You Should Inferknow By Now

Have you heard of Inferknow? I hadn't until today, but now I'm hooked.

Inferknow is a Seattle-based company with a nifty piece of software called Green. It's an add-on for the Firefox web browser (which all the cool kids are already using — get yours here). Green helps you raise money to fight global warming while you surf the Web. But get this: You don't have to click anything, there's no bar over your browser window and there are no extra ads.

Green replaces the ads that you would have seen with ads of their own. Green uses the money generated through the application to pay for the construction of solar panels, wind turbines and reforestation. No gunky extras to freeze up your computer or give you the Mac Spinning Color Wheel of Death. In fact, when using Green, you see fewer ads. They have clearly found some totally awesome legal loophole, and I can actually surf faster now that I have it installed.

According to Inferknow, "The average desktop computer has a carbon footprint of about 400 pounds per year, and the average laptop has a carbon footprint of about 150 pounds per year." Green can reduce your footprint by up to 650 pounds per year, depending on how much you use the internet, helping you offset the CO2 emissions of less efficient users. You're raising money by letting them scalp ad space, basically.

I wanted to know more about this software, so I asked Founder and CEO David Bargeron how it works. "We don't steal ad space," he said. "When our software replaces an ad, it blocks it before the impression is counted, which means no one is ever charged for it. The ad we put in its place is typically much higher value, because we build a long-term relationship with our users and can therefore deliver them much more useful and relevant advertising that is customized to their interests. A portion of the ad revenue goes to funding environmental projects, and a portion goes to the publisher to pay for the ad space."

Still sounds crafty and clever to me, and I mean that in the Biblical sense. Companies pay a lot of money to have their ads displayed on websites. Green makes it so that our website visits and page views aren't counted. If Green really, really takes off, you can imagine that fewer page views being counted by advertisers could make websites less valuable. And that could mean trouble for lots of advertising-dependent web companies. That's bad.

Bargeron does say that part of the missed ad revenue goes to the Web publisher, but if enough people were to add the application and ad companies aren't getting paid like they thought they would, something's going to give. Contracts could be rewritten, and programs to block Green (and continue to sell us Viagra) will probably show up soon.

But for now? Add it. Why not? Let's save the planet until the other shoe drops. I see no reason why we shouldn't all be doing this — we'll see what happens.

They track what you're browsing to tailor advertisements to you, but so do Facebook and Google (yes, even your Gmail is watching you). At least Inferknow asks for your consent and won't release the information to third parties, like other browsers do. (If you didn't already know that, I'm sorry. Also, there's no Santa Claus.)

If you're not into the Firefox thing (cough, cough, hater, cough!) but would use it for Internet Explorer, they want to know. Visit their FAQ section, scroll down to #17, and click on the "Let us know" button.

According to the unobtrusive leaf on the lower right corner of my window I can scroll over at any time to check my progress. I reduced my carbon footprint by 0.12 pounds just while writing this article.

Bargeron said, "Thousands of people in 70 countries worldwide have installed our software. As you can see on our website, the Green community has offset more than 26,000 pounds of CO2 so far."

Let's do this, people. Go there.