Digital Culture Studies

This theme, that is. I am using my site to give a hand’s on demonstration of how themes work. Also, comments are now disabled, because I have enough cialis and porn, thanks.

VOIP Fraud: Telephone fraud catches up to VOIP services

Google’s New Advertising Strategy: I sometimes wonder about how much Google defines the average user experience online.

Social Publishing.

In today’s Chronicle, two astonishing facts:

1. Wikepedia costs 5 million a year to run

2. They only have enough cash on hand for the next 3 months.

Social Study Games: resource on the social aspects of gaming.

Social Fiction:  I can’t even boil this down to one sentence. Check it out, and see why.

How To Become a Hacker: an oldie but a goodie.

The Paradox of the Active User: Great read over at 37signals - how do people use technology, versus how they think they will use technology.

Being Digital: A look at Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 book, Being Digital.

Typeface matters: And Comic Sans is not getting your point across. The Effect of typeface on the perception of email.

Back in the day when I made websites, one of the hallmarks of a good site was a witty 404 page. It keeps users from getting upset when the site doesn’t work the way they want it to, and it is a way to flex one’s humour in what is usually a less than amusing venue. I don’t see a lot of 404s anymore - I think most people have a redirect to the index.html page for incorrect pages in sites, so I was charmed when I inadvertently typed in an incorrect livejournal address, and got this:

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You cannot be interested in digital culture and not be interested in issues surrounding free speech - as the medium of CMC grows, questions regarding what can and cannot be said in online venues is in constant debate. So it was with interest that I recently discovered ReputationDefender, a site which states that, “who you are online is as important as who you are offline”. Can’t argue that! But in the FAQ, I found this, and it gave me pause:

Does ReputationDefender simply send cease-and-desist letters or sue everybody when it seeks to “Destroy” content?

No. Most of our approaches to effecting correction or removal of content are non-legal. We will only pursue legal options with the express consent of our clients, and these techniques are strictly optional and usually the last resort. They may incur additional cost.

Are college students techno-idiots? While I don’t like the term ‘idiot’, I do wonder sometimes about the nature of technology fluency at the undergraduate level and whether or not colleges plan to address this in terms of core competancy in the same way that alcohol use and other social norms are addressed. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that this isn’t a problem limited strictly to students on campuses - how do you understand the need for technology-fluency if you yourself are not fluent? And even if you can understand it, how do you impart knowledge you don’t have to your students?

“As of this week, roughly 0.1 percent of the sum of modern humanity plays World of Warcraft.” Or to put it into personal perspective - that is more than a quarter of the entire population of my home country.

ObscureTags.com: Old tags never die. They just go to Hell and regroup. Oh, blink tag! I miss you!

Ch, or double N, however you spell it, the menorahs are beautiful. And some are ….interesting.

Neal Stephensen: “My ongoing struggle against ‘continuous partial attention’” I am also inordinately fond of his essay, “Why I am a bad correspondent.”