Andrew LaVallee

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.

“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.

“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Read Even Boring Blogs Can Be Things of Beauty

When a group of college students launched the document-sharing Web site Scribd.com, they envisioned it as a place where they and others could publish term papers online.

Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Ave Maria.” Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.

But rivaling Scribd’s growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned — from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh — keeping the site “clean” while not alienating users is a central challenge.

Read Document-Sharing Web Site Finds Racy Content Piling Up

As recent graduates, several of Hung Truong’s classmates will be headed for typical next steps in their technology careers: working as programmers or pursuing master’s degrees in computer science.

But the 23-year-old, who received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, instead plans to study the growth of social-networking sites like Facebook and why unpaid volunteers spend time fixing incorrect Wikipedia entries. He enrolls this fall in a new graduate program in social computing at the University of Michigan.

Michigan’s program clinched his decision to attend that school. Social computing “has more of a focus on real-life applications, whereas [computer science] is very broad and more ambiguous,” he said. “I do think there’s a growing interest from students, myself included, and the universities seem to be responding to that.”

After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students’ lives - and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among the tech companies that have invested in schools’ social computing programs.

The programs tend to draw as much from the sociology, psychology and communications departments as they do from more traditional computer science classes.

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New Real-Time Messaging Services Overwhelm Some Users With Mundane Updates From Friends

Though she already has a blog, a podcast and a character in the virtual world of Second Life, Kera Richard has recently become obsessed with a new online tool for connecting with friends. For the past three weeks, she has joined the crowds on Twitter.com, a site that invites everyone to answer the question: “What are you doing?”

“I didn’t get it at first,” said the 32-year-old Randolph, N.J., project manager for a financial services company. “How much information do I really need to let the world know about me?”

But soon she was “Twittering” a dozen or more times a day, broadcasting quick, as-they-happen updates to friends who had chosen to link to her through the service. Topics ranged from her lunch (tomato soup and a pretzel) to work annoyances (a high-pitched buzz from a nearby computer). She sent updates from her office and home computers, and used her cellphone to send posts from her car and a bar at happy hour. “It became addicting very quickly,” she said.

Twitter is one of several growing services, including Google Inc.-owned Dodgeball, that tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication. Twitter allows members to use their computers or cellphones to distribute short messages on what they’re doing. Each message is limited to 140 characters, but there are no limits on how many messages a user can send. Members specify whether they want to be alerted by a text message on their phones or an instant message on their PCs when friends post updates.

Like most social-networking sites, once a person opens a Twitter account they can invite their friends to join or connect with existing members. Each member gets a personal Web page that logs all their posts. Some members limit their networks to a handful of friends while others sign up to receive instant updates from dozens of members.

These services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel “too” connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.

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Looking to attract more young people to his church, the Rev. Patrick Gray turned to an unlikely marketing tool: MySpace, a social-networking Web site that draws millions of teens and young adults every day.

Father Gray, a 35-year-old Episcopal priest at Boston’s Church of the Advent, was sold on MySpace by a congregant whose rock band had used the site to attract listeners. While most MySpace users create pages to promote themselves or a band, he posted a profile for his parish. It includes reminders for Sunday services, audio files of its choir and announcements for “Theology on Tap” gatherings at a local bar.

“It’s a way for us to say, ‘Hey, come and see,’” said Father Gray, who created the MySpace profile in January. “It gets our name out there. It puts us on the mental map, the emotional map.” (The church also has a more traditional Web site.)

In a bid to attract new members and shed their persistently Luddite image, churches across the country are embracing technology and Web sites like MySpace. Blogs and podcasts have become part of religious leaders’ communications with congregants, and photo-sharing sites like Flickr are increasingly used to depict a fun-loving, casually-dressed community of churchgoers.

Churches with an evangelical bent often lead the way when it comes to harnessing technology, though some traditional congregations are also experimenting — even the Vatican has podcasts. Still, some Christians are concerned about using unmoderated social-networking sites that may contain adult language and racy photos.

“There’s always going to be some dangers,” Father Gray said of sites like MySpace and Flickr. But that doesn’t mean churches should avoid them, he said. His church is considering establishing a presence on another social-networking site, Facebook, that is limited largely to college students.

Attracting young people, as well as staying relevant, are two of the most common reasons churches are trying these sites, said Brad Abare, who posts tips and interviews on the blog Church Marketing Sucks. The tough-love name reflects the blunt discussion he thinks many religious organizations need to have, he said. “We have the greatest story ever told, and nobody’s listening,” he said.

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