Two very different tidbits came across my desk this morning. The first was a post on the Google Research blog about a graph computing language they've written called Pregel, and the second was a graph from FriendFeed's traffic logs showing the drop off in traffic from Iran as a result of the post election crack down.

Two very different pieces of news you'd think, one an academic advance, the other a sad reflection of brutal state control. But, they are both linked. Pregel allows programmers to do distributed computing on gigabytes of data over hundreds of machines. They implemented the PageRank algorithm that is the core of Google's initial success in fifteen lines of code. This is real progress in the state of the art.

Mean while, Iran is showing what happens when the powers that be attempt to shove the genie back in the bottle. A genie created by the creativity of surrounding silicon valley - FriendFeed and Twitter which are at the heart of the ability of Iranian's to mobilise their resistence are both born of the silicon valley technology revolution.

I'm intrigued to see what future political revolutions are brought about by widespread usage of Pregel.