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.
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.)
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.