As I mentioned the other day on Twitter to you, we welcome feedback at Greenscroll, even the critical kind as above.

We only launched in July 2009, so are still very young. To that end, there are only three of us — Nik, Sasha and myself — running Greenscroll, during the evenings, at weekends, and in any other spare time we get. We are all non-paid. (@suleymani is not an employee; we sponsored his R4 Fashion Show last year.) You’re right, one day when we start to get bigger, we may be able to hire a marketing professional … but at the moment, we don’t have the funds, so we do it ourselves. We call that transparency, and means you can pick up the phone and reach any of us on the other end, rather than go through a PR company.

Further to that, Sasha’s first language is not English, so sometimes the meaning of his message does not come across as intended. He has passion for the subject matter at hand, has invested his own money in co-founding Greenscroll, and running the technology behind the scenes. If you’re not happy with the response to some of your conversation, feel free to speak to him in person; he’s happy to chat with you on any aspect of green hosting.

On the subject of green hosting, that is not the full story. Just because something is hosted at a green hosting company, it doesn’t mean the network, and client machines etc. are not using “brown” energy. We are trying to make people aware of that fact.

You comment: “Except that the web host for your site is not green.” We say, using Greenscroll frees you from the ties to green hosting. We use Slicehost: cloud hosting. In our opinion, Greenscroll uses the most efficient server software available at the moment. Again, this is Sasha’s expertise, so feel free to call or e-mail him for clarification.

This section: “I can either use this technology now or pay you to go invest? Sounds like technology is beating you to the punch. What you do give me is a ‘Greenscroll Certified’ button, because I pay you $5 a month? I believe this is deceitful to consumers who care about green and often give business to a company when that company has some evidence of being green. You are offering companies the ‘look’ of green without any evidence thereof. They have to do NOTHING to do to be green except pay you.”

Deceitful, by definition, is “deceptive, false, fraudulent, delusive, lying, treacherous, tricky, mendacious.” Those are not words we associate with Greenscroll. We are being open, putting ourselves out there, and trying to educate people and encourage them to put a little back into “good” energy that will help us all down the road. Our names, photos, contact details are on the site.

I hope that I don’t come across as “reeking of ignorance” in answering your critique. Nothing more to add at this stage, except I hope we can continue this conversation at a future stage in our development.

Many thanks,
John Carson
Co-Founder, Greenscroll
@johncarson, @greenscroll
http://www.greenscroll.org

Looking Forward,
Seth