Digital ethnography seems to be on everyone's lips these days but what is it? A year ago Mike Wesh of Kansas State University tried to lay some foundations to where we might look with his 'new media' excursus into Web2.0:

This grew into a 'pilot' ethography of YouTube conducted by his students.

The YouTube ethnography project engaged in proper participant observation, the bread and butter of ethnography, but many questions remain. Which part of the ethnography does the adjective 'digital' refer? Method, medium, community? Traditional approaches to reporting ethnography were exclusionary. Who are new forms (new media) of presentation excluding? Traditional approaches to sharing resutls of ethnographic research concealed certain dimensions of the 'lived reality' but what are the new approaches concealing? In the early days ethnography could easily become enamoured of difference and turn the mundane into exotic. Is the new ethnography too smitten with the supposed 'newness' of the digital world? (See Victorian internet.)

There's also the Digital Ethnography Workgroup at UCSD and the Hypermedia and Ethnography group at the University of Cardiff for whom the 'digital' means mostly the tools pf recording and presenting the ethnographic data. 

More on this subject later.