The fine art of blogslackery

Much as I hate those self-indulgent notes some bloggers post about how their lives are far too harried to allow them to post regularly on their blogs, as if they owe their readers some sort of a detailed, my-life-is-sooo-hectic explanation, when it’s really just a way to cover for the fact that they don’t have anything really interesting or pertinent to post about — much as I hate those notes, I feel compelled to post just such a note right now. Which is why I’m writing.

The fact is, my life is soooo hectic right now. I’m too busy to blog. I shouldn’t even be posting this note right now, but I feel I owe you some sort of explanation. I mean, I’ve got a zillion brilliant blog ideas but just no time, know what I mean? Work has been a killer, I’ve got an out-of-town meeting tomorrow, our women’s basketball team is playing lights out and will probably be selected to the Division II NCAA Tournament this Sunday, next week marks the 100th anniversary of our campus’s St. Pat’s Celebration and it’s going to be a crazy busy time, students on campus are biting the heads off of snakes to prepare for St. Patrick’s arrival. It’s just crazy busy, man.

I’m not blogslacking. I promise. I’ll be back with some real blog posts soon. Someday. When I get the time. Because I’ve got plenty of ideas, see.

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Now playing: Arcade Fire – Intervention
via FoxyTunes

Contextless links: 3-2-08

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