On Wednesday, we reported that the government of Estonia had agreed to temporarily host several key websites for the government of Georgia, to protect them from hackers. The specific websites include the company's central bank, and foreign ministry. Estonia is also hosting a Georgian English-language news portal. The Georgian government has also reportedly transferred sites to some other countries, including Poland and France, after some sites came under attack during the country's war with Russia.

Along somewhat less dramatic political lines, Level 3 Communications said Monday that it would be providing live video and content delivery services for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which took place this week in Denver. The company said it would deliver HD and analog video feeds to TV networks, as well as live online video streaming and on-demand Internet video.

Later in the week, we posted a Q&A with Maria Farnon, the company's vice president of product delivery, who discussed the process behind the delivery of online content for the convention, as well as the great-and-growing importance of the Internet as a vehicle for distributing this kind of content form this kind of venue.

The survey data trend began this week with Tucows, which announced the release of the results of a survey the company's OpenSRS brand conducted at HostingCon, among visitors to its booth. The data deals both with the relationships of resellers with their service providers, and the relationships of small hosting providers with web 2.0, social networking and ?functional hosting? offerings. In particular, the survey shows that while the vast majority of hosting operators use these services, very few of them have considered the threat those services might pose to their own businesses.

On Thursday, we posted a Q&A with Ken Schafer, the company's vice president of marketing and product management, who discussed some of the survey's intent, which he says had much to do with OpenSRS seeking out ways to help its resellers understand the market they're competing in. In particular, he says the potential for these functional hosting services to take business away from small hosts is real, and that resellers should consider ways of addressing those capabilities.

On Friday, we reported on the release of Netcraft's August Web Server Survey, which illustrated growth of about 1.3 million sites during the month, including 1.2 million new Apache sites, and a slight dip in Microsoft IIS-hosted sites, along with about 500,000 new sites hosted by Google.

On Thursday morning, the Association of Internet and Hosted Service Providers reported that is inviting hosting professionals to volunteer to participate in a list of subcommittees, which will help the organization develop its key objectives in the early stages of its development. First really introduced to the hosting public at HostingCon this year, the AIHSP intends to begin enrollment in early 2009.

While this week's biggest trend was the survey data issued, for ongoing relevance I would look first to the AIHSP announcement, in particular because the WHIR ought to have a Q&A with Paul Hirsch, one of the organization's founders, in the next couple of days.