Good interactive ideas

Yesterday Cris Russell asked what “interactive” meant. She pointed out that merely clicking around a web site is little different than flipping through a newspaper or magazine.

Some of today’s suggestions have proposed excellent ideas to have readers meaningfully interact with a web page.

* Calculating your own carbon emissions
* Dueling blogs (two on one page) or Expert blogs (hopefully with expert contributions, to avoid he said/she said faux-balance of opinions)
* Coolest user on YouTube
* Interactive maps (to which users can upload their own illustrations of climate change, for example)

Also, I think it’s a great idea (nice one, Kat) to get attention-starved and under-appreciated grad students to advertise their work online. It would probably be a lot of work to set up a streaming feed from a lab, and to would require quite a bit of technical expertise. But we grad students are used to having to do all the work, and by and large science grad students are fairly tech-savvy. So a site would only have to ask, “do you want to be a celebrity?” and grad students would probably jump to do whatever it took to post information from their lab.