The Swedish company Bahnhof has presented two suggestions for how to turn a 19th century gasometer into a 21st century high tech data center. If these plans become reality, the new data center would arguably be one of the coolest ones anywhere in the world.

Besides being über cool, the proposed data center would also have another interesting twist to it: a clever use for the significant heat generated by its computers.

And since Bahnhof has been a part of designing data centers fit for James Bond villains in the past, there’s every chance that the proposals will become reality.

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Last week we showed that the top 1 million web sites in the world were hosted in almost 8,000 different cites. If these cities were evenly distributed across the world, there would be about 40 cities in each nation, but is that really the case?

Following up our own 2012 study, we present this year’s survey of the top 100 web hosting countries. What do you think the major developments were since last year?

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Pingdom has been awarded the prize “Gasell” by DI.se for being the company with the fastest financial growth during 2012 in its region of Sweden, the county of Västmanland.

The prize was given out at an awards ceremony at Conventum in Örebro on November 7th, in front of an audience including other finalists. We at Pingdom are very happy to be given such an honor. This is a milestone on the journey that Pingdom is on, to make the web faster and more reliable.

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After yesterday’s Internet Discovery Day and WordCamp, we felt ready to really take on Internet Days today. Now on the way back to Pingdom HQ, we’d like to bring you some of the events and impressions from today.

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Want to know what Internet users in Sweden do online each day? When most Swedes start using the Internet? What they buy online? Answers to all of that and more can be found in this report, just released by the Internet Infrastructure Foundation in Sweden.

Even though we really love stats and really digging into them, at 69 pages in total, this report is a bit beyond what we would call easily digestible  So, quite simply, we thought we’d summarize it, highlighting some of the more funny and interesting aspects of the report.

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Pingdom has studied the uptime of the official websites of all 290 municipalities in Sweden during July, and we can now present that only 17% of the sites scored a perfect 100% uptime. In this study, we also identify the 20 municipalities with the worst uptime record in July.

It’s clear on the basis of this study that website uptime is something that many municipalities in Sweden continue to struggle with. Availability of their websites and other online services is a key issue that needs to be dealt with, as more and more local governments around the world, including municipalities, take to the Internet for communicating with residents and conducting business.

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We have this tradition in Sweden where graduating high school students are driven around on the backs of large trucks together with their classmates. One last celebration before they move on with their lives. That’s today. It’s loud. It’s fun. There’s a long procession of trucks, driving all over town, and you can hear them pretty much a mile away. They’re usually equipped with some serious sound systems, pumping out party music. A calm, quiet celebration it most definitely is not.

This year, we worked with some of the local students, helping them get a really kick-ass graduation. Being geeks ourselves, naturally we went for the computer science graduates, the future IT gurus of their generation. Being the best and brightest, they should be able to graduate with style, right?

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Every year there’s an event in Sweden called 24-Hour Business Camp, or 24HBC for short. It’s a fun meetup where some of Sweden’s more entrepreneurial developers show up and try to create a bunch of internet startups in 24 hours of intense hacking. This year it’ll take place on June 10-12. It’s a great event, run by our friends over at .SE.

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The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American.

Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only two other countries make an appearance: China (with Hong Kong), and Sweden (with Umeå and Göteborg). Amazingly, only four countries have cities on this list.

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Call it Facebook Addiction Disorder, Facebook Anxiety Disorder, Facebook depression, or Facebook unhappiness, we have all heard of issues of well-being related to people using the social network too much.

And with visitors during January 2012 spending on average 405 minutes on Facebook.com, is there any wonder that a new study suggests that using Facebook spreads unhappiness and a large portion of users on the site feel bad if they can’t log in regularly?

So with Facebook predicted to reach 1 billion users this year, are we putting too much of our lives in Zuckerberg’s creation?

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