Does anyone want to help make a quick website that could answer this eternal question, and perhaps spread a bit of environmental advice as it goes?

Along the lines of isitChristmas, but obviously localised by Post Code, the site would offer RSS and iCal feeds of whether it’s bin day for you — with reminders the day before, and telling you what week it is for recycling purposes (green or paper/plastic) for those that have differences. Along with this simple, but useful service it could impart environmental advice and info slipped into the RSS as well as somewhere on the site. It could even do calculations of stuff like “my council doesn’t collect X, is it better to just bin or drive it to the recycling centre?”.

It could get a few ads from electricity suppliers etc to pay its way perhaps.

With people barely having a thought we don’t in some way publish to the interweb there’s continuous chatter about information overload. I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d rather have all the information there was, leaving it up to me to pick what I wanted and what to ignore. It’s this that leads me to never ever getting my feed reader down to less than 2000+ unread items (most of these are flickr photos tagged “cat” or various vanity searches for my projects).

So, given that the background noise is of my own making, why would I complain about too much information?

Well I’m not complaining as such, I just think there needs to be a solution to the problem of getting the same information twice from different places. A technical one may do, but I’d rather a sort of moral code.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, with people pushing their blog posts through their tumblr or twitter accounts, or into their Facebook posted items – this is information that I want, but I’ve subscribed to the blog I’ll find it there. It would be fine if the sources were just different ways of receiving the same content, but there’s other unique stuff mixed in - I like my contacts personal tweets, or their randomly tumbl’d web content, so I get the blog posts again. You end up skim reading everything, so I’m sure I miss things I’d like to have known.

I signed up for FriendFeed this week, more to claim my online identity there that through any desire to use it at the moment, but is it just another way to push the same content? ReadWriteWeb listed 35  ways to stream your life, albeit that some of them are rather hazy, I’m just thinking that I’d rather cherry pick what I care about from different people.

Since I’ve had my iPhone I’ve become interested in the names people give their wifi networks, the way that the phone brings them up for you as you walk around made that inevitable. So I took to writing them down - I found that I was interested in what it said about the thoughts of who set them up. ‘Secure’, ‘Home’, or peoples names – or those who cared so little they left the default on. I collected these ones here on my normal travels around Birmingham (UK) in January and February of 2008 – the larger ones in the ‘cloud’ do represent multiple networks with the same name, but I haven’t done that scientifically.

I think it works quite well as a poster - I uploaded the graphic to a cafepress store so I can buy one when I get some royalities of some of my other shops.