At Len Devanna’s blog, he announces a very cool gadget from EMC on their recently revamped emc.com – a downloadable application to calculate your complete digital footprint based on how much you email, send text messages, take digital pictures or videos, etc.  (There is both a mac and PC version).  Len’s was 11.7MB, and being the Director of eBusiness for a data storage company like EMC, I figured that’s some heavy bandwidth.  I don’t consider myself an online junkie, yet I scored 19.1MB!  The app then starts a running ticker showing bytes of data I have created.

First, this gives a great appreciation for how much data is created out there.  Some of the well known bloggers, podcasters and others out there will have much larger footprints, but think of how this ties to corporations, small and large.

Second, this is a terrific marketing tool.  Not only is it interactive, it has a direct correlation to EMC’s business.  I’d love to see a similar one created by Earth911.org or the EPA that shows how much trash we generate or each person’s personal impact on global warming.  Or instead of Alicia Silverstone naked, PETA could create an application that calculates your "animal cruelty" footprint.  The campaign for Florida orange juice could calculate your annual carbonated soda footprint.  A hybrid automaker could calculate how much gas is guzzled by driver behavior.  There are lots of applications.  Hmm – maybe I need someone to calculate how many times I’ve watched that PETA ad.  Nah, I only looked at it once, I swear.