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It should not surprise anyone, but a survey of 3100 employers confirms that 22% of them check social network sites for information about candidates. That’s twice as many as checked Facebook and MySpace two years ago.

Sometimes what the employer discovers hurts your candidacy, especially if you or any of your buddies posts information about your drinking or using drugs. Of course, it’s also unwise to post information about your qualifications that is inconsistent with what you submitted when you applied for the job.

Sometimes the information can actually help, for example if it demonstrates your good communication skills.

Ready for another non-surprise? College admissions offices do it too.

As previously reported by the New York Times and noted in this blog (The Google Cache Strikes Again), two of the medal-winning Chinese female gymnasts are only 14 years old, according to rosters posted on Chinese web sites at the time of earlier competitions. (They have since been furnished with passports showing them now to be the minimum Olympic eligibility age of 16.) The NYT found a copy of the roster cached at Google (see pp. 124-126 of Blown to Bits for an explanation of how this works).

Now blogger Stryde Hax has found traces of incriminating rosters at the Chinese search engine Baidu — the one controlled by Chinese authorities. Links to the two cached copies are here and here — though I don’t expect they will stay visible for long, now that they are being publicized. You need to read Chinese to pick out the gymnasts’ names.

As we say in the book, search is power. And bits don’t go away.

The whole concept of truth is being shaken by developments like this. Will the IOC be able to continue to accept the word of Chinese authorities that those new passports have the girls’ real birthdates and those old records are wrong for some reason?

That’s the name of a “crowdsourcing” Web site, whoissick.org. It’s a work in progress, so slow, but go try it. You type in a zip code and you find out the symptoms of people in your neighborhood. And the data comes from you too; you submit your observations of your own symptoms, or those of someone you know. Weird. The origin tale is peculiar too — the site’s creator waited with his sick wife for four hours in an emergency room, only to be told that she had the same symptoms as lots of other people in the area. He wouldn’t have bothered if he knew what was going around.

The site illustrates two developing trends. The ease with which mashups can be thrown together (including this one, from the Huffington Post site, with wonderful depictions of your neighbors’ political allegiances, drawn from public databases). And the ease with which we can now try to channel large numbers of voluntary, amateur observations into widely useful knowledge.

One of the fondest hopes for the Internet is that it will re-energize the democratic spirit, by making it easier for citizens to participate in the democratic process. Senator Obama is thought to have profited in particular from the mass participation of Internet users.

An Obama supporter ¬†has used the Obama Facebook group to organize opposition to the senator’s position on FISA (previously discussed on this blog). It’s a lovely example of the double-edged sword. Conventional wisdom requires that modern campaigns be well controlled. (Good grief, the Dems are so focused on image control that they are dictating the colors of the food on the plates at their convention, and the percentage of fruits and vegetables – do they really want us to think that is the way they will run the country?). The control instinct runs counter to the spirit of participatory chaos that the open Internet also supports. I’ll bet that in four years this conflict will have been sorted out a bit better in the political campaigns, at a cost to that spirit of individual entrepreneurial power that is so invigorating right now.

I have a piece in the Boston Globe this morning about social networks and other threats to privacy. It’s the most e-mailed.

I didn’t pick or get consulted on the title; that’s generally the rule for these opinion pieces. I’m a bit sorry that it comes out as picking on Facebook, which is merely the most successful and probably no worse on privacy matters than many other sites. As a title for this piece about the privacy wars, I might have chosen instead Pogo’s classic wisdom, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Some estimates of the value of Facebook run as high as $15 billion. How can that be? It’s just some software and some people, right?

Wrong. It’s data about who hundreds of millions of people know, and who those people know, and how often they communicate, and what they are interested in. Every time someone agrees to be your Facebook friend, the two of you have established a link in Facebook’s gigantic friendship graph. Even the fact that you asked that person is probably recorded somewhere, even if he or she ignores you.

As far as I know, the connections between Reverend Wright and Barack Obama, and between Reverend Hagee and John McCain, were not discovered by electronic sleuthing. But such connections are going to be easier to discover in the future than in the past. Facebook data would be a gold mine, but it won’t help much if you decide to stay off such social networking sites. It’s easy for computers to connect people whose names appeared together in old newspaper articles. Photos and videos will be subject to face recognition, so it will be possible to build a huge “appears-in-the-same-image-with” graph automatically. Public figures will have to worry more and more about their associations, as it looks like the public interest in their circle of acquaintances will not diminish anytime soon.

And the power of the government to create such structures of social connections will be even greater than what can be gathered from public sources. The UK may implement a massive data aggregation system, including data on every phone call, email, and instant message in the nation. The fight against terror demands such ubiquitous surveillance, goes the claim.

Would we live our lives differently, fearing that our everyday social contacts, and our adventurous escapades, are all going to wind up in the government’s great social network? How will the world change when clumsy attempts at romantic outreach, phone calls placed to wrong numbers, and group photos snapped at parties all turn into contextless edges in that permanent, all-encompassing social graph?

As we wrote Blown to Bits, we came to recognize that many of the stories in the news were “bits stories.” Sometimes it’s a bit of stretch, other times far less so. Consider world hunger.

The price of rice has been rising. A story last month in the New York Times reported that rice producing coountries were cutting back on exports, civil unrest was rising, and a crisis loomed. For populations that spend a large portion of their income on food, populations where rice is often a staple of their diet, these increases can be devastating. It is a complex problem with potentially dire consequences.

But how is it a bits story?

The University of Washington’s “Nutritious Rice for the World” project is seeking to mitigate world hunger by analyzing rice proteins. The goal is to make it possible for farmers to grow rice strains with higher yields, greater resistance to disease, and even improved nutrition. It’s a noble cause, and a difficult scientific and technical problem. The computational needs of the project are enormous. Using conventional computing approaches the time to complete the analysis could well be measured in centuries.

We could just wait for computing power to increase. With computers doubling their performance approximately every year (close enough for this calculation), in a a decade, they will be 1000X faster. A task that would take 200 years using todays’ computers should take 73 days then. Wait another decade, and they will be 1,000,000 times faster and our protein analysis will take less than 2 hours. But the rice crisis won’t wait that long.

The team at the University of Washington had a better solution – harness the aggregate computing capacity of thousands and thousands of otherwise idle computers – your computer and mine (if you choose to participate). They joined the World Computing Grid project.

A computing grid is a loose collection of computers that work cooperatively, each doing a small portion of a large computing task. It’s similar to the way Google works – dividing the processing of your query across lots and lots of computers so that the response is fast. This particular grid joins technology and social involvement, allowing individuals to “contribute” unused computer time. In addition to analyzing rice proteins, WCG now has active programs for cancer research, AIDS, protein folding, denque fever, and more. The WCG harnesses the computing power of over 1,000,000 computers from more than 380,000 participants.

This is one more example of the transformative power of the digital revolution. Not only is it possible to do complex protein structure analysis, but also we can share the task across thousands, even millions of computer linked through the Internet, computers that belong to ordinary citizens of the world, with a shared purpose, part of a community that has been made possible only by virtue of the social connectivity that the Web engenders and supports.

Even world hunger is a bits story.