Bogost on "the new aesthetic." The focus is the tumblr blog "the new aesthetic" which focuses on "the otherness of computer vision." New or no?

The original Zork.

Bogost's game study. Lots to play here.

Hush, empathy in Rwanda.

Art games by Jason Rohrer

Empathy

Bogost talking with Stephen Colbert. Nation, this man believes video games aren't just for wasting time.

EnemyGraph, a Facebook app that lets you list your enemies. Silly or necessary? 

A smart political article about the relation between communication and capitalism. Useful especially on the way technical networks both present themselves as political and foreclose the political.

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. Very smart but cranky and idiosyncratic.

Rapleaf: a way of gathering/pulling and managing user reputation. Targeted to websites that want to gather information about customer demographics, it's one example of how profiling works integrally to web 2.0.

Lovink's latest book is all about social media. It addresses a number of the critiques we offered in class - which is not to say it answers or does away with them - but also reinforces that he offers less a theory than a report or journalistic take. (One example is the way he looks at the uneven use of blogging world wide, so that blogging becomes much less monolithic in this account.)

vivid use of content on top of background image

Cool spatial/pictorial layout.

Cool super-minimal no-style website.

Cool super-minimal no-style website.

Cool super-minimal no-style website.

Apocalypse of mediocrity or community of readers as writers? And who decides what counts as boring?

Fascinating article from frequent Chronicle tech blogger on why some academic scholars continue to use the typewriter. The primary answer - nostalgia - is both a mood (in the sense of a feeling one has in relation to history and technology), a political statement (opposed to forward modernization), and - perhaps - deeply related to the "literary" or writing (notalgia as why one writes).

Already in 2008, China had more users than any other country; now they have more users than the population of the use. About 50% of the world's web users are now in Asia.