Word: webbing
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...City council meetings have devolved into shouting matches. Local crime stories on the New Orleans Times-Picayune's web site, which allows readers to post comments, are inevitably followed by a string of missives reeking of barely disguised racial hostility, calling for citizens to arm themselves against the "thugs" responsible for the city's sky-high murder rate. And a string of guilty pleas from corrupt city officials, including one that led to the resignation this month of popular City Council member Oliver Thomas, has elicited charges that white prosecutors are motivated by race; even the somewhat staid Louisiana Weekly...
...computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant...
Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow...
Maybe that's why Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they're refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially...
...even if you don't take out a second mortgage, you can still fantasize about what the house is worth. Fantasies of real estate prices have long been a staple of middle-class conversation. These days you can go to the Web and get a specific number...