One interesting trick (in other situations) I've seen is to keep the nicknames, but store the real names in a title attribute, so they appear as "tooltips" in many browsers if you mouse over the nicknames.
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!