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Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior. "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.

Recently, Michael Wesch was named national professor of the year for research and doctoral universities. A few weeks later, Vincent Hofer was named a Rhodes Scholar. One teaches cultural anthropology and one studied agribusiness at Kansas State. Jon Wefald longed to hear from anyone interested in either honoree. "Nobody called," said K-State's longtime university president. Instead, intercollegiate sports dominate far more discussions.

The Wikileaks site claims to have posted 1.2 million leaked government and corporate documents that it says expose unethical behavior, including a 2003 operation manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Indaba, which launched earlier this year, provides a meeting ground for musicians. Anyone can upload a track — whether it's a beat, or a melody or a full-fledged song — and can solicit other musicians to record new or different parts. Similarly, musicians looking to add or build on other people's songs can search for these open "sessions," which are tagged by genre and instrument. They can ask to be invited to play and can send audition tracks.

Though the Indaba guys were at Harvard at the same time as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and plan to release their own Facebook application

With childhood obesity rates tripling in the last 15 years, Kaiser Permanente has decided to do something about this growing epidemic: It plans to introduce a video game.

Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube. Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

She hopes the course will raise serious issues about YouTube, such as the role of "corporate-sponsored democratic media expression."

YouTube is "a phenomenon that should be studied," student Darren Grose said. "You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general."

You and your family are the "real thing." And maybe that's why so many companies (particularly big corporations) are so eager to get their hands on these photos that they seem to be using them without permission.

Case in point: A 15-year-old girl from Dallas discovered that a photo of her at a youth car wash posted on Flickr was later used in an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile in Australia. The photo was not displayed in a flattering way. She was portrayed as the dorky pen pal that Virgin wanted you to dump in favor of its text-messaging service. She only discovered she has been "photonapped" when a friend sent her a copy of the ad.