On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

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Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O’Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different–perhaps something more realistic. O’Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation.

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There’s a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon (AMZN) doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle, there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there’s Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

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Everyone knows how well Barack Obama’s presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama’s CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.

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If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I’m paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O’Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I’m following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a fire hose at editors, conference planners, and researchers within O’Reilly. A lot of my job is, as we say, “redistributing the future”–following interesting people, and passing on what I learn to others. And twitter is an awesome tool for doing just that.

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On Wednesday, about 1,000 of the tech industry’s elite will begin schmoozing at a three-day conference here on Web 2.0 technologies, in what is now a vastly different business climate than a year ago.

At the onset of the Wall Street meltdown, many in Silicon Valley seemed to have their heads in the sand. But in recent weeks, with lightening speed, venture capitalists are suddenly preaching to their portfolio companies to cut costs, generate revenues and become profitable, fast, or die. So it will be interesting to see if the Web 2.0 Summit, founded by Tim O’Reilly, the president of O’Reilly Media Inc., and John Battelle, chairman of Federated Media Publishing and a co-founder of Wired, will also inject more much needed realism without the incessant hype that is often found at these conferences.

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In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world’s great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to “work on stuff that matters.”

We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I’m sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around the world, wars over access to resources, and yes, terrorists, are all in our future. Scientists who’ve studied global warming agree that we’re heading towards decades of extreme environmental stress, leading to even more severe economic disruptions than we have seen to date. Meanwhile, we have an aging population with ballooning healthcare costs, an unfair economy in which some people receive outsized gains while others fall behind, an educational system that is not preparing children for the future, and deficits that require an increasing percentage of our tax dollars to service debt to other countries. Even if there is a short-term recovery, huge problems loom in the years ahead, problems we can no longer pass off to our children and grandchildren.

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Technology publisher and Web 2.0 impresario Tim O’Reilly wrote a thought-provoking post today about the dynamics of the nascent cloud computing business. He makes some important and valid points, but his analysis is also flawed, and the flaws of his argument are as revealing as its strengths.

O’Reilly begins by taking issue with Hugh MacLeod’s contention that, thanks to “power laws,” “a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google (GOOG) came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft (MSFT) came to dominate Software. … We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.”

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In my keynote at Web 2.0 Expo New York, I made the comment that, cool as Dell Ideastorm is, the fundamental supply-chain approach behind dell.com is actually a better example of how Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise. I also made the provocative assertion that WalMart is a Web 2.0 company (or at least a model of how Web 2.0 principles apply to the enterprise.) Based on questions I’ve heard since, I thought I should explain further.

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Yesterday evening I took a quick look at Techmeme and saw that the top two posts at that point in time were Tim O’Reilly and my responses to Mike Arrington’s Yahoo post. I clicked through to see Tim’s post and noticed that Tim had done the same thing that I had done; simply cut and paste the comment I had left on Arrington’s post onto my blog. It was interesting to see that the top two posts on Techmeme at that moment in time were in fact comments to another blog post.

I then twittered that thought and went to dinner.

Here’s the thing. I get comments every day on my blog that are as good as any blog posts I see on the Web. And they are stuck behind the comments link. They need to be on the front page, not on the back page.

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Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is something that has been rumored for a long time, but it’s really the first of many more consolidation steps for the computer industry. Every new industry starts with a few crazy innovators, who are followed by thousands of entrepreneurs engaged in a fierce Darwinian competition. Some of those entrepreneurs build large companies, but as the new industry that has been created matured, few of them make it to the finish line.

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In the lazyweb department, I had an idea the other day that I thought I’d put out more broadly (lest someone else have the same thought, plus the thought to patent it). And that is the idea that one side-effect of the “social graph” is to create a unique identity signature.

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The Amazon Kindle has excited a lot of comment from people who have long wanted portable electronic access to books. Amazon has put together a lot of the pieces that make this holy grail seem reachable, even if not yet truly achieved. But in reading the commentary of some of the enthusiastic boosters of e-books, I’m struck by just how much wishful thinking they display. For example, in an interview on Teleread with Marie Campbell of MarketIntellNow, Marie reports on a poll of 5,000 “random” (actually self-selected) Web surfers, and concludes: “Lower e-book prices, not gizmos like the Amazon Kindle, will be the big spur for book sales.” Read the rest of this post