Presidential candidate Mark Warner, formerly governor of Virginia, is campaigning in Second Life, the poplular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game).

Computer giant IBM is building a new supercomputer which will be capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second (or one petaflop)! Blue Gene, as it will be called, will be 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, the machine that famously beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Wired News posts the results of its Wiki-story (see my earlier post here). The verdict? The final piece was a lot more complete and a lot more accurate, but lacked the flow of the “story”.

The San Francisco Chronical’s site SFGate.com charts some fo the woes of social networking sites Facebook and Digg.
Facebook: user backlash after the site introduces “news feeds” which some liken to stalking
Digg: users rebel against top users whom they accuse of gaming the front page

A lot has been made of the virtues of involving users in creating and managing content. These two example illustrate the other side of the coin – user power is a two-edged sword.

Update: Robert Scoble offers his own words of advice on how to manage the Facebook situation

Wired News argues that 9/11 marked the “birth of the blog” Wired quotes social media consultant Matthew Yeomans:”Back in 2001, blogs were still very much the geek toy of the Slashdot set. (But) this collective tragedy demanded a forum to be shared by people all around the world who wanted to talk about what happened with anyone because it was the only way of making any sense of it. Were it to happen again, blogs and social networks would play an enormously cathartic role.”

There was a very full discussion on APIs at d.construct. Simon Willison and Paul Hammond made a very good case for the internal consumtpion of APIs. They say that many new services are developed with much greater ease because the internal architecture is based around APIs which are published internally. This means that if someone wants to use avatars, for instance, they call the Yahoo! avatar API. If they need authentication, they call the Yahoo! authentication API. Smart stuff.

But the two then went on to talk about the general external consumption of APIs – mashups, as we’ve come to love to call them. There are several popular concerns about using mashups:

1. they are not for commercial use [not so, say Willison and Hammond – many APIs are open for commercial use]
2. they tie you in to one provider [not so, the early movers get to define the interface which others then follow. You can switch between Google maps and Yahoo! maps almost by just changing the name]
3. you are vulnerable when the API changes [no more so that when Microsoft patches its commercial software. And the major providers do give notice because of the pressures of point 2 above – this is my view, not one expressed at the conference]

The other really interesting thing to come out of the conference was a lively discussion on microformats. Strikes me that by implemented RSS everywhere and microformats on data such as calendar events and people’s names, you could almost build a set of internal APIs which make rapid, flexible publishing a dream.

I promised yesterday that I would write a full account of the conference today, so here goes.

The first thing to say was that it was very well organised – but in a very informal way. Everything was done over the web and email, there was a very intuitive web site , the price was cheap – £70 I think – and all you had to do when you turned up was be prepared to provide some ID.

This is the first conference I’ve come across in the UK which is starting to feel like the US blogging and Web 2.0 conferences (e.g. Blogher – for women bloggers) and it encouraged widespread use of social networking tools like this photostream on Flickr.

There was a great line up of speakers: for instance Jeff Veen project lead for Measure Map, Google’s newly-acquired analytics service; Jeremy Keith from Clearleft, Simon Willison and Paul Hammond from Yahoo!, Derek Featherstone, founder of Furtherahead , and Thomas Vander Wal, founder of Infocloudsolutions and the person who coined the term “folksonomy”!

It was a geek conference, but, apart from one presentation, not too geeky at all. And there were some good insights….which I will expand upon in my next post.

I’m in Brighton at d.construct 06 today. Although there is wireless, it’s hard to blog from here. I’ll review notes tomorrow and post.

Wired asks: is sending subscription jokes to mobile phones the killer app?

Pew, the survey organisation, has produced a handy page which brings together key statistics that they have produced over the years.