Mobile phones are becoming more and more numerous across the African continent. I found out about this competition a year or two ago, and thought it was really neat because it shows innovators designing unique apps to help solve social problems within their communities.

Duolingo's premise is quite simple. How do you get people to translate the web for free? Their answer is to turn it into an experience that is part game, part language instruction, and all ambitious crowdsourcing.

Yeah, I managed to get on the program. It's fun; feels like I'm playing a game.

The website is run by Chair for Social Informatics (CSI) at Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Ljubljana), which deals with interaction of modern society and information communication technology (ICT).

Whoops, didn't see that this was already added, and now it won't let me delete!

From the website: "In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship. Our goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media. In Media Res provides a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we experience mediated texts. Each weekday, a different scholar curates a 30-second to 3-minute video clip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response. We use the title "curator" because, like a curator in a museum, you are repurposing a media object that already exists and providing context through your commentary, which frames the object in a particular way. The clip/comment combination are intended both to introduce the curator's work to the larger community of scholars (as well as non-academics who frequent the site) and, hopefully, encourage feedback/discussion from that community."

One of the fun articles I read on this website was "Yes We Can; Even Though We Say Knope." Here's a link: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2012/06/04/yes-we-can-even-though-we-say-knope Another really interesting one is "Curating the City" (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2012/05/25/curating-city), which talks about new mobile app, which allows people to explore a geographical map of Cleveland which provides embedded history for various locations. Supposedly a new update will even allow people to provide their own tours and stories.

Here's an interesting article about the social mechanics of Farmville and how it mimics the ideals of "gift economy" often demonstrated by non-western, "primitive" cultures, such as those of native Papua New Guineans.

The in-text link to the article: " The High-Tech Gift Economy" is also worth a read. It compares the proliferation of shareware and open source software to the political movement of anarcho-communism.

Jorge, that's an interesting blog post, and does point out one of the big reasons why I stopped playing. It was fun for a bit, watching my crops grow, and even uplifting when my facebook friends helped out my crops or sent me gifts without my ever asking, but the planting schedules and need for "x" amount of friends in order to expand made it get old pretty quickly. And I refused to spend real money it.

Hi folks!