Wikispaces - an online space for groupwork for ordinary people.

Wikispaces is a place for people to easily build web pages together. Anyone can join the site for free, create a space, and begin contributing within a matter of minutes.
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We're firm believers that wikis can be revolutionary tools for building communities. But most wikis are very engineer-focused: hard to use, buried under busy user interfaces, full of features only a geek could love. Wikispaces is our attempt to build a wiki that's easy to use and easy to adopt for all kinds of audiences. We've kept the tool simple so that you can focus on building content, talking with other members, and growing your community.

I wonder whether wikis can (will) be as widely adopted as blogs.

Even though Wikinews project has been up for quite a while, I just discovered it. From Wikinews manifesto:

We seek to create a free source of news ... build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.
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While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. ... Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.
While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

Very exciting project, it'd be interesting to get data on readership, authenticity and patterns of collaboration. I wanted to start the Russian section but then realized that I'm not sure why I would want to do it (besides that it's fun). I can understand Wikinews in English - the ideas of independent and grass-root media as well as the idea of wikis are quite wide-spread. But Serbian or Ukrainian Wikinews? Does anybody read them? Can people even find them?

I volunteered to maintain a new collaborative blog (ASIST SIG-BWP) created to support the ASIST special interest group on blogs, wikis and podcasting. As its name shows, the blog will collect and post information related to blogs, wikis, and podcasting (news, conferences, resources, etc.)

In addition to being another read in the relevant area, for me it will be a great chance to be in the community of smart and like-minded people.

Media Bloggers Association is a non-partisan organization consisted of bloggers and writers, who are interested in the development of media blogging and emerging citizen journalism.

Following up on recent discussion at Blogher conference as well as many others on "where are female bloggers?", here are the numbers of males and females in this association (I might have incorrectly figured out one or two but I tried to check all unclear cases):

• Out of 27 founding members there are 23 males and 4 females.
• Out of 133 other members there are 112 males and 21 female.
• Therefore, out of 160 members of MBA 25 are women. It's 15.6%.

I don't have any particular point here but it'd be interesting to estimate how many female media bloggers are out there. Is it the actial gender ratio of media bloggers represented? Or is it something else? Women's indecision or reluctance to join? Lack of information among them? Other circles of media bloggers with more women in them?

Following some links from slashdot.org I found an interesting report on "The Economist" website on video games. From that report I found a very thorough study of the effects of violent fantasy role-playing games on young adults and adults by D. Williams and M. Skoric ("Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game", 2005, Communication Monographs, 72 (2))

Hypotheses

1. Game play will result in beliefs more accepting of violent behaviors.
2. Game play will result in more aggressive social interactions.

Method

• 213 participants completed the whole study
  (characteristics of participants: 167 male, 45 female, 1 unstated; mean age 27.7 years, predominantly white (85%), male (84%), educated, and middle class (annual income $30,000-$40,000), which is consistent with the typical player profile from the previous literature)
• Power analysis method, aimed to detect medium or large differences between the treatment group (75) and the control group (138). Participants assigned to these groups randomly.
• The treatment group played MMRPG game Asheron's Call 2 (a game based on combat and conflict) for a month. The control group didn't play.
• Pre- and post-online test questionnaires collected demographic, behavioral and personality variables for both groups.
• Aggression-related beliefs were measured with the Normative Beliefs in Aggression (NOBAGS) general scale.
• Aggressive social interactions were measured with two questions: one asked if, in the past month, participants had had a serious argument with a friend; the other asked if they had had a serious argument with a partner.

Result

Some differences in percentages but nothing statistically significant. In one paragraph,

Despite a robust exposure that averaged 56 hours over the month of the study, the results did not support the hypotheses. Simple correlations between hours played and the three dependent variables [NOBAG, argument with a friend, argument with partner] were non-significant. In the controlled regressions, game play—controlling for gender, age, and time one aggression scores—was not a significant predictor of aggressive cognitions.

This article is a great contribution to the shift from prophecies and condemnations, which dominated the discourse on video and computer games, to empirically supported studies and thoughtful discussions.