My last post was an email I’d just written to a friend. As I was writing the email, I thought, “I should blog this”, largely because I’d read this just an hour before:

When people tell me they’re too busy to blog, I ask them to count up their output of keystrokes. How many of those keystrokes flow into email messages? Most. How many people receive those email messages? Few. How many people could usefully benefit from those messages, now or later? More than a few, maybe a lot more. (Jon Udell, “Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes.”)

The whole post is definitely worth a read.

I’ve been pretty absent from blogging lately, but I think I’ll take this to heart, both for this blog and for work-related emails that might be better served by an internally-facing blog. My company is reasonably compact (certainly in comparison to Microsoft, anyway!) but we still have a lot of challenges spreading information around when people aren’t all in the office together and communicating face-to-face. We’ve reached a size now where, even when we are all in the office, some people are still out of the loop on X, Y, or Z because they weren’t present at the conversation in so-and-so’s office, or over the lunchroom table, or wherever.

And speaking of not blogging in a while, it reminds me that I also have a post on Yahoo Pipes and Dapp and many related issues that I started ages ago — like when Yahoo Pipes debuted — that I still haven’t finished… Too busy…

A friend just emailed me this link. MSN Autos has an article showing that the highest fuel efficiency models in 1992 were more efficient than 2007’s most efficient (non-hybrid) models.

I wrote the following in response:

On its face, this looks really awful, and I do agree that cars could be a lot more fuel efficient if cars companies wanted to make them that way and if people wanted to buy them that way.

But realistically, those high-efficiency cars from 1992? In general, they’re lawn mowers. They struggle going up hills. It’s no wonder no one wants to drive one. The fuel efficient cars from 2007? They’re real cars. The Yaris is totally suitable, and the Mini is downright sporty and fun.

Now, I’ll be the first one to agree with someone who says that gas is underpriced in this country, who says that we have an overwhelming bigger-is-better mentality that’s often not a good thing, that we are over-consumers and not concerned enough about conservation.

But, I don’t think that means everyone has to drive a small car. If you need a station wagon or an SUV or a pickup truck, that’s OK. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you have to drive a car that can’t make it up a hill.

What I really want is for the cost-to-benefit comparison to be more transparent, so that it becomes apparent to someone who’s driving a gigantic SUV what the tradeoffs between fuel efficiency and utility really are. Unfortunately, our current energy prices don’t take a lot of things into the accounting.