It is can be hugs tiem now, yes.

Not long ago, Esther eponis brought to my attention the notion of "ticky", which is apparently a cultural trope in the fandom world, maybe particularly on LJ. It's a tendency to use check-boxes in your web surveys. It's interesting how there are little social norms in different communities -- check-boxes, at least on the surface, don't immediately have anything to do with fandom or fanfic or anything else, right? And I was struck by how much social sciences work could be done on online communities, and how little of it is actually getting done -- or if it is, it's well under my radar.

But. Xeni, on BoingBoing, has pointed out David McRaney's social-sciences-style overview of the LOLcats/image-macros community thing.

Anil Dash, internet culture maven and Six Apart VP, has writted u an articles about LOLcats grammah. (but I eated it)

And. Mr. Gordon McNaughton of Chelmsford, Essex, has produced a LOLcat builder that lets you LOL nearly effortlessly. This sort of tool, it would seem, encourages the continuation of the status quo in LOLcats... innovations in the field may still have to come through some more general image-manipulation program.

Speaking of online communities, though -- what really really baffles me is the comments on the xkcd syndication. xkcd is this beautiful, erudite, subtle thing ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") with jokes about Fourier transforms, self-reference, and the subversion of language... and the comments on the feed seem inane: "FIRST POST!" or "I don't get it" or "I laughed!". Is there something about xkcd particularly, or is it more a culture of webcomics feeds on LJ? Value judgements aside, I think we should try to make sense of this phenomenon...