Today is Blog Action Day and if you haven’t guessed the topic is about the environment.

BlueFur announced in February that as corporation we will be off balancing the carbon emissions used by our servers by planting trees. Since then a lot of flack to Green Host’s has come about saying that carbon balancing does not in fact make your company Green at all.

With that in mind what do you think about Green Hosting?

Personally I agree that carbon balancing is a fast way to provide a Green solution. It does not mean that we are using Green energy for all of our servers.

I still believe that corporations that do carbon balancing are in fact Green. These responsible corporate citizens are part of the solution where those doing nothing are part of the problem. Switching to all Green energy although a great idea is not feasible for everyone.

Before deciding how to provide a Green solution we did a lot of research in what would be the best solution. The long term benefits of planting one tree per server per year means we are in fact more then overbalancing for the amount of carbon used by that server.

Some criticism is that hosts are doing this as a marketing ploy. I assure we have no marketing ploy in mind when making the decision to be Green. In fact the intent was by going Green we could encourage other companies in our area to get into carbon balancing.

Is your company Green? If not why?

Yes, everyone seems to be in love with the Apple iPhone, but many have said that the iPhone is inappropriate as a business tool. Part of their rationale is that the iPhone lacks a physical keyboard, making it more difficult for the purposes of mobile email.

While the original HTC Touch — which some claim to be little more than an iPhone clone running on Windows Mobile 6 — suffered from the same “problem” by lacking a physical keyboard, it’s follow-up addresses this issue straight on without adding too much bulk. The HTC Touch Dual, shown above, is otherwise identical to the first HTC Touch (which is available through Telus Mobility and soon available through Rogers Wireless), except for the vertical slide-out keyboard.

At this time, there are two variations to the HTC Touch Dual: one has a standard numeric keypad, whereas the other has a keyboard that is closer to SureType, mapping two letters to each key. There are obvious advantages to either choice. Other features include a 2 megapixel camera, TouchFlo interface, Windows Mobile 6 Professional, and GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity, as well as 3G via HSDPA. If you want one in North America, you’ll need to import it.

Congratulations to this weeks geek Melayu who scored on our Star Wars Geek of the Week questions. This weeks questions are computer acronyms:

1.  What does BOFH stand for?

2.  What does SCSI stand for?

3.  Who does IBM stand for?

4.  What does WiFi stand for?

5.  What does AMD stand for?

We had posted in April that Google will penalize people for selling text links. We also surmised that this would bring the fall to companies like Text Link Ads. Over the last week or so bloggers have finally seen that those selling links are being penalized through page rank. Lower page rank to them means a lower income.

Has Google with this penalization brought the Fear of Google God into you?

This may only be the beginning of penalization for those sites that sell links. If you do sell links you may want to add the nofollow to those links ASAP and notify your customers.

Unless you are in a commodity business never compete on price. You are doomed to fail if you compete on price. Instead of competing on price work on your business to make it better then everyone else. The hosting and domain industry in the last 4 years has companies who are building their business solely on competing on price.

For example would you be surprised if I told you that GoDaddy has never made a profit since they have been open? Yes they make millions of dollars of revenue but at the end of the day they are always short from making profit. What do you think happens to a business that runs year after year in the red?

Several other hosts in the US who compete sole on price have resorted to unethical business practices to keep afloat. These hosts have been stealing customers 404 pages and inserting high paying pay-per-click or affiliate searches. What happens is if someone goes to your site where a page does not exist they usually get a 404 error. On one of these hosts instead of getting an error page you get an affiliate page. How scary is that?

We do not compete on price and will not compete on price. We will instead work on building a stronger service.

It’s official. Summer is over and autumn has arrived. The leaves are changing colors and there is a distinct briskness to the air. Be sure to bundle up when you head outside, but while you’re still sitting here in front of your computer, here are five fun reads I’ve discovered this week. Hope you enjoy them.

Jon Lee came across an interesting article in the New England Journal of Medicine that says that you shouldn’t drink ice cold water before you study or write a test. This is because cold water lowers your IQ by as much as 15%, which works out to about 10 IQ points on average. The effect is temporary but it could explain some of those test scores you had in school… right?

Search Engine Guide reminds you that Google isn’t the be-all and end-all of search engines. There are other demographics and users that you have to consider, and that’s why they’re offering an extensive guide that describes how to optimize for Ask.com. Sure, Ask only has a 4.3% market share, but Ask users shouldn’t be ignored!

Investor Blogger takes a look around the blogosphere to determine how many posts should be on your blog’s front page. He takes a look at guys like John Chow, who have only five posts, and compares them with GeniusTypes, which has 16 posts. Where do you fit along this spectrum?

Optempo is supposed to be an experiment in rapid paced blogging. You’ll find that “jfc” doesn’t get particularly long-winded with his posts, but I did find one that is a little more substantial than usual. This one tells you to not make one of these 3 mistakes with your eBay ID. Interestingly, none of these three mistakes have anything to do with getting scammed, per se, but rather with the way that you should conduct business on the site of the world’s largest garage sale.

Keeping on the topic of eBay, Ed Lau must have been shopping for more funky t-shirts and other awesome things when he found a missile silo for sale on eBay. We’re talking a complete underground lair, one that even Dr. Evil would be proud of. It’s 45,000 square feet of awesomeness and it can be had for as little as $1.5 million.