Social Bookmarking 101, a virtual lecture by Collin Brooke at Syracuse University.
Break of Day in the Trenches, a blog devoted to historicized attitudes toward war in roleplaying games, written by Esther MacCullum-Stewart.
A brief account of virtual marriage proposals and sexism in MMPORGS by Jill Walker at University of Bergen.
Yochai Benkler's new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms" is available in PDF. Essential for those interested in intellectual property in digital environments.
Pro-lurker points to Concordia University's CFP for a conference on conducting research online. The focus includes but is not limited to

• Ethical Issues
• Researching video game console culture
• Fieldwork Boundaries & Possibilities
• From online & offline and back again: the question of merging identity
• Post-Virtual Research: Situating the virtual as a space of inquiry after the real/virtual debate
• Ethnography in cyberspace
• The future of qualitative research online

Update: Short, unscientific City Pages article on virtual economy and labor outsourcing in WOW.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/24/web.surf.ap/index.html

Judge finds that surfing on the internet at work is the equivalent to reading a book or talking on the phone.

http://news.com.com/Congress%20readies%20new%20digital%20copyright%20bill/2100-1028_3-6064016.html?tag=nefd.top

Hmmm.

The more that I think about this the more this doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. Doing this exercise is just as accurate and useful as trying to put artwork on a scale of beauty. It is not that the idea of media richness isn’t important; it is that determining whether something is high or low in richness will never be agreed upon without criteria. You will never get me to agree that email has more media richness than written addressed documentation. Not with all the spam, listserv messages, and task related messages that I receive on email and the lack of anything that even remotely that fosters community, friendship, etc. On the other hand, although I am sure I receive the same amount of junk mail and bills (spam/task related) stuff in my mailbox you do, when a friend or family member writes me a letter, whether that is weekly or a monthly occurrence, it is much more rich than email. I often receive drawings from my friend’s children back home, pictures from friends, clippings of articles, coupons, you name it. The most I ever get in my email box is the random link or ads with pictures that want me to visit a website – most of which I don’t care about. But even if your experience you rarely get snail mail, I hope you will concede that a personal letter has the potential to be just as high in media richness as an email or that either one can be very low in media richness depending on the circumstances.

I am not thinking that the scale is a bad idea I just think that media richness has to be based on a combination of a number of factors. FTF communication is the richest form of communication for many reasons: it is verbal and non-verbal, it is synchronous, it fosters community, it can occur in a dyad or in a group, it can serve different functions simultaneously, and the list can go on and on. The only effective way to use media richness is to determine these criteria that make media rich and build a scale (or set of scales that can be used in conjunction) that can determine media richness with less ambiguity.

While the technology that supports such games spaces is indeed interesting, how does one situate the notion of "neighborhoods" (if we can appropriate it from mathematics), and communities within the mixed reality game space. And while the creators of such games wax eloquent about the social aspects of such games, are these new spaces that blend the physical and the virtual any different from current game spaces? And what does the concept of Transfiction mean anyway to gamers and role players (in some instances also called as performers)--does it alter the sense of community (because of changes in the feeling of immersiveness, if any) in any significant manner? But maybe, before we even begin to examine those questions, we might have to learn to grapple with the 'mixed reality space' (how does one theorise about it, how does one even study it?...)

(I am just thinking aloud here...)

Both Laura and Turkle brought up the issue of protecting participant confidentiality regarding online postings. Although good practice to minimize any harm to participants when possible, I do think it's also important to be able to cite the actual source where possible since the source is the foundation upon which good scientific evidence is based. If we aren't certain of the veracity of the source, it's a little hard to establish scientific credibility.

Toward the end of Woosley's article, she asks of the three interconnected media, "Which will help [students] to understand and then contribute to the world around them, its politics, its science, and its literature?" (10). Although the question certainly implies a hierarchy, I'm assuming from the context that she wants to find utility in many of the discussed e-media. Since she mentions gaming, I'm wondering where exactly her discussion of "Experiential media" literacy comes into play with regard to the above question. I'm not sure I buy the idea of such a literacy; the term itself seems rather vague (of course, I do not discount that I am simply misreading it). Nonetheless, I find gaming useful for more general purposes mentioned elsewhere, such as collaboration skills leading to enhanced civic discourse. If there is one "practical" line in the burgeoning merger of education and ludology, it is certainly one of collaboration--the notion that gamers find specific roles that compliment each other, roles that enhance awareness of co-constructed systems of knowledge as well as the knowledge itself (I'm borrowing heavily from James Gee here). Part of that knowledge, of course, entails multiple other media: digital media in order to interact, older media forms in order to communicate, and so on.

Social Software
Folksonomy
Vlogging
Audio Blogging
Podcasting
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Also, a few relevant not-blogging social software applications:
Flickr
del.icio.us
And for people like us: CiteULike

The concern about the gap between the health related haves and have-nots is indeed valid and yet I share Curran's enthusiasm. Better to "let" at least some people have access to health-journals and credible sources of health information than restricting such information to the domain of health professionals. The Internet in some (maybe) small way is working towards bringing out information that belongs to the field of the specialist practitioner, and providing access to consumers.

The Other Things:
The conclusion to the IWD article states: "there is ample reason to believe that this type of written communication will proliferate in the future, perhaps even influencing or outdating the stylistic conventions of traditional writing styles." Interestingly enough, more than 10 years later, the "perhaps" is now a reality, email being a modified example of truncated writing. Even though an email is not composed under constraints of time or other real-time interaction pressures, features of "IWD" do show up on email: spelling contractions, casual and shortened sentence structures, etc. (which in turn creep into Rhetoric 1101 and freshman composition classes). What would this mean for standard English or standard versions of any language? Do they point to a possible move of the "Internet vernacular" up the ladder of language (to be slowly recognized as standard)?

A couple of other comments on the readings:
1. I was thinking of the Hawthorne effect as I read the Sproull and Kiesler article. The Hawthorne effect is that people will change their behavior if they know that they are being observed. Just the fact that people knew that their messages were being viewed by researchers may have changed how they constructed those messages. This, of course, is a problem in most self-report studies unless some type of deception is used.

2. Ferrera et al.'s idea that CMC is a "hybrid" between written and oral begs the question of whether CMC is moving toward a stage where it will be something other than a hybrid. I'm not sure if that would look more and more like truncated, telegraphic speech, or whether it will be something completely different.

"Electronic medical journals and health newsletters also facilitate consumer access to information. This is increasingly important as consumers begin to educate themselves about their health conditions and available options for medical treatment."

As we have discussed previously, this implies large questions as to what one would define a health "consumer" as, particularly with regard to something as supposedly "important" as Curran makes online health access out to be. While it is reasonable to assume that those most interested in and knowledgeable of health journals would be those able to afford internet access and to whom ample health care is provided, the question of internet access still imposes a strict limitation as to who is able to view critical health data. Dissemination of information via the internet may *seem* more democratic, but we must also remember that consumerism stretches across economic barriers; claiming that online health journals make health information more readily accessible to "consumers" in general may further widen the gap between those with and without access to sufficient health care in this country. It is true that print publication currently entails a small audience and that internet publication seems viable in comparison, but when increasing the scope of the audience, we must remember exactly whom we wish that audience to be.

An extremely detailed map of the North American Internet backbone including 134,855 routers. the colors represent who each router is registered to: red is Verizon, blue AT&T, yellow Qwest, green is major backbone players like Level 3 & Sprint Nextel, black is the entire cable industry put togethe, & gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.
this map demonstrates that although AT&T & Verizon own a lot of Internet pipes, they currently do not dominate the Internet infrastructure (yet).