Greetings, readers!

Happy Firday!

Yes, Webmaster?

I also am having trouble believing that you are the one addressing my spelling and/or grammar.

However, in answer to your question, no. Although this may at first glance appear to be incorrect, it is the appropriate title for the post.

Yes. You see, Firday is a new, alternate spelling of “Friday” that author Neil Gaiman proposed. It all started last Firday, with a fairly innocuous tweet…

To which he followed up with another tweet.

Under many circumstances, this might have been the end of it. However, a dictionary got involved…

…and they had a conversation.

Shortly after that, I started following the Merriam Webster Dictionary on Twitter.

Now, fast-forward to very early this morning or last night, depending on where you are.

Others on Twitter have gotten involved, and this conversation has continued.

And thus, today is most definitely Firday.

(My utmost apologies about some of the tweets appearing twice; I have minimal control over what Twitter decides to embed in addition to the tweet I actually want.)

And so without further ado, I wish you a Happy Firday.

Greetings, readers.

I had originally intended to provide another October themed post to you, or to at least update a Doctor Who idea. However, I got distracted by my surroundings. One of the slightly older news (but still somewhat relevant) internet “scandals” caught my attention, and I got sidetracked.

The existence of the scandal got me to thinking, however. Has anybody tried to study how political frameworks can be applied to the internet? After all, there are such ideas as “flame wars”, and there are definite subgroups on the Web. (One only needs to look to reddit, imgur, or even Twitter to see that this is the case.) And the scandal I was looking at (“GamerGate” for those of you masochistically minded and interested) also clearly demonstrates this.

Of course, there are not exactly any sort of genuine “resources” on the internet, and it is connected to the real world. Much of the scandal I spent time looking at was very connected to the real world- it is loosely related to the topic of making commodities in the real world. However, those commodities from the real world are for the online world- video games.

Since there are group dynamics, I would like to think that there are political aspects.

But how would one define them? There is a huge amount of data. How would one use it?

(I would apologize for this post not being particularly “fluffy”, were it not for the fact that I am still, at the core, discussing video games. By many metrics, that makes this topic fluffy.)

So, readers, do you have any thoughts on a metric or framework for understanding the politics of the internet?