With computers sucking up an ever larger portion of the world's energy output, two Google engineers will today push the computer industry to reengineer power supplies to improve their efficiency, reports John Markoff. The electric power industry has a similar initiative ongoing.

Mohit Chhabra finds the link between information technology, the Winchester Mystery House, and Indian businesses.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a report called "The Future of the Internet," a speculative look ahead to what will be happening in 2020 based on a survey of experts and pundits.

A lawyer provides a quick rundown of some of the key legal implications of business blogging.

Kent Newsome looks at a response to the Dead 2.0 semi-outing and sees red.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen announces that Reuters is providing some money to launch NewAssignment.net, his experiment in "open source journalism, where people collaborate peer-to-peer in the production of editorial goods." "In some respects," comments Ian Delaney, "NewAssignment sounds like a Citizendium for news."

Bruce Schneier writes that the recent "Facebook riots" show that "privacy is more about control than about secrecy." But even though web companies need to respect that fact and "give users as much control over their personal information as they can," in the end users "are just fooling themselves if they think they can control information they give to third parties." He concludes: "we all need to remember that much of that control is illusory."

Larry Sanger responds to Clay Shirky's critique of the Citizendium concept: "I think Clay lacks any good reason to think the Citizendium will fail; but clearly he badly wants it to fail, and his comments are animated by wishful thinking."

Gizmodo reports that Microsoft has already slashed the price of its forthcoming 30 GB Zune music player, from $289 to $229, in response to Apple's cutting of the price of the 30 GB iPod from $299 to $249. Talk about a consumer's dream: a price war that breaks out before a product is even released.

Oh unreal world! Boing Boing finds that Hewlett-Packard has added a "slimming filter" to its digital cameras. HP's pitch: "They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!"

The boom in the solar-panel business has led to an "acute shortage" of silicon, driving up prices. The shortage should continue for at least two years as silicon makers build new factories, reports the Financial Times.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Forbes that mashups will "transform the business world."

Phil Edwards writes: "The artificial elitism of the Wikipedia community doesn't only marginalise the 'masses' who contribute most of the original content; it also sidelines the subject-area experts who, within certain limited domains, have a genuine claim to be regarded as an elite."

Seth Finkelstein says the blogosphere is more about demagoguery than democracy, as it provides greater incentives for argumentativeness than for reporting.

John Markoff reports on a technological breakthrough that promises to allow data to be sent between a computer's microchips with laser beams rather than through wires: "Commercializing the new technology may not happen before the end of the decade, but the prospect of being able to place hundreds or thousands of data-carrying light beams on standard industry chips is certain to shake up both the communications and computer industries."

Dan Farber and Mark Anderson discuss the "super data centers" that will form the heart of utility computing.

Blogs make a perfect attack weapon for politicians, finds the Washington Post.

Martin Banks believes that parallel processing's time may have finally arrived: "the move towards service-based architectures and even dedicated, applications-specific virtual servers, means that there is now an architectural approach available that will allow the few who do understand the intricacies of parallel processing to service the needs of the many who don’t but are very likely to need it."

In yet another sign that computing's PC era is ending, Esther Dyson has iced the venerable PC Forum. The conference had its origins, back in the mid-70s, in the rise of the personal computer.

Looking at the explosion in the popularity of social networks like MySpace, Tony Hung foresees a balkanization of the web into separate enclaves with corporate overseers: "At the end of the day, you’ll be locked into where your friends are. The cost would be too high to migrate from system to system. You’ll spend your time within the system checking messages, blogging, communicating in real time, playing games, reading the news, and so on." So it's back to the age of Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy?