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,

I'll second that.

A lot of readers here at TOD are scientists, engineers, computer wizards, etc.

It doesn't blow them away when someone posts a chemical formula

CH3-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH3

or a math equation

y= A*e^-(kt)

But think about your average swim coach.
This stuff may sound like a lot of hooey.
Maybe we need a TOD-Lite site?

Not really. They can just jump in and sink or swim :^)

Just point 'em to the Tech Talk link on the main page and give 'em the laws of thermodynamics:

  • You can't win;
  • You can't break even;
  • And you can't get out of the game.

That, and children are much faster learners than adults ...

Thanks DIYer. Those Tech Talks in the early days of TOD were really educational. Note how few comments there were back in '05.

I read Kunstler's book The Long Emergency, that's what got me started. I do believe he mentioned TOD.