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As I have already confessed, I am inordinately fascinated (see previous posts here and here) with a YouTube webcam “artist” known as lonelygirl15 and the question of whether she is actually a home-schooled 15-year-old whose parents are religious missionaries of some kind, or whether the series of videos she has uploaded about her relationship with her parents and her boyfriend Daniel are an elaborate Blair Witch-style viral marketing campaign for something or other (Brian Flemming, a filmmaker who said he wasn’t involved, might not be telling the truth).

Luckily, New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan seems obsessed as well, and has devoted much of her blogging time to tracking down the various elements of the mystery. In her latest instalment, she looks at some of the evidence that has led skeptics to believe the whole lonelygirl15 business is a giant conspiracy — including the fact that several domains with lonelygirl15 in them (including a fan site) were registered before Bree put any of her videos up. There’s some more details in this L.A. Times story (reg. required).

Update:

Even more details and rumours to mull over, for those without a life: Virginia has a new post, in which she talks about the mysterious (possibly unintelligible) phone message she got, and has some links to a new discussion group about lonelygirl’s identity and purpose. Also links to an L.A. Times column, a Joystiq post about whether it’s part of an ARG (alternate reality game) and a typically erudite column at the Times (although Virginia gets points for using the word “hermeneutic”).

Let’s give credit where credit is due: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who recently joined the Apple board of directors to much fanfare and rumour-mongering from the blogosphere, has reportedly declined the automatic grant of 30,000 stock options that are due him as an Apple board member, according to StreetInsider. Instead, he has said that he plans to buy 10,000 shares on the open market. Bravo, Dr. Schmidt.

Well, it was bound to happen. First it was retailers like American Apparel and Telus making their way into Second Life, the virtual world “game” from Linden Labs, then musicians like Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega, and now it’s politicians.

For whatever reason, former Virginia governor Mark Warner — who wants to become the “fallback” candidate should Senator Hilary Clinton get hit by a truck or decide not to accept the Democratic nomination — decided to make an appearance in Second Life, where he was interviewed by blogger Wagner James Au of New World Notes before an audience of about 30 avatars. Among other things, some handlers taught him how to wave and how to keep his feet on the ground (literally).

My favourite comment about Wagner’s appearance came from Rex Hammock, who said that campaigning on Second Life was “right up there with doing an interview with Steven Colbert. High risk, questionable reward and lots of accolades from people who rarely vote.” Touche.

And in other virtual world news, someone with an appreciation for architecture and a whole lot of time on his hands designed a map for the video game Half-Life 2 that is an exact replica of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann house, also known as Fallingwater. There’s a cool video walkthrough here.

I don’t often do this on my blog, but since several different blogs and news sites have mentioned the Washington Post’s introduction of reader comments on news stories, I thought I would mention that the newspaper I work for in Toronto, the Globe and Mail (www.theglobeandmail.com) has allowed reader comments on every story we publish since last September. It has proven to be an extremely popular feature with readers — so popular that on some contentious news stories we are overwhelmed with hundreds of comments.

We aren’t alone in experimenting with such features. As commenters on the ePolitics post mention, China Daily has had a comment feature for some time, and so has a German newspaper — a recent survey of the industry called the Bivings Report notes that 19 of the U.S. newspapers it surveyed allowed comments on news stories. For awhile now, the BBC has had a feature known as “Have Your Say,” which is turned on for certain stories and includes either moderated comments (in which an editor reviews comments before they are posted) or unmoderated comments (in which readers themselves monitor the comments and flag inappropriate ones for removal).

Like the Post and other newspapers, the Globe is experimenting with blogs and user-generated content as well as comments, and with other ways of allowing our readers to become part of a community. I can’t give any details, but we’ll be rolling out new features along those lines in the months to come. To me, that kind of interactivity is one of the most exciting things to happen to the news media in generations, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

Ryan Carson says he doesn’t have time to use all those social apps like del.icio.us and Flickr and Digg, although he thinks they are cool, and Phil Edwards says that he likes them too but sees the phenomenon as appealing to a relatively small niche of Web geeks — in his post, he says social software is like a reverse Tardis (the time machine in the cult sci-fi TV show Doctor Who), in that it is “much, much bigger on the outside than it is on the inside.” Nice line, Phil. I wish I had come up with that one.

It’s worth reading Ryan’s entire post, because at the end he surveys people like Tom Coates of Yahoo, Mike Davidson of Newsvine and Ted Rheingold of Dogster about what they think of social software and its significance. Predictably enough, Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr chimes in on the issue of whether social software is a fad, and says that such apps are a passing fancy — and that even if something useful remains after the fad passes, it will be “less than world-changing.”

My response would be that worlds change in small ways as well as large ones, and I think the social aspect of apps like Flickr and Digg means a lot more than any one of those software services does on its own. Do they take a lot of work? In some cases yes, although my use of del.icio.us is so ingrained into the way I browse that I don’t even notice it any more, thanks to a Firefox extension, and I couldn’t browse for long — or do my job as quickly or as effectively — if I didn’t have something like it. It’s debatable whether Digg or social bookmarking or any of the other social apps are standalone businesses (I would argue in most cases they are not), but what they represent is no less real.

I think that over time, social software features such as tagging, sharing, sorting and voting Digg-style will become more and more a part of all kinds of services, to the point where we hardly realize they are there. Will everyone use them? Unlikely. But I believe that most technology starts with “edge cases,” as Robert Scoble put it — including email, the Web and cellphones — and gradually moves towards the center. Stowe Boyd has some great thoughts on the necessity for and the payoff from social apps here, and Karl Martino says that we are all confused, and that the Web itself is a social app (I would agree).

It started as an inside joke among friends, but FOO Camp has turned into an “event” that seems to draw equal parts admiration and criticism, depending on whether you get invited to it or not. For those who don’t know, FOO is short for “friends of O’Reilly” — as in Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, publisher of technology books and organizer of conferences. According to the Wikipedia entry on FOO Camp, the event got started after an O’Reilly staffer joked about having a “FOO bar” at a conference — a reference to the time-honoured term “fubar,” mean “f***ed up beyond all recognition.”

Over the years, FOO Camp has grown to become one of the hot, invite-only happenings in the Valley — yes, even bigger than Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch parties. And along the way, there has been an undercurrent of frustration from those who feel left out by the invitation-only status of the event, including some people who have never been invited (but think they should be) and some who were invited once but then weren’t asked to come back. The latest brouhaha — not surprisingly — involves Web guru Dave Winer, who clearly falls into the former category.

This definitely has a high-school, “who’s in and who’s not” kind of feel to it, but it also raises the same kinds of issues that the old “A-list gatekeeper” debate over influence in the blogosphere does. Is O’Reilly being elitist by having an exclusive, invite-only party — and if so, does it matter? For those who see the Internet as leveling the playing field, lowering the barriers to entry, and so on, FOO Camp seems like a kick in the communal goolies. But Tim appears to see it partly as good business and partly as an attempt to bring smart people together in a controlled setting, without having to worry about troublemakers, windbags and other assorted riff-raff (he explained to Roger Cadenhead why Dave isn’t invited, and there’s more details here).

For my part, I think Tim should be able to hold whatever kind of event he wants (and so does my friend Stowe Boyd — who gets a comment from the Scobelizer). Would I like to be invited? Sure. But I’m not going to bitch and moan because I haven’t been. Call it elitism or exclusionary or arrogant if you like — the fact is that not everyone can be invited to everything, and sometimes being exclusive (or discriminating, in the positive sense of the word) makes for a better event. My friend Kent Newsome has some thoughts from the other side of the argument, and Tom Coates of plasticbag has his own thoughts (he attended this year).

WTF? Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has posted a copy of a letter he received from a lawyer representing Apple, who asked that CrunchGear — Mike’s new gadget site — remove a video clip showing some elements of Apple’s new Leopard operating system, which hasn’t been released yet. The letter says:

“Apple therefore requests that you remove this video from your website and take steps to prevent any further distribution of videos or screenshots of Apple software without Apple’s authorization. If you are represented by counsel, please provide me with the identity of that counsel.”

Mike’s response: “It’s a YouTube video. That’s at www.youtube.com. Get them to take it down if it’s a violation of your IP and it will stop showing at crunchgear and the other sites.” Good one, Mike. My favourite part of the post? The lawyer’s letter begins with these words: “NOT FOR POSTING.” Lol.

How many CEOs of online dating networks can you name who have done advanced math research that led to someone getting the Field’s Medal — often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics? I can think of one: my friend Markus Frind, the guy behind PlentyofFish.com, one of the top dating sites in the world.

Markus recently posted a description of how he came up with an algorithm that isolated 23 prime numbers in succession for the first time, and how that research was in turn cited by Terence Tao in a paper he did on prime numbers, a paper that helped contribute to him winning the Fields Medal.

Nice work, Markus. It’s bad enough that you’re making $500,000 a month or whatever it is on your dating site (for which you are the only employee). Now you have to be a math genius as well. Next you will tell me that you have a platinum-selling CD and are hanging out with Paris Hilton and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

This has been said before, but it bears repeating: Chris Pirillo — the guy behind Gnomedex — has a post with some good advice in it about how to keep your blog from becoming part of the blogosphere echo chamber, where everyone writes about the same things and then dozens of blogs pile up on Techmeme like tractor-trailers jack-knifing on the I-95. This is a problem my friend Rob Hyndman has written about recently, and so has Jeremy Zawodny.

Chris’s advice is well worth reading, including “Don’t live inside your news aggregator” and “Stop whining (or worrying) about what list you’re on (or not on)” — of course, his list also includes “create, don’t regurgitate” and “say something original at least once a day,” but for the purposes of this post I’m going to ignore those. The core of his advice is to try and lift your head above the fray and think of something new, and to link to someone other than the usual suspects.

I’ve been trying to follow this latter suggestion ever since my friend Kent Newsome mentioned his “second opinion” idea, in which he tries to link to a lesser-known blogger whenever possible. Now, whenever I’m looking at Techmeme or Tailrank or Popurls, I try to look for names I don’t recognize and scan their posts to see if they have anything of value to add (which they often do). I still look at the usual suspects, but I do my best to at least read and potentially link to bloggers I haven’t read before — although Kent warns that this can go too far sometimes.

Jeneane Sessum has some similar advice she calls “global bloggers link out day,” and Duncan Riley has his own thoughts on the subject of how to keep your blog from getting stale.

One of the things I find fascinating about virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims Online and There is that in many ways they are very much like the real world — right up to the point where things start to get really weird. The fact that the laws of physics, morality and even life itself can effectively be re-written on the fly has a way of making things very interesting (and in many cases confusing) for non-players. I’ve written about this kind of thing before, and I recently came across another example — and one with a Canadian flavour, no less.

In a recent post on Second Life Herald, a writer named Pixeleen Mistral tells the story of what happened when she went to get a new cellphone for her avatar (yes, she felt her in-world character needed a hot new cellphone) at a new store set up by Telus, a Canadian wireless provider that has — like T-shirt maker American Apparel and several other retailers — opened a virtual version of one of its real-world stores. Unfortunately for Pixeleen, the store had been completely encased in plywood by a “griefer” artist trying for a Christof kind of look (griefers are like in-world hackers and troublemakers).

She came back a little while later to find the plywood removed, but then watched as another griefer (this one with a gun fetish, and an avatar whose clothes were covered in long spikes) first shot a customer (another journalist) and then waved around a sword to show off his script-writing skills. Sparkle Dale, who works at the Telus store, reportedly handed the whole affair with aplomb, and even managed to sell another customer a phone — all while the griefer was busy shooting another customer, a “trend consultant” from PSFK.com named Brighton Giugiaro, for standing between him and the door.

Juvenile? Perhaps. A waste of time? No doubt. But fascinating nonetheless.