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I mentioned this video in a comment I made in this week's discussion. It highlights several reasons why school librarians are so essential now more than ever.

This is not scholarly, but it makes a few excellent points about Video Game Addiction, that most people can likely relate to.

Jane McGonigal's new book - Reality is Broken - is out. This is an interview with her and some of the users of her games.

Like the etextbook story I just linked to, this video on "what is a vook?" shows how interactive ebooks can be. I'm not sure how I feel about all this functionality just yet. It makes sense for certain kinds of etextbooks, but I'm not sure if I want video to go with my "Pride & Prejudice."

Design firm IDEO came up with some crazy ideas for the future of the book, one of which is really social in nature. These are some cool ideas/videos.

This google video showing its datacenter and security, is probably in response to the amazon outage last week

This site documents the public response to internet phenomena (e.g., smiling dogs, phrases, viral videos).

This is fascinating to me. Some years ago I have read Richard Dawkin's The selfish gene (http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introduction/dp/0199291152/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296232952&sr=1-3) and the Idea of Memes, using us, humans, to reproduce and evolve was quite amazing. I would also recommend Susan Blackmore's The meme machine (http://www.amazon.com/Meme-Machine-Popular-Science/dp/019286212X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296232884&sr=8-1), it was interesting for me. Yes, it falls under the "popular science" category, and her pseudo)scientific style could be a bit irritating; but overall there were some interesting ideas. P.S. I did not get the hyper-linking to work for me. I would appreciate some clues :-)

scientismic - a new term?

I am getting interested in online mediated learning and apparently a lot of tutoring is being conducted via online video/chat programs, such as Skype.

I saw my friend use an Android version of herself as a Facebook picture. Adroidify allows you to give your phone visual attributes of how you understand your personality. I immediately thought of SI, and especially the early video we watched about MIT projects making phones more interactive via robots.

One of the reasons why I will likely never be good at joining virtual communities such as Second Life is that I get really, really nauseous when moving through images on a screen when I'm sitting in a chair. Apparently, people call this "cybersickness."

Photos taken with smart phones and gps enabled cameras pinpoint your location...

From the article: "Still, books are one of the last ad-free zones, and by showing ads on an e-reader, Amazon risks alienating some users, he said. " Libraries too are one of the last ad-free zones.

They may try to release a tablet. "An Amazon tablet could tie together the seemingly disparate parts of the company's business, Mr. McQuivey said, including e-commerce, e-books, video and audio."

How has the distribution and viewing experience of watching a movie changed in the instant netflix age? "There are moviegoers and probably critics who don't care about the kind of box that images come in, how those images were created and how they are consumed, though it seems important to mark these changes and how they are affecting our modern or postmodern selves. Television and home video shrank movies, turning them into more easily obtainable images that are perhaps no longer (as) sacred. The new 24-hour movie, meanwhile, has brought other changes, filling our eyes and sometimes flooding our heads with an unending stream of visions. "