Thanks to Alan Levine’s blog post about the blogging plant in Japan I ran across this novelty. As can be read on Pink Tentacle,

Midori-san started blogging about a week ago. So far, the plant’s highly structured posts summarize the day’s weather, temperature and lighting conditions, describe its overall physical condition, tell how much light it received via the user-activated lamp (see below), and explain how much fun the day was. Each post also includes a self-portrait photo and a plant-themed pun (in Japanese), which Midori-san likely did not write. A graph at the top of the sidebar shows the plant’s surface potential in real-time.

Impressive for a plant. Now we will know all about it and can monitor its growth cycle, need for light etc. very closely. I wonder what the inventors come up with in the future. Will the blog send a message to the cell phone of the owner reminding him / her to water it? That’s what I would need in order not to neglect my oxygen producers. 🙂

Visitors to a web site have the opportunity to treat the plant to some light as Pink Tentacle points out:

Readers can also treat Midori-san to a dose of fluorescent light either through the website […]:

To activate a web-controlled fluorescent lamp positioned next to the plant inside the cafe, click the “Give Light to Midori-san”button at the bottom of the widget, enter your name (or a nickname), and click OK. […]

Once the lamp activated, the widget shows a real-time view of Midori-san under the light.

Judging from the blog content and the numerous “thank yous” below the fold of each post, Midori-san seems to really appreciate every chance it gets to photosynthesize.

This is really nice for the plant. However, when I read this, I was reminded of the movie “Untraceable” in which a killer sets up a web site that is connected to his murder instruments. The more people visit the web site the more quickly is the victim exposed to the lethal poison etc. Unfortunately, there is usually a dark side to a good intention and invention.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.