I don’t think a lot of people consider the spatial implications of the online world. By this, I’m specifically referring to the massive data centers required to power the internet.

Earlier this year Facebook opened its first European data center in Sweden, less than 70 miles from the arctic circle. It’s 900,000 square feet. That’s about equivalent to a 102 storey condo tower.

Behind the virtual worlds we live in - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others - lies nondescript buildings with repeating rows of machines inside them. They’re the complete antithesis of the vibrant lives we pretend to have on the consumer web, but they’re making it all possible. It feels just like the Matrix.

And there are some interesting shifts taking place in the data center space. Facebook - through its Open Compute Project - now designs its own centers and makes the work available to others, for free. It’s an “open hardware” play that could threaten incumbents in the space such as Dell and Cisco.

Facebook’s goal is “to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost.” Their Swedish outpost represents their first self-designed center. And it’s proven to be a highly efficient one.

While the average data center might use 3 watts to produce 1 watt of computing tower, Facebook’s Swedish center was able to get that ratio down to 1.04 : 1, largely because the colder climate allowed for a dramatic reduction in cooling loads. It makes a ton of a sense.

I’ve actually thought about this before. Why aren’t more data centers - which have massive cooling requirements - built in colder climates? I just so happen to know of a country with lots of prime arctic circle real estate.

New York VC Fred Wilson wrote a blog post yesterday called “Writing It Down." In it he talks about why he blogs everyday. It’s worth reading. If you’re into tech, you should also read his linked post on Twitter. After reading it, I thought I should come clean about something: He’s one of the main reasons I decided to start blogging. I saw what he was doing and I felt inspired. The other reason is that I started blogging for Dirt and really enjoyed it. I’m trying to also do it daily, but so far I haven’t made any public promises on that front. I’d rather under promise and over deliver. I’ve been an avid reader of Fred’s blog for awhile now. What I find really powerful is that it has become a mechanism for him to get his thoughts out and into the world and to get feedback on them. Sometimes his posts can be a definitive how-to (such as his MBA Monday lessons) and in other cases it’s clear that he himself isn’t sure of the answer, but that he wants to put it out there for discussion. And I think that’s a great way to be. There’s wisdom in crowds. At the same time, when I decided to start blogging personally, I told myself that even if nobody reads my stuff that I’d still be getting value out of it. That’s because writing forces you to think about things to a greater extent than if you, well, just sat and thought about them. I like that. However, I do hope that my blog will end up getting read by others because I’m interested in happenstance. I’m interested in the chance that like-minded individuals will read one of my posts about cities and reach out to me, or introduce me to somebody I should meet.  When you put yourself out there, I think you also open yourself up to opportunities.

Remember when you first started using the internet and nobody wanted to reveal their actual identity? Everyone used aliases, because it was weird to share sensitive information - like your full name - on the internet. One of my earliest usernames was bdonn. I used it for everything. I had bdonn@aol.com.

Well, things have certainly changed.

Could you have imagined that we’d get to a world where “over sharing” is viewed as a real - albeit first world - problem and phrases like “I share therefore I am” get thrown around. It’s a pretty dramatic departure from how we used to feel about privacy. And for the younger generation, who grew up entirely with social media, I don’t even think privacy is on the radar.

Some would argue that this is a problem, which is why a group of academics over at Berkeley created a web app called Ready or Not? What it does is allow anyone to enter a Twitter or Instagram username and see a plotted map of where that user has shared from.

Here’s what it spit out for me based on my recent tweets:

The hope is that this will promote awareness around the fact that even one short tweet could be potentially revealing your exact geographic location. But I wonder to what extent people are actually unaware that this is happening or is just that they’re comfortable sharing this information? What do you think?