I admit to not being familiar with websites like facebook
or myspace (the one or two times I looked at these sites
seemed to me to require too much time and effort to
really understand what they were about) but it appears
that these types of social networking systems will be a
rich source of archival data for analysis, as shown in this
morning's NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Of course this raises a variety of questions (to whom does
research based on such a website generalize to, what are
the ethical issues involved [apparently some of the research
is conducted without the participants knowledge]).  How many
researchers will study such online phenomena instead of
traditional human/animal-based research?

-Mike Palij
New York University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]





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