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This is the social networking homepage of a online gaming website, IGN. I wanted to share this because it seems to overtly combine the gaming and social elements of social media. It also, similar to the AXE site, allows users to follow certain products and claim an identity based on what products the user owns in comparison to other members of the community. Within the site itself members have some level of gaining badges and competing by listing and comparing their games and interacting with each other. Also, on the level of competition, there are prizes available for different interactions on this site which further invokes the sense of gaming and competition.

This is a critique of comments that users make in response to news items. It speaks to some of the readings.

This is the entry point for the work of Loss Pequeno Glazier, what the text notes as a unique online work in which text is generated every ten seconds. I really needed some kind of visualization of this since description just doesn't quite get me there. Click begin to try it out

Argument (with some decent solutions/suggestions) for making the transition from paper to electronic publications.

This group is briefly mentioned in the chapter on Pranks in this week's reading. The fired game designer for the SIms helicopter game left and joined this group-- pretty much pranksters of an online nature. While it has little to do with video games, it has everything to do with ethos in an Internet age.

Interesting idea from Bogost. Although he labels it as game art, I might consider this a multimedia piece as the code itself, the process of "re-soldering" and essentially rebuilding the game cartridge, and then the finished project performed online with DIY functionality seems much more complex than the book describes. Personally I think it's a brilliant but I'm not sure I know what (if anything) it means...

Along with Zork, here are a few other interactive fiction games. I played Lost Pig for a while.

Interesting in terms of issues of ownership. Once our identities are "published" online, who owns them? Who "owns" our search histories? Google owns most of mine, I'd say, but it also allows me to supposedly delete items. Are our search histories too public now to be hidden? And who ever said we had a right to privacy on the world wide web? It does seem contradictory to the nature of a "web."

Now for your favorite brands you do not even need to shop online. Just log in to Facebook!

I'm posting this article because the author and this website are referenced in our book and I think this is also relevant to the ideas presented in O'Reilly's book. We often see discussions about knowing the audience and bringing them to certain and specific actions which brings into question the kind of rhetorical situations we react to online.

Our reading this week touched upon the idea of "sock puppets," or fake users "often created for the purpose of talking up or praising a product" (Crumlish and Malone 305). This article explains how a company that creates and sells a program for learning and mastering guitar was fined a quarter of a million dollars for fabricating online reviews.

This is another satirical look at what's going on online and how sites like myspace seem to be loosing relevancy. In some ways the video is actually a little disturbing, but it does at least partially bring into question what makes a good social networking site and what causes us to favor sites like facebook over sites like myspace. For instance, was myspace too customizable to the point that it left the user with too many choices and left visitors feeling out of place every time they visited a page that blasted music at them they didn't actually enjoy?

More on badges. This article discusses both the pros and cons of badges as an alternative credential system.

Of the different online accounts I have, Tumblr is one account I don't have and after reading O'Reilly and looking at the site I have to admit I'm a little fascinated by it. It seem like in many ways it's taken the parts of Myspace, facebook, and twitter that work and pasted them all together at once. In some senses this seems overwhelming, but just from the sample pages, what I see doesn't look entirely unlike what I'm creating for this class. I intentionally linked to the about page since I think there is a great deal of interesting info that feels like it came almost came straight out of O'Reilly's book especially in regard to building communities and allowing for participation, customization, and interaction. The home page also has some useful pieces worth exploring I think.

This article is extremely interesting as we think about online "spaces" because the author describes how he pictures the literal "space" of each social networking site he uses.

An interesting article on educating parents, teachers, and kids on digital citizenship and safety - and integrating better digital practices and training in schools.

A little late in the game, but the wording here is really interesting because the censorship of bloggers by the Chinese government includes works with imagined information. In addition, they specifically cut off the comments option. We have a direct moment here where the 2.0 and call and response of online writing is considered poisonous to government action, even if the work is a fictional piece. The most important thing to note here is that China is now requiring all microbloggers to use their real names. We talked about how useful a tracked name can be, but in this case practicality loses over privacy.

In our reading this week, there is an emphasis on how the Electronic Literature Organization is working to preserve online narratives that somehow become out of date. Here is a huge reason why that is so important. As we move toward a dependence on mobile technology, Flash is officially out.

While I'm not a fan of reading online/on a computer screen-yet-I am interested in this transition from paper to digital texts (textbooks). There seems to be several advantages, such as constantly updating and affordable ($49 for a science textbook?!).

This article touches on a lot of the topics that keep surfacing in our classroom discussions about narcissism and how we use social media to communicate with others and share our own identities. It also expresses some of the concerns that I am often torn about; how much privacy can we have if we are going to use this technology, and why aren't we more aware of it.