MySpace Doooomed. Allegedly.

The Washington Post has a story about young­sters leaving MySpace in droves that recently hit the front page of digg. And the WSJ agrees with a spookily similar story. Hang on. I recall reading another remark­ably similar story four months ago [digg link — the news­paper has moved the piece].

I think these stories

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Pirate Nation: Two-​​Thirds Share Music

Illegal sharing and down­loading con­tinues to have a major appeal for music con­sumers, in spite of several high-​​​​profile lit­ig­a­tion cam­paigns. Two thirds share music and over a third of us have used illegal download networks like Kazaa, Limewire and Soulseek. That’s according to a new report from Entertainment Media Research. The sample com­prised over 3,000 music

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Downward Spiral in the Music Biz?

News has emerged about a new music download service, SpiralFrog, due to launch in December. This story has been extens­ively covered on boing­boing and Techcrunch. However, if you’ve missed it, the gist is that the service will offer the Vivendi Universal Music Group cata­logue for free download. Talks are underway with EMI and

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Virtually Safe

Children’s safety may not always be at peril when they go online. In fact, the latest devel­op­ments are hope­fully a move in the opposite dir­ec­tion. I received news yes­terday about a new attempt to tackle bullying through roleplay in a virtual world. The scheme is being developed by a con­sor­tium of nine European universities.

Professor Ruth Aylett, Professor of Computing

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instant messaging don’t break your grammar

While most teen­agers use short­hand expres­sions in their instant messages, it’s not actually lowering stand­ards of grammar. That’s according to a University of Toronto study by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis. Detailed analysis found that while the words and phrases differed from the registers that would be expected by parents and teachers, the struc­tures of

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