SiliconBeat

Last week this blog offered a bulletin on the runway debut of Hewlett-Packard’s latest “digital clutch,” a chic netbook marketed toward women, featuring a butterfly motif from designer Vivienne Tam. This week we have a little update on footwear.

Miguel Helft at the NYTimes was first to report this one, but we also noticed the unusual shoes that Google co-founder Sergey Brin was wearing when he popped over to NASA’s Ames Research Center, next door to Google’s Mountain View campus, for a discussion on cloud computing yesterday.

Brin, who’s been seen wearing Crocs at other company events, was sporting high-tech Vibram FiveFinger moccasins — thin-soled sports shoes with a design that fits around each toe, the way a glove fits around each finger. (Vibram’s Website promises “the same physical and visceral sensation” as going barefoot.)

Brin was wearing standard Silicon Valley khakis and a short-sleeved shirt. But the more traditionally dressed government officials who flew out from Washington to attend the event — at which Google announced plans for a dedicated “government cloud” to host software applications for public agencies — would undoubtedly have been reassured to see that Google product manager Matthew Glotzbach wore a dark business suit.