You've had a few days to ponder questions I posed in Part 1 about the site Psychosocial Parameters of Internet Addiction. Being the savvy librarians and information professionals that you are, and naturally surpicious of my leading questions, you've surely aced the test.

1. Who created this site?

I did, along with my colleague and Coordinator of User Education Programs, Trudi Jacobson. If you look at the bottom of the page, you'll see a link to "Click here for more information." This takes you to the page Information for Educators, which explains the purpose of the site and reveals its authorship. As Trudi and I write on this page, the site is an instructional tool to encourage students to critically examine and evaluate the types of information encountered on the Internet.

This is just one of those bogus sites that were popular as teaching tools a while back. We created the site in 1997, but have kept it online because of its ongoing popularity, and for other reasons that I'll explain below.

2. How does this site advance the study of Internet addiction?

If you're relying on a site like this to become informed, you're in trouble. Only a few of our citations are valid, while others are bogus.

3. Who is Rudolph G. Briggs, and how can you contact him?

Professor Briggs is fictitious. Regrettably, there is no Department of Psychotechnology at the University at Albany, or anywhere else for that matter. Therefore, there is no contact information on Professor Briggs' brief bio page. I've always gotten a kick out of Trudi's description of his career, and I'll admit I wish he was around to support us as we deal with the psychological impact of technology in our lives. I sure could have used his advice when I was learning to type.

What began as an earnest pedagogical exercise has evolved into a series of adventures for Trudi and me.

The gratifying part has been witnessing the use of our site in information literacy exercises in secondary and post-secondary classroom across the U.S. We've gotten a number of messages from librarians and teaching faculty about their success in using our site as a teaching tool for site evaluation.

The not-so-gratifying, but admittedly interesting part, has been the decade-long discovery that several Web sites, including those maintained by universities and libraries, have cited our Psychosocial Parameters page as a legitimate source on the topic. University teaching faculty have been taken in. Our site has been featured in an online magazine and an opinion piece in a regional newspaper in Pennsylvania written by an administrator at Rider University. A couple of weeks ago, Trudi got a request from a nationally syndicated radio talk show on health to interview Professor Briggs for a forthcoming broadcast.

As a result of all this, Trudi and I developed a Press Kit, which is a written explanation of the pedagogical purpose of our work. We send it out when we're contacted about serious references to our site.

Trudi and I may need to hire help if we want to reach everyone who has misconstrued the nature of our site. I mentioned earlier that there is no Department of Psychotechnology in any university, no less at the University at Albany. If you search Google, however, you''ll find about 80 citations (not counting the site itself) referring to my university's Department of Psychotechnology. Most of these link to our site at face value. Check it out. It's particularly interesting to find the site listed in Health -> Addictions -> Internet on the Open Directory, and by extension, also on the Google Directory. Google Answers charged some poor soul $2.20 for a list of resources on Internet addiction which included our site - and offered our fictitious Alcholics Anonymous item as an example of what's going on. Alcoholics Anonymous is considering setting up a separate division of their organization to work with people addicted to browsing the Internet. Riiiight.

Thankfully, the Wikipedia entry on Internet Addiction Disorder does not link to our site.

One of the cornerstone concepts of Library 2.0 is radical trust of the user. When librarians engage in radical trust, they open their systems to user input and trust in the beneficial effects of this input. What can the experiences with the Internet addiction site say about the legitimacy of this concept? I'll mull this over in Part 3.