Free PDF of the book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, by Daniel J. Solove. Grab it while it’s hot. Via Apophenia, who posts a succinct review
The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about Twitter as a teaching tool, and introduces me to another Twitterer to follow, @AcademicDave.
Ad Age column: Email deflates critical thinking. I believe it. (And now I’m thinking maybe blog-skimming and Twitter has a similar effect.) Good article, with tips for resisting the email siren song. Via @steverubel.
Just signed up for Yahoo’s new Facebook application, Friendsense. According to Yahoo’s Research Blog, “addresses two empirical paradoxes that have puzzled political scientists for years”: 1.) “the widespread perception among Americans that the US is a politically polarized country, when in fact numerous surveys indicate that Americans are surprisingly difficult to classify into simple categories,” and 2.) “that people also tend to think that their friends’ beliefs are more similar to their own than they actually are—suggesting that people don’t know their friends as well as they think they do.” If you’re on Facebook and interested in survey tools, this might be worth checking out.
Another blog aggregator on the scene: Alltop, which claims to pull the top stuff from the top blogs in 21 categories. No higher ed category yet, but Guy Kawasaki assures me they’re working on it and is even seeing suggestions. (If you have any ed blogs to suggest, post in the comments and I’ll get the word to Guy. He and I are like that, after all.) Blogger Kami Huyse suggests the site might be “a great way to start building a list of blogs in the topic areas that AllTop has chosen to cover, though I have no idea how they classify a blog as a ‘top’ blog.”
Eduweb Conference keynote speakers announced. The conference, July 21-23 in Atlantic City, N.J., will open with Mark Greenfield, director of web services for the University at Buffalo, and will close with Karine Joly of CollegeWebEditor.com and HigherEdExperts.com.
New sites on the radar: BricaBox, a social platform (h/t to Matt Herzberger); Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards), an email organizing tool in beta test (h/t to Snark Hunting); and Traackr, a social media tracking/analysis site (via ReadWriteWeb).
170spoons.com is a new tech/productivity blog just launched by my buddy Rob Williams. You should check it out.
Taking a virtual break. We all need to unplug from the grid once in a while. This guy’s story makes me realize the value of disconnecting every now and then. And that’s what I’m about to do.
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Now playing: Talking Heads – Pull Up The Roots
via FoxyTunes
Higher Ed Marketing 
Well DUH you know you love .eduGuru! Pass that along to Guy! :)
I did check out the Alltop page and it does some annoying rendering with Firefox at the bottom of the page as the text goes over the colored footer. Maybe it’s because I have such a large monitor at work, but it is annoying. Just passing that along. Otherwise it looks like a pretty insanely big aggregate site. It doesn’t let you pull any RSS feeds either so that’s kind of a bummer.