Today is my birthday, and I have been surprised by a bombardment of Skype messages, emails and writings on my Facebook wall. An interesting and very pleasant experience.

On the BBC news web site Michael Geist (who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law) has written an…

Arguably games of one sort or another are at the heart of most social networks. Sometimes the games are explicit, like the ma.ny games available on Facebook. Sometimes they are implicit in the social interaction. Feeling smug about having the most friends on Facebook of anyone you actually know would be an example of an implicit game. The one thing all these have in commons is that they are pieces of a larger puzzle. They are party games, not the party itself. From this perspective Kongregate is an interesting experiment.

Google doesn’t have a social networking site, and there has been a lot of talk recently about what they would do about this. Yesterday Google announced their intentions, and it was a swerve of astounding cleverness.

Two themes emerged at the LoW conference last week. Neither had been planned in advance, although some people who attended suspected otherwise. The first theme was Second Life as an educational tool. The second was identity.

Many people have a fear about “where” their data is. The questions that they should be worried about, in my opinion, are not about who currently owns the physical machines where the zeroes and ones that represent their data are stored, but rather who has control over the right to look at, or distribute that data.

The collapse of an RSS stream caused my FBFriends plug-in to scream a php warning error message that spilled out of the sidebar and made everything look icky. This caused me to hunt down a way to suppress the message. I found one.

This morning Reidar Wasenius is back on Facebook. The management has apparently become convinced that it is better with him in than out.

The site has scarcely been updated since the end of June. I managed to upload several posts from India but none of the accompanying photographs – and indeed none of the re-edited prose. Early this morning I reloaded the amended versions of the Goa pieces, so they make at least some sense now.

There are crucial differences between MySpace and Bebo on the one hand, and Facebook on the other. Although the three are often lumped together, I have come to think that Facebook has very different possibilities – ones which could be usefully used in educational contexts, and particularly as a background platform for immersive learning.

says, "hello mister sun!"
is online listening to the first presentation in Arcada Day
is wrestling with variable connectivity – the downside of cloud computing
thinks that the new "My Arcada" site is delightful!
is multi-tasking while Heffe’s slideshow whizzes by
wants to know why his Facebook RSS feed is no longer working. Grrr, he probably says.
notices that the Facebook feed is back, as he leaves the party in time to watch Lost

is trying to plan the future with the frustrated Ms Törnqvist
wonders what the Facebook RSS deal is: its down again now after being up all morning…
is moving from Task A to Task B and back again, while thinking that maybe Task C is more urgent after all
notices that HostMonster are now offering WP 2.5, and plans to upgrade on Monday
declares the weekend open and ready for business