Yesterday, the San Francisco 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) gathered the emerging social media expert crowd from the Bay Area. The topic of the day was “What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?”

The 140 characters conference objective follows Twitter spirit: “One can change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” @Jack (Jack Dorsey, co founder of Twitter). The subjects were diverse: from Agriculture to Telco or Spirituality. I will just highlight some pearls of the conference.

Peter Hirshberg, chairman of the Re-Imagine Group, talked about the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) last exposition MIT SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures. He wanted to demonstrate that Arts can bring a lot to understand technology and its future which is precisely GAFFTA idea. “Visualization can help us realize what’s going on”, stated Hirsberg, taking the example of the NYSE visualization picture exposed at the NYC MOMA.

Dom Sagolla, helped to create Twitter back in 2006, writer of the 140 characters book and more recently founder of the iPhoneDevCamp took the stage to share his tweet per capita invention. According to him, “tweet per capita” answers the question “how to best measure technological and cultural progress”. One funny fact about Twitter: it was first called “Status” internally at Odeo.

Just after, Google and Twitter Geo experts were talking about the future of LBS and last Facebook Places announce. For Leorn Stern from Google New Business Development: “Facebook Places is the mainstreamization of checking”. But the real question about LBS is Local Merchant interaction with customers, something that is the next big opportunity for the Internet players and has been already leveraged by some like Groupon.

Deborah Schultz from Altimeter Group began her “Etiquette in a RT world” speech with a clear statement: “Twitter is blogging on crack” (repeating what she said in the early day of Twitter). “Social media is a teenager figuring out what is elegant” added Schultz mentioning that it was reshaping the social contract between people like nothing else before. Taking the example of the “no device diner” mentioned by Jeff Pulver previously, she explained that it was really hard to figure out what was okay or not to do and there was a growing gap between techies and non techies as well as between generation.

Last but not least, Twitter was also part of the conference with a dedicated panel. Twitter team has grown like crazy in the last two years: from 22 people in early 2009 to 70 in October 2009, 250 people in July 2010 and more than 350 people expected by the end of 2010. They are experimenting a lot of things and said that what was “glue for the people” to stay on Twitter was a good mix between following celebrities, real life friends and some experts from a community and/or hobby.

Update: Twitter list of Speakers at the San Francisco 140 characters conference http://twitter.com/atelier_us/sf-140conf

News sharing site Digg was undermined by fringe groups of conservative news manipulators for over a year before the story broke yesterday.These users frequently buried news deemed “too left-leaning” by the group, ensuring that this news was effectively removed from the site.

The San Francisco startup, founded by Kevin Rose, was responsible for shaping the now commonplace practice of forwarding articles to social networks, as well as popularizing stories on their front page by “Digging” the stories using a bookmarklet. The “most dugg” stories were often different than what one would commonly find on a more mainstream news portal, as frequent users often skewed more towards technology, liberal views and of course, stories about Digg.com and its staff.

The flipside of the “Digg” action is “Bury,” which the influential conservative Digg members in question exploited, according to Alternet, by means of “multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.” These practices disproportionately affected popular stories on the Digg page, but also trickled down to driven traffic to news source sites. This is not a small effect - Digg is ranked fiftieth among US Web sites by Alexa, likely has three million users and generates around 25 million page views per month (all Alternet numbers).These tremendous shifts in bandwidth usage and page views have overwhelmed Web sites with the “Digg effect.”

A year of undercover investigation connected to author Oleoleolson exposed these groups, now referred to as “bury brigades.” One conservative group, who calls themselves the “Digg Patriots,” buried over ninety percent of certain users and Web sites’ articles. Along with political articles, these groups target other subjects including “education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy,” and articles critical of GOP, Tea Party and Fox News leaders.

A new Digg site is imminent, with various safeguards to help prevent undemocratic gaming of the system. For example, users can now follow individuals or publishers so that they will have access to trusted content whether or not their news items have been Dugg or Buried. CNET reports that they will shelve Bury functionality.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom today announced the first municipal policy for open source software in the U.S.

As part of the city’s “Open SF” project, San Francisco municipal agencies will consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software when making any purchasing decisions over $100,000.

The Software Evaluation Policy will require departments to consider open source alternatives, when available, on an equal basis to commercial software, as these may reduce cost and speed the time needed to bring software applications to production.

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Update on 01.12.10 4:01pm: Video demo of Parrot’s ARDrone after the fold.

The big news at this year’s CES last week in Las Vegas were tablets and 3D TV.

Tablets have been one of the main topics of dialogue for the last few months, as Apple’s tablet has been gossiped about incessantly, really heating up around September and doing its best to outlive the Energizer Bunny.

At CES that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer . . . talked about tablets. As if there hadn’t been enough ‘just talk’ already. The consensus in the tech press is that Ballmer wasted an opportunity here, especially since the next big show is MacWorld 2010 in San Francisco next month.

3D TV is the technology that seems to only come out at CES. Last year this technology was the big story coming out the event — along with the Palm Pre, which has generally disappointed since. But this year we are ready for adoption — even if our wallets aren’t — especially after the mainstream success of Avatar and Up.

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One in four Americans has a diagnosed mental disorder, but only 25 percent get treatment. BreakThrough fights the stigma of mental illness by keeping treatment anonymous, connecting patients with medical professionals.

Some members of the review panel showed awkward hesitation when addressing the site’s potential, mirroring society’s general reticence to understand mental illness and any non-Freudian structures required to treat it.

I suspect that BreatkThrough’s main funding problems will come through misunderstandings like this, met with jokes about the mentally ill instead of any real attempt to understand the issues BreakThrough is trying to address.

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Google announced today the launch of a new public data search, part of the Mountain View, CA, company’s attempts to make government data easily accessible.

“Public statistical data, such as unemployment rates or population numbers, doesn’t need to be hard to find or, more importantly, hard to understand. Google is making it easier to find and use important public statistical data from governments and other sources,” according to the company’s site.

Anyone who’s looked for this kind of data online knows that it can be a time consuming process. If Google’s public data makes it easy to find any sort of data, it will definitely make research much easier.

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Huddle.net announced last week the launch of huddle v2, a new version of its online collaboration, project management, document sharing and social networking service.

Huddle allows unlimited users to manage projects, create, edit, share and store files online and have group discussions. Its co-founders describe it as a “viral team collaboration app.”

Huddle v2 features phone and web conferencing, desktop sharing and new customization options.

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Steve Perlman founded Rearden with the purpose of taking risks on wildly disruptive new business ideas. His newest may change the destinies of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

This idea is called OnLive, and was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Perlman (picture right) plans to whip up the technology necessary for recent video games to be accessed through a conventional broadband connection. The results: the latest title on any television, PC or Mac.

This includes old and otherwise limited-purpose computers, while a television requires only a palm-sized “microprocessor” to access the service. Gaming systems, whether tricked-out CPU/GPU multi-processor madness or a five hundred dollar proprietary console are rendered obsolete.

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The Earth2Tech Green:Net 09 Conference was kicked off by San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom. Introduced as the “future governor of the state of California,” he described as “easy” the breakthrough achieved by the City of San Francisco in reducing its CO2 emissions since 2002. However, the road is still long to reaching the goal of reducing them to below 20% of 1990’s levels by 2012 (6% so far).

Most of the keynotes highlighted the main obstacles: everyone wants to enjoy “cold beer and hot showers,” meaning that individuals are ready to adopt the behavior changes that don’t threaten their lifestyle and that companies are trying to reduce CO2 emissions by attempting to optimize processes and the use of existing technologies rather than expend more money.

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Certainly not in any case at the Web 2.0 Summit, held at this very moment in San Francisco. Surprising, since it is with this same conference that it all began in November 2004. We expected Tim O’Reilly, and the speakers of the summit, to discuss the future of this great movement, the participatory and collaborative Web. And we came in great numbers to hear the good word: more than a thousand. It’s packed!

Well, no. The only Web 2.0 is in the name of the “summit.” They talk about energy, notably John Doerr, head of Kleiner Perkins (the investment fund behind Google), with Al Gore or Elon Musk (the head of Tesla, who makes electric sports cars for millionaires….). There’s a lot of talk of politics, and Obama’s election of course, with just about everyone, in fact. Even the mayor of San Francisco made the trip. And they talk mostly about the appointment of the US CTO and the new administration’s technological program. There’s even bicycle talk with Lance Armstrong … for example.

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