ReadWriteWeb

• What's the most effective way to spread false political rumors? Not blogs. Not Twitter. Email. http://bit.ly/e674zt via @millermccune
• GoDaddy.com CEO kills elephant, poses with carcass, is "not ashamed". Outrage ensues. http://lat.ms/dOPADN via @latimesoutposts
• The worst jobs in the world matrix. Yep, World of Warcraft gold farmer makes the list: http://bit.ly/fSrskX via @LaphamsQuart
• The iPad isn't a product, it's a badge - a way to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying ourselves by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase: http://ind.pn/ed9EZG via @StevenParrott
• Online 3D fire ants! http://bit.ly/evXdd5 via @BeeSpotter

Can you imagine some of the technology world's best game play being combined with the immersive experience of a motion-controlled full-body interface? Nathan Olivarez-Giles posted the video above, from Christmas day, on the LA Times tech blog today, showing USC researchers playing the wildly popular game World of Warcraft with their bodies, using a hacked Microsoft Kinect interface and their own software. That software, called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), is freely available for anyone to download and train.

It's crude software so far, but the research team says they'll be making it more sophisticated with time. It looks pretty cool already.

When film critic Roger Ebert posted on his blog that "Video Games Can Never Be Art," he seemed to incur the wrath of the gaming community, and the entry now has over 3,000 comments, many protesting Ebert's claims. Ebert wonders why the designation of art or not-art matters to those who play video games: "Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy."

According to this year's Comscore stats, consumer publishing platform Wikia has surpassed DIY social network competitor Ning for monthly unique visitors. Since July 2008 the company's traffic has more than doubled from 2.8 million to 6.5 million unique US visitors per month. Despite abandoning Wikia search in early March, it seems Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has built another great company. As of this evening, Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina is announcing the company's profitability due to its custom sponsorships program.

After selling Last Minute to Travelocity, Alexis Bonte developed an obsession with Sid Meier's strategy game Civilization. Bonte played so often, that his wife began to complain. He jokes that he partnered with George Lemnaru to started eRepublik Labs and the eRepublik game in order to satiate his gaming appetite through work. The company officially launched in time to win the 2007 Le Web awards.

eRepublik is a multi-player online strategy game where members interact as citizens of one of 60 countries. More than 125,000 active users sign in on a daily basis to work, join the military, form political parties, launch newspapers and in some cases, wage wars. Just last week the Iranian president was impeached. Meanwhile, last month Russia was invaded and Indonesian users hosted the game's largest real-world meet up.