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A flurry of activity on free software blogs addresses the losses of freedom brought about by cloud computing.

The Free Software Foundation is concerned, that:

the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

Cloud computing presents a centralization of resources, hence a centralization of power. The software you're using doesn't run on your own PC, it runs on a distant server. The documents you're creating aren't saved on your local harddisk, but somewhere on the intarweb. The combination of the two presents a major shift of control away from you, an individual, towards a few giant global technology corporations.

That's scary. Read on for countermeasures.

Green IT is all the rage.

60 percent of global executives view climate change as important to consider within their companies' overall strategy McKinsey report on ITstrategyblog.com

A sudden outbreak of tree-hugging planet-conciousness? Nah.

I think the real reason that most IT shops should be looking at going green is the sheer cost savings component of it SUN CIO Bob Worrell on Biz-tech 3.0

First and foremost, this new trend is powered by record oil prices. Second: green has become a magical marketing word. A green spin covers any sin.

Hot air has become big business.

Webmonday Aachen yesterday featured great talks (video available) and lively discussions.

Technologies like XFN enable exchange of social network data between different carriers. Now people can search your social network through the Google Social Graph API.

As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their ‘consent’.

Suddenly even people in the dataportability camp start scratching their heads about the implications of unbridled data sharing.

The separation between our online identities is a feature, not a bug. Unifying our fragmented online selves into a total identity is not only technically difficult (XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks). It's also epistemologically unsound.

Not everything that can be done, should be done. We should be talking less about technology, and more about what we want. And especially about what we don't want.

If you start thinking about social data control, it soon becomes clear that ownership of social data, like opensocialweb.org claims in their Bill of Rights, is a fiction. If Alice publishes a link rel="friend" relation with Bob, and Claire publishes a link rel="coworker" relationship with Bob, we know a lot about Bob without having to ask Bob. It ain't Bob's data, and it ain't under his control. That's because it's social data.

Combine this brewing privacy backlash with mounting signs of social media fatigue and you may start to wonder if, maybe, social networking has reached the peak of it's hype cycle?

The announcement that Facebook apps can now also be deployed on other websites (outside Facebook), has gone largely unnoticed, except for some Dutch press coverage.

Following the introduction last year of the Facebook platform, which precipitated the OpenSocial effort, widening the scope in which Facebook apps can be deployed is potentially a big deal. Deployment of Facebook apps across the web is attractive for both application developers (gain exposure) and for Facebook (drive traffic).

However, Facebook may have passed the peak of it's hype cycle already. The proliferation of apps results in a deluge of spammy messages that seriously annoys the user population.

Exporting this problem to other sites will only hasten the "Through of Disillusionment."