And on the subject of efficiency...

In the last blog post, the article on improving efficiency had this great quote:

Efficiency is often confused, detrimentally, with conservation. Conservation connotes making do with less — turning down the heat or driving a smaller car. Efficiency means getting more bang per buck.

Another way to think about this is how do you use the most of what you have. Rachel Botsman is quoted in this article on Collaborative Consumption that "80 percent of the items people own are used less than once a month." This is pretty amazing and it rings true. We buy a lot and we throw away a lot. Many of these items can be used by others with imperceivable wear and tear on the borrowed objects. Yet we don't. So of course here in Silicon Valley we have a simple solution....

...the internet

So basically there are these sites that enable people to log what they have and share things. Think Delicious Library 2 on the web and with software to keep track of things and who has what. And that's the model, right now libraries are government owned entities, but what happens when everyone become a library?

The clear way is to figure out a way to take advantage of one's buying history to create a library automatically for everyone. The best source for this in the U.S. might be Amazon. Imagine downloading you Amazon purchase history and annotating those things that you will share. Imagine buying with sharing in mind?

Any takers in the internet land out there? Amazon has the interfaces, who has the sweat equity?