Bottom line: Tree lover

It is heartening to see that bloggers take on worthy causes, even though sometimes hidden behind mundane complaints.

See Muhammad Salem, for instance, in a recent post, he calculated that at&t will destroy 74,535 trees in order to provide extensive and lengthy bills to Iphone owners.

The very same day, someone working for an at&t call center provided some information onto at&t's plans to transition toward "summary billing" (i.e. smaller bills) to improve the company's bottomline. His / her answers were then posted onto Salem's blog.

Two things seem really interesting with this story:

- The call center representative relayed information from at&t, but did not seem uncritically "sold" to the company. His / her voice was that of someone at the periphery of the company rather than a middle- or high-level manager.

- Salem's second post shows him feeling gratified with the answer he received. It is not that at&t altered its tree-destroying billing policy because of him. However, Salem's post raised awareness toward the issue, and the immediacy of the answer showed that his blog mattered, at least to a certain audience.