How much energy do our digital personas use while we are sleeping?

This question was posed to me at today's Drupalcon keynote and got me thinking. The power to run a website like this is more or less trivial due to my small audience, and the fact that my site is hosted along with several others on the same machine. But what about Facebook profiles, or for that matter the power needed to run virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. The power needed to run these widely distributed networks is not trivial.

As networks become more and more powerful so do their needs for real world electricity. Something to think about the next time you send that status update to 300 friends.