If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget, his first book.

It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?

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According to its creators, Outdoor Lovemap, an interactive site that encourages users to swap tips about the best spots for getting down in public, “is a labor of love. It is our intention to create a place where adults can share information about the beautiful places where they have shared romantic time. We believe that the world is an abundant place and that by sharing information in this way we can create joy.”

Are we the only ones transported back to 8th grade health class by such language?

There are currently 64 different locations posted in 20 countries, with a large concentration of hot spots in Switzerland. Can anyone explain this? New York state is still waiting to be deflowered; it looks like our Midwestern friends in Missouri beat us to the punch with an unlikely vote for the St. Louis Zoo. We’re hoping it doesn’t involve the miniature train.

Which brings us to the one problem we anticipate for the guys running this site. Say someone makes you mad and as a result you decide it’s a funny idea to tell strangers that their backyard is a fantastic spot for making love. Outdoor Lovemap is too smart to allow such childish pranks: “If someone has posted information to a location on private property, and you are the owner, and you want that information deleted, definitely let us know. We don’t want to cause any grief.”

What do we find creepier than CNN “beaming” holographic guests into the studio to make their election coverage more interesting? The idea of having an avatar deliver up our evening news.

As we write, smarty-pants grad students at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University have put down their video gaming consoles and Star Wars action figures to design a futuristic Web site — News At Seven — that automatically generates virtual newscasts “pulled from wire stories, images, videos and blogs all linked by a common news topic.”

The project is being funded by a National Science Foundation grant.

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