time, and will continue to change, and I’m encouraged by the thought that more of us can become thought leaders by participating, commenting, and posting, rather than by the dumb luck of being born into the right family in the right place at the right time.

(We at techPresident also worked hard on our own version of an online debate, producing 10Questions.)

Such innovation was particularly on display at the MySpace/MTV candidate “dialogues,” an update from MTV’s old townhall-style sessions from the Clinton era. The dialogues used the full power of the social web to involve viewers and voters from across the country in a conversation with the candidates.

So one would expect that MySpace, which has clearly used their tools to push the envelope, would, uh, push the envelope. But it looks like the vice grip of the Commission on Presidential Debates has squeezed the fun and — more importantly — the democracy out of these newfangled debates.

Basically, the video of the Obama/McCain debates will be streamed and you can embed it. Golly!

Micah at techPresident registers the appropriate amount of outrage:

What they’re offering us here is little more than live video streaming, which is like, so, year 2000. When you consider what YouTube and CNN did in the past year, along with what MySpace and MTV did, as well as what we did with 10Questions.com–in each case to expand voter participation in debates and in some cases open new kinds of feedback loops, you have to admit this is really disappointing. Honestly, it would almost be better if they didn’t bother to include MySpace. (And one might want to ask, why only MySpace when plenty of other sites and services could provide this video service?)

Sigh. And things were getting so fun.

Day Two (for me) of Netroots Nation and I’m a bit fuzzier-headed than I was yetserday, thanks to free Chimays at the HuffPost/GQ party last night and an unspecified amount of beers afterwards.

But I woke up here at a panel on health care and the web.  Melinda Gibson from Health Care for America Now just showed a fantastic video from Andy Cobb, the web video maestro who’s been on the election beat all year.  This one, however, is about health care.

I just loved it.  Maybe it’s because of that fuzzy head of mine, but damn is it good.