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"We discovered that only about half of your digital footprint is related to your individual actions—taking pictures, sending e-mails, or making digital voice calls," IDC senior vice president John Gantz said in a statement. "The other half is what we call the 'digital shadow'—information about you—names in financial records, names on mailing lists, web surfing histories or images taken of you by security cameras in airports or urban centers. For the first time your digital shadow is larger than the digital information you actively create about yourself."

Type numa numa into Google Video’s search box, and you’ll get well over 400 hits; in YouTube’s, you’ll get over 1,500. Virtually all of the results are cut from a single template.

Brolsma’s video singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams. His squarish head and shoulders are in the center of the shot. He’s got a short haircut, glasses that are slightly too small for him and reflect his computer’s monitor, and cheap headphones; he’s sitting in a dismal-looking suburban room. And he is going for it: rolling his eyes back in his head, shaking his face, shooting his hands into the air with the beat, saluting along with the word salut, gesturing grandly, lip-synching the whole thing with his grand opera of a mouth, flirting with the camera, utterly given over to the music. It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

they start to look less like an infectious joke than like a new cultural order. These kids aren’t mocking the Numa Numa Guy; they’re venerating him. They are geeks honoring the King of the Geeks, and they’re beautiful to see, because they’re replicating and spreading his happiness. They’re following a ritual that’s meaningful if not yet venerable: learning the dance, lip-synching the song, documenting their performance just so, making it available for the world to see.

"It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful," says David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 4chan's utility is its ability to gather millions of people in conversation in a single place and create a "meme-rich" environment, says Mr. Weinberger.

Mr. Poole originally just wanted a place to share his fascination with Japanese comics and television shows. He was a fan of the popular Japanese image Web site 2chan and wanted to create a version for American audiences. With his mother's approval, he used her credit card to purchase server space and started 4chan.org.

"They get rowdy -- it's like a bar without alcohol," says Willard Ling, a moderator and long-time user of the site. "It's like that psychological concept of deinvidualization -- when groups of people become less aware of their own responsibility." Mr. Poole and his team of moderators have handed out 70,000 bans over the last three years, but preventing long-term abuse can be difficult. 4chan's "Wild West" reputation has created a dilemma for Mr. Poole. While it's brought him Internet fame, albeit through his alter ego, and created enviable traffic, he has trouble selling ads to more cautious companies who don't want their ads appearing next to potentially graphic content. He's attempted to quarantine sexual material on a set of adult boards, but that doesn't stop pornography or other adult content from appearing elsewhere.

Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.

Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content.

The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: • all media messages are constructed • each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction • media messages are produced for particular purposes • all media messages contain embedded values and points of view • people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages • media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.

In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."

The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme

An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts with negative credibility, say –26 or –27. Why on earth should we believe anything said by someone who’s unwilling to stand behind his or her own words? In most cases, the answer is that we should not.

For all this, anonymity is essential to preserve. It protects whistleblowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous. But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments.

"After that, I think the assumption was that this was going to be a gotcha medium," says Steve Grove, YouTube's news and politics editor.

When the election ended, all YouTube videos mentioning Senator Obama had received a total of 1.9 billion views compared with Sen. John McCain's, which got 1.1 billion views.

Obama's YouTube channel alone were watched the equivalent of 14.5 million hours, with McCain's channel racking up about 488,152 hours

Researchers at the National Academy of Sciences have found that the lightning pace of media brought on by Facebook feeds and Twitter has made the average person increasingly indifferent to human suffering.

When used in a self-centered fashion, it's one more piece of technology increasing the individualistic streak we see so much in Western culture and making us islands unto ourselves.

It's not a clear-cut question. Used properly, Twitter can be an amazing tool for shrinking our globe, quickening international response and building relationships.

Second International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'09) CALL FOR PAPERSSecond International Workshopon Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'09)in conjunction with the8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009),Aachen, Germany, August 19-21, 2009.

Social Network Analysis Conferences in 2009 2009 seems to be a great year for social network analysis and computer science. Here is a list of conferences I am aware of.