You are invited to participate in an academic study on Second Life. We are interested in the innovation-related practices of Second Life members so we can study the composition and structure of the Second Life community and the extent to which members receive resources and support from Linden Lab and other members. The questions focus on information sources such as the Official Linden Blog and the forums, and Second Life features and tools so we can study the ways in which Linden Lab invites and supports Second Life residents to create in-world content and to further develop the Second Life platform through (close) contact with Second Life members.

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary. There are no foreseeable risks associated with this project. The survey takes approximately 20 minutes.

For your chance of winning one of the following amounts in Linden$ - L$10.000 (1x), L$5.000 (2x), L$3.000 (3x), L$2.500 (4x), L$1.000 (5x), L$500 (10x), L$250 (20x), L$100 (30x), L$10 (50x), you can fill out your email address at the end of survey. We will never use this information publicly.

If you have questions at any time about the survey or the procedures, you may contact Rocketgrrrl Tripp aka Shenja van der Graaf at a.c.vandergraaf@lse.ac.uk. For further information you can check http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vanderga/ where the results will be posted in due course.

Yes, I would like to take the survey!!!

I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

Just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight two very useful resources danah boyd has recently brought to my attention via her blog.

First is a presentation (available in audio and video though not alas transcribed) by her and three other US leaders in the study of online risks for young people - David Finkelhor, Michele Ybara and Amanda Lenhart. I was surprised as she was about how much their conclusions (particularly those of Finkelhor and Ybara) seem to have been misrepresented by the media. They do an excellent job of separating the hype about online dangers from the realities and the remedies they suggest for educators and for parents (and their criticisms of current thinking) seem to me very well thought through and argued.

danah mentioned an idea which I hadn’t seen promoted before - “digital street outreach” - the idea that peers online would intervene when they see behaviour or profiles that suggest the author is having trouble. I had thought the Cyber Angels might be doing this kind of work but it seems their focus is now on schools and parents not on the troubled kids themselves.

On a similar theme, but with more qualitative detail, I recommend a paper of danah’s she recently published online both as text and as audio - “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”. It was very broad-ranging and gives an excellent introduction to some of the issues around young people’s use of social networking software.

The invaluable Pew Internet & American Life Project has just completed some more research trying to come up with a typology of American Internet use. You can fill out your own David Brake