The Artic cold a green lining for social networks

Another social networking organisation, with a slightly different outlook on its core business and probably a very different business model, is Wikileaks led by its enigmatic spokesperson, the Australian-born Julian Assange, who is facing extradition from England to Sweden to face questioning on charges of unwanted sex with two women.

The computer servers where Wikileaks kept its digital leaked documents were also located in Sweden but it’s safe to say for reasons other than those of Facebook. Wikileaks was hosted by a Swedish Internet company whose premises are a renovated bomb shelter, built during World War II. The facility is carved right into the cliff side of Södermalm south of Lake Mälaren, that bisects Stockholm, the Venice of the North.

The number of secure servers occupied by Wikileaks was only a fraction of the total number at the server facility in Stockholm and certainly handled only a minuscule volume of the internet traffic projected to be handled by the 10,000 plus servers in Facebook’s future Luleå server farm. The data contained within them has caused a lot of controversy and provided the nucleus for Internet based political activism.

Philip Dorling in the National Times of October 29 revealed that Assange is an enthusiastic supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement and that Wikileaks has provided moral support by tweeting Occupy Wall Street information early and thus encouraging those who wanted to see protests to spread and take off globally.

Dorling alsoreports that during the house arrest of Julian Assange in the U.K. there has been an exponential growth of Wikileaks' global support base. Followers of the website's Twitter account have increased tenfold to 1.2 million. It seems Wikileaks is tapping into another rich source of supporters through the use of social networking and becoming more than a drop-box for illicitly obtained secret material.

In light of the new age political activism sparked by Wikileaks the Swedish Pirate Party leader in the European Parliament, Rickard Falkvinge, had this to say about these new internet enabled organisations on his own website ''a swarm is a new kind of organisation, made possible by available and affordable mass communication,'' Falkvinge writes. ''Where it used to take hundreds of full-time employees to organise 100,000 people, today that can be done…by somebody in their spare time from their kitchen.''

The growth of social networks either for the personal gratification of narcissistic Facebook users with thousands of virtual friends or for political activism of thousands of real but loosely connected protesters will require servers where all the information is stored in cloud computing and located near the sustainable ice blue rivers of the Arctic.

Who would have thought this to be an outcome of the rise and rise of the use of social networks and cloud computing combined with global warming and trends towards using renewable energy?