more links (and how to keep track of them)

Here are a few links to material that might be useful:

1. Postsecret blog. An online community art project of sorts wherein anonymous people snail mail postcards revealing their secrets to the site's creator, who publishes a selection every week. The project has been so succesful that its been curated as exhibitions in galleries across the U.S., as well as converted into book form. As most of the featured postcards are a collage of text and image, I'm creating an assignment wherein students will each make a secret postcard, exchange it with one another without knowing its author, and complete a description/analysis writing exercise. Click here for audio clips of NPR interviews with the site creator, Frank Warren.

2. Gold-farming. A gold-farmer is an MMPORG player who "harvests" virtual objects that are useful within a game and sells them in exchange for real money, usually via Ebay. A gold-farmer is different from other game players in that s/he is repeating a particular move within a game to acquire a certain object for the primary purpose of making a cash earning. While there are individuals who run these services independently, the issue came to public attention when organizations were set up to provide these services, often paying low wages to its staff for long work hours. The bulk of these organizations are located in China, although the gold-farming industry is also exists in other "third-world" countries. This NYTimes article is a good introductory piece to the issue. A PhD student in UC San Diego is making a documentary of the issue. The preview, broadcast on Youtube, can be found here. Finally, this article, academic in nature, discusses the racialized narrative of the gold-farming issue.

3. Forgotten-NY. A website about no-longer existing or obscure landmarks/sites throughout the five boroughs. Potentially useful as a resource for the Neighborhood assignment, but I think it is especially fascinating given that the website creates a "space" for what is no longer materially there.

Conversely, thanks to advances in graphic design, we are growing more familiar with virtual models that help us envision what a certain place might possibly look like in the future. This Wired article illustrates this. Interestingly, parts of NYC are experiencing a proliferation of new luxury condominiums, as some of us can attest to in the neighborhoods we live. These condo units often find buyers before the structure is in place, and this technology is a widely used marketing tool that allows developers/agents to give a "virtual tour" of a product not yet completely in existence, for which people are willing to pay obscene amounts of money.


Finally, I've recently set up a del.icio.us account, a social bookmarking web service which is similar to the feature on your web browser, only its available to others. You can also create a network or community of. I'm still experimenting with it, but from what I gather, bookmarks are grouped according to tags. As such, I've labelled web sites that I've come across that might be useful for our course as "cyber110." I'm not implementing it in my teaching this semester, but I can see something like that as being a great tool for teaching web research, organizing, annotating and summarizing (there's a space where you're required to post a 'description' of the site you're bookmarking. Click here to access my del.icio.us account.