While trying to expand internationally, Facebook finds competition from foreign clones and other SNs entrenched in the countries they add: http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/F/FACEBOOK_CLONES?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-07-28-10-19-41

Lawsuit over malicious board posts: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/07/autoadmit

Newspapers aren't really online if they don't allow comments.
http://www.editorsweblog.org/web_20/2008/07/opinion_without_reader_comments_youre_no.php

Community contributions can begin to seem exploitive if there's not feedback/reward.
http://www.horsepigcow.com/2007/12/21/please-stop-crowdsourcing-me/

An intelligent diatribe against crowdsourcing: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/07/11/whyIDontLikeCrowdSourcing.html

We should watch this to see what happens. Could be an interesting addition to live events such as GameDay and MNF.
http://www.crowdfire.net/blog
When the festival starts, the CrowdFire really gets going. We'll all be able to send SMS, email, and uploads of our media directly into the CrowdFire database, and we'll have media jockeys creating streams of CrowdFire imagery in real time, which we'll send back out into the festival grounds through a network of digital screens. We'll also send them out into the ether of the Web, for anyone to experience. And anyone can do the same - which is pretty cool.

Wordle: http://wordle.net/

RIP tag clouds? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tag_clouds_rip.php

Times article on trolls
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?ref=magazine
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.