Fox Harrell (Georgia Tech): Toward a Theory of Critical Computing: The Case of Social Identity Representation in Digital Media Applications. From First Monday, a special issue on user creativity, governance, and the new media. Liz Gannes on the short and illustrious history of Twitter #hashtags. Search engines' dirty secret: Even search engines must obey the laws of thermodynamics — and that means the whole world pays for your every query. Is Facebook becoming the global phone book? The Inside Story of Moot vs. 4chan: Christopher "moot" Poole founded the infamous message board 4chan, but when the site's pranks got out of control, he cracked down on users. A British project is setting out to take geotagging to the next level: Barcodes without barriers — is this the web's next big thing? Have relationships like rock stars: Meera Atkinson on a Twitter expose. The launch of Arabic domain names has been hailed as a milestone — but a milestone to where? PerezHilton.com is the "McDonald's of the Internet". Lost and Found: An article on Deep Purple, GeoCities, and the web as archive. The death of the open web: The Internet was once an unruly place — are apps gentrifying it? Nicholas Carr on how “real life” is now “lived”. The argument that "we take the internet for granted" may seem like a tired straw man, but perhaps the ideology of the internet could stand a second look. In praise of Boise: Why space really is the final frontier in the internet age. Who remembers a time when there was no internet? The web is filled with amazingness. Is anything we make online now going to exist in the future? From Cracked, a look at 5 guilty pleasures the Web killed while you weren't looking; and here are 5 reasons you should be scared of Google and 10 survival tips now that Google knows you're on to them.
