The Oil Drum

Calorie,

I am a member of the general interest public. Normally I don't "dilute the thread" like you are worried about, but this time I needed to comment. My apologies to those who get irritated by tangential comments.

Honestly I don't understand everything on this site, I'm a swimming teacher not a geo-physicist. BUT I have a stake in this peak-oil issue as much as anyone else. I heat my home, drive my car, and benefit from petrochemicals in many other ways. The more educated I become, and the rest of the masses, about one of the key issues facing civilization this century the more prepared I am to make decisions. For example I could pressure my senator or congressman, or decide to bike to work.

Being elitist just creates barriers, and if you're interested in finding solutions and planning for the future barriers won't help. Give the ordinary guy some credit, some day you might want the general public to understand the issues. Ignorant people might be annoying, but the people who have knowledge should be open to sharing it.

Calorie

I work in the federal government, although not at Energy or Interior -- do I qualify? or not?

I don't know how to adequately describe a contango or a backwardation, let alone explain the impact of geological structures on the development of oil and our ability to extract it. However, I am smart enough to understand that the oil companies are not the de facto spawn of Satan, and that the prices we are seeing at the pump are occurring due to economic, and perhaps geological, reasons that defy feel-good responses like suing the pants off of OPEC for price increases.

I have spent the past 37 weeks of my membership trying to promote an understanding of the peak oil issue, with varying success and using TOD as my primary source for information. It has been extremely helpful and many of the articles that Leanan posts are not aimed at technicians, which means that I and my peers will understand what is being discussed.

Please don't assume that the general public cannot be educated and cannot get an understanding of the issue. If that were true I suspect Portland Oregon would not have shared its report on the risks of Peak Oil and invited comment. Evidently they have more faith in the general public than you. Try to give the rest of us credit for using our heads for something more than a hat rack.

synchroGENized and Kheris,

Thank you for your comments. If I may ask, how did you discover this web site? Did it come to you or did you come to it? If you found it via one of the referral sites like reddit or digg then I stand corrected. If you came to it through a search engine or another energy blog such as WSJ's energy roundup or R-Squared, then I would argue that my point stands. My guess, and I could be wrong, is that trying to generate traffic by getting high rankings on the referral sites is not going to be very effective. A far better strategy, in my opinion, is to get noticed, referenced, and summarized by the major media outlets with strong online presence. One of the best things that has happened to this site was to get listed by WSJ's energy roundup.

One more thing. When I mentioned that the target audience for this site is probably not "the average person wondering why gasoline is so expensive," I didn't mean to imply that the average person is not smart enough to understand this stuff. I meant that the contributors, as far as I know, are not trained journalists and are probably not going to do as good a job communicating their message as trained journalists. The articles here are both too long and too technical. To get this material into the "general interest" arena, I think the site needs to attract top quality writers who are good at sourcing highly complex material and presenting it in a concise, easy-to-understand format.

Calorie wrote:

From the "raise awareness" part of this sentence, I assume your goal may be to reach as large a target audience as possible. I question whether this is possible or even desirable. I don't think this is ever going to be a general interest web site, nor do I think it should strive to be. I would suggest that a good goal would be to try to reach a key audience in government, industry, academia, think tanks, mainstream media, and so forth, rather than the average person wondering why gasoline is so expensive. You may or may not agree with this, but if you do, you ought to be far more concerned with exactly who is visiting your web site than with your total number of visitors.

Been thinking a LOT about this.

I disagree with you that this isn't a general interest website, in that, we are doing what we are going for the general interest.

I am an educator, it's what I do. As I have said a few times of late, I consider TOD a seminar beyond all seminars. Ideas are freely exchanged, materials are offered, time is given.

The blogosphere is a public endeavor in that regard, I can't (and don't want to) restrict who comes here and who doesn't. I can restrict who posts if needed, but I don't even want to do that.

It takes a lot just to be able to understand what TOD is trying to do. It takes investment, critical thought, but it also takes an integrative acumen that not very many people have. We're trying to help make that happen.