Fun links, in one of them the comment “Good blogging involves attitude and snark.”

Academic bloggers. Here
Like Breaking Up, Leaving Academe Can Be Hard to Do. Here
I Pencil: A product of the mixed economy. Here

And

The wikipedia abstract of the day: The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.

In this paper, we examine the social roles of software tools in the English-language Wikipedia, specifically focusing on autonomous editing programs and assisted editing tools. This qualitative research builds on recent research in which we quantitatively demonstrate the growing prevalence of such software in recent years. Using trace ethnography, we show how these often-unofficial technologies have fundamentally transformed the nature of editing and administration in Wikipedia. Specifically, we analyze „vandal fighting‟ as an epistemic process of distributed cognition, highlighting the role of non-human actors in enabling a decentralized activity of collective intelligence. In all, this case shows that software programs are used for more than enforcing policies and standards. These tools enable coordinated yet decentralized action, independent of the specific norms currently in force.