"But, with the machines making assumptions about what we want, it’s often easier to embrace that default decision than to choose an alternate path." that's pretty much summarize the issue.

service that aims at identifying who the authorities are, rather than just count the followers

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity [...]" beautiful piece. must read.

people play Farmville because people play Farmville.

"In this paper, we study whether 'social recommendations', or recommendations that utilize a user's social network, can be made without disclosing sensitive links between users. More precisely, we quantify the loss in utility when existing recommendation algorithms are modified to satisfy a strong notion of privacy called differential privacy. We propose lower bounds on the minimum loss in utility for any recommendation algorithm that is differentially private."

"cloud publishing" - helping groups to work on manuscripts and publish books. It's built for writers, editors, designers and small presses.

"The Amanda Project is the story of Amanda Valentino, told through an interactive website and eight-book series for readers aged 13 & up. Readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for Amanda." The published books actually contain a selection of the user generated content from the website.

book + video hybrid publisher. vooks are available (currently) for the web and the iphone.

a service that helps you leave social networks (e.g. facebook), thus killing your "virtual" self.

a page saved from the GeoCities shutdown. Experiments in digital conservation.

"Can an online social network build enough trust to allow strangers to sleep on each others’ couches?"

"Google has quietly opened up a new resource that aggregates Internet statistics across five vectors: consumer trends, macro economic trends, media consumption, media landscape and technology. The site is hosted on the Google.co.uk domain but the statistics are global."

"Free Will is metacommentary on games in the form of a game. In this case [...] one of the oldest mechanics of the videogame: the ability to replay or continue, the fundamental consequencelessness of 'death.' "