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Yes, good money can actually be made in the rapidly-growing world of free-to-play massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), but just how much can micro-transactions actually generate?

Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively - providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are: 1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around? 2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources? 3. Where do stories begin? 4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications? 5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source? 6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage? 7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues? 8. Do online comments shape the news?

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

Starting wtih Volume 35, Issue 1, Computational Linguistics is an open access journal, freely available to all online readers. There will no longer be a print edition.

Connexions works to connect individuals and organizations working for social change with each other, with information and ideas, and with the wider community. Connexions Online features resources and organizations fostering democratization, economic justice, environmental responsibility, civil liberties, and the creation and preservation of community.

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

The key phrase is "forced browsing". Scientific discovery is often a story of serendipity, of stumbling on an idea that has been neglected or discarded (it's one of those remote Google search results that you don't bother to click on). The question is whether putting science on the internet makes such unexpected encounters less likely.

This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300). Suitable for text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases, ODF frees documents from their applications-of-origin, enabling them to be exchanged, retrieved, and edited with any OpenDocument-compliant software or tool. This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content.

How is Ma.gnolia different from other social bookmarking services? It starts with making the social side of social bookmarking work better. With contacts, groups and different ways to share bookmarks both within and outside of Ma.gnolia, we make working together on a casual basis or more formal projects fun and easy.

Invisible Architecture The NanoWorld of Buckminster Fuller by Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco

A semantic web experiment with a focus on Ontology Visualisation and Querying.