It's almost taken for granted these days that your data lives Out There Somewhere on the Internet. If you set up a webmail account at a service like Gmail or Hushmail, your e-mail will ultimately be stored on a bunch of servers racked in a data center someplace you will probably never see. Users of social networks implicitly accept that whatever they post - updates, notes, images, videos, comments, what have you - will probably never touch any piece of hardware they own ever again. Everything stays in someone else's server farm whether or not you want it to, and while there …

MySpace, one of the biggest and best known social networking websites on the Net has announced that they'll be putting volumes of their users' data for sale on the open market. An outfit called Infochimps, which specializes in such bodies of data as stock market trading activity archives, political statistics, public service usage surveys, and social network data dumps will be handling the sales. The data will include such user generated content as playlists of music, posted photographs, blog posts, and users' stated locations. Some of the data dumps will even be organized by the (approximate) latitude and longitude of …

If you've been on the Net for a while, you've probably seen buttons or tags for Digg, which is a community-based news management and relay website. The idea is that news articles are submitted by users, and everyone else on the site votes on how interesting, relevant, or helpful the articles are. Articles deemed popular through this method rise to the top (theoretically) while unhelpful articles sink to the bottom and are lost (again, theoretically).

Somebody developed a Tetris-like game seeded from Digg's RSS feed. For every article submitted, a game piece enters play. It moves pretty fast, and is …

The article says that so-called bedouin workers, who don't work out of offices or their homes, but from restaurants and coffee shops all day on laptops seem to be indigenous to San Francisco, California, but I think I've seen them in DC, Virginia, and New York City in my travels (and come to think of it, I was probably one of them during my last job in Pittsburgh). Rather than pay by the square foot for office space or work out of someone's bedroom, basement, or garage (which seem to be the traditional birthplaces of companies), people are paying by …