• Student hit hard by his Web 'fame'. "Think before you upload" would be a massive understatement for Yale University senior and job applicant Aleksey Vayner. He didn't even upload his resume video and 11-page cover letter and resume for Swiss bank USB to YouTube - other people did the circulating and blogging about them. They "showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread on the Internet," the New York Times reports. The video, entitled "Impossible is Nothing" and "staged to look like a job interview, is spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner lifting weights and ballroom dancing and has him spouting Zen-like inspirational messages. The video clip flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube," according to the Times. The Daily Princetonian reports that he has "successfully petitioned YouTube to remove his video, but it's still at IvyGateblog.com, which the Princeton University paper says Vayner has "threatened to sue." But now the student, who has taken a short leave from Yale but plans to take his midterms, the Times reports, is "facing charges himself," according to the Daily Princetonian, for claiming to have launched a nonprofit organization that Charity Navigator, an evaluator of US charities, says doesn't exist. He has also been accused of plagiarism in a self-published book he includes in his resume.
• Net addiction study. In their first-ever attempt to quantify "Internet addiction" in a study released this week, Stanford University researchers looked for signs of "compulsion," the San Jose Mercury News reports. That's not vacation planners who surf sites on travel destinations during lunch breaks. Examples they gave the Mercury News were more like when "social interactions" in alternate-reality games substitute for face-to-face interaction, deadlines at work are missed, sleep is lost, and - when online time is reduced - a person becomes anxious, irritable, or restless. Psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude, who led the research team, "grew interested in the problem when he started to see a small but growing number of habitual Internet users visiting the university's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic," according to the Mercury News.
• 'Bully' not so threatening? Rockstar Games released its game Bully this week amid an unsurprising swirl of controversy - including some legal flak. "This is Rockstar, the guys who dreamed up 'Grand Theft Auto,' a top-selling series featuring plenty of gore and guns," reports the Washington Post. Calling the game a "Columbine simulator," an attorney and prominent critic of videogames filed a complaint in a Florida court asking that the game be banned, the Associated Press reports. Miami-Dade circuit court Judge Ronald Friedman said he reviewed the game for two hours and concluded, "There's a lot of violence. A whole lot. Less than we see on television every night." He added it wasn't violent enough for him to ban it. Here's one psychologist's view on the game.
• Social-networking backlash? A young person deletes his account on a social site, telling the Associated Press the novelty had worn off and a "superficial emptiness" had set in. A sure sign he's thinking for himself and working through the risks and benefits. He's a 26-year-old graduate student. Across the campus at Iowa State University, a journalism professor suggests to the AP this is a sign of hope "that some members of the tech generation are starting to see the value of quality face time." He says social networking is reaching a "saturation point." I don't know. First, MySpace, the biggest social site, recently passed the 119 million-profile mark. Second, the number and frequency of press releases I get announcing new social sites are growing. Third, social-networking services are opening up shop in more and more countries - both homegrown services and US subsidiaries. Maybe this latest growth trend has to level off, but I'm not sure the professor is right about a general backlash yet. Certainly individual social networkers have reached the saturation point, and they have to be getting smarter about privacy and safety, with all the media reports on sexual predation. And if they're using a social site as a popularity contest, that'll get tiresome. But that's only one thing people use these sites for. Convenience tools for keeping in touch with friends will not lose their attraction, and then there's the rest of the spectrum of social and self-expression features these sites provide that reflect enduring interests (blogging, page-decorating, music-sharing, code writing, etc.). The AP quotes another grad student as saying she sees "faceless communication as a supplement to everyday interactions, not a replacement."

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