Months of extensive discussion on the IDC-list, from June to November, have now culminated to the conference Internet as Playground and Factory, organized at The New Shool, New York, November 12-14. At this international event about 100 activists, lawyers, media scholars, anthropologists, artists, students, programmers, historians, and social media experts come together to reevaluate free labor, play, and pleasure in an economy that is increasingly driven by the expropriation of online sociality. On Friday and Saturday, parts of the discussions will be streamed from this first event in a series of biennial conferences about the politics of digital media.

FirstMonday continues analysing web 2.0 practice and discourse. After the relevant March issue on Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 the current issue (June 2008) focuses on related social media topics, presenting case studies on crowdsourcing, online predators, wikinomics, the One Laptop Per Child project, and a detailed technical comparison of web 1.0 and 2.0 platforms.

Fibreculture 11 publishes a selection of papers from the Digital Art and Culture (DAC) conference 2007. The papers present perspectives on the future of digital media art and culture, speculating on recent trends and developments in digital media use, creation and perception. Check the articles by Axel Bruns, Jim Bizzocchi, Jaakko Suominen and Simon Penny if you wish to learn more about concepts such as produsage, ambient video, retrogaming and critical technical practice.