• Can We Change the Web’s Culture of Nastiness? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – A new book by Jaron Lanier, a Web pioneer, suggests that the “drive-by anonymity” of the Web has fostered a culture of meanness. But does it have to be that way?
• The Real Roots of the Crisis – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review - An insightful post from Umair Haque. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get away from nihilism and back to “Truth, Justice, and The American Way”?
• Web 2.0 in Instruction: Adding Spice to Math Education — THE Journal – From the article: “Math 2.0 has been interpreted with a variety of phrases. Participants in weekly Math 2.0 Interest Group meetings co-created a definition where Math 2.0 links math education to social networking; involves using Web 2.0 tools to build and share knowledge of math concepts; is collaborating and connecting with others on problem solving, math thinking, and learning; and is an ability of users to create their own math-rich social objects using Web technologies.”

• Mashable’s Twitter Guide Book Now Available for Download – And for those who are considering taking up the Tweet…
• Why Teens Don’t Tweet – Interesting analysis by Ben Parr on why it might be that teens do not use Twitter.

• FREE — Teaching Resources and Lesson Plans from the Federal Government – A nice collection of educational resources available for free from the Federal Government. It will be interesting to see how this and other resources (such as data.gov) continue to grow as the Feds try to become more open and transparent.
• Facebook Users Are Getting Older. Much Older. – Watching nech tech go mainstream. Remember whaen e-mail and AOL did the same thing? From the article: "If the iStrategyLabs numbers are correct, Facebook, simply put, is not a young site anymore. Most of the users (20,3 million, or 28.2% overall) on the site belong to the 35 – 54 age group. Compare that to the age group that was once Facebook’s bread and butter – the 18 – 24 group – which is now in third place with 18 million (25.1%) users, behind the 25 – 34 year old group, which makes for 25.2% of Facebook’s user base with 18.1 million users. The number of users aged 55 and over has grown from negligible 950,000 to 5.9 million in mere six months."

• Progressing Through Change – Introduction – Great (if I do say so myself) online tool you can use for free to see how you or your team are progressing through the changes your organization is facing. Chock full of tips to help you or your team work through change successfully.
• The Unsociable, Radically-Individualist Soul of Social Media – Another thoughtful (and lengthy – I wish I could commit to typing like Venk does!) post from Venkatesh Rao explores the psychology of people who are successful in "social" media.

• How Facebook is taking over our lives – Feb. 17, 2009 – Jessi Hempel at Fortune provides a lengthy profile of how Facebook is changing our lives. Boy does this remind me of AOL back in the dial-up days! AOL did get "America Online" and perhaps Facebook is the one that has cracked the nut on what they like to do there…
• Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom | Video on TED.com – A great video of the Barry Schwartz talk about how our drive to codify society is costing us wisdom and morality.

The always insightful Clay Shirky in a great interview with Joshua-Michéle Ross:

• Google, Zen Master of the Market – News Analysis – NYTimes.com – “The source of Google’s competitive advantage is learning by doing,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist. One of the hallmarks of Learning 2.0 will be easy, inexpensive experimentation – learning through mistakes.
• What good is collective intelligence if it doesn’t make us smarter? – O’Reilly Radar – Tim O'Reilly conference ad (with quote from John Battelle) discusses how it is time to move beyond the consumer-centric euphoria of social computing (Web 2.0) and start using the new found power to improve society.
• The Future of Instruction: Teacher as ‘Co-Learner’ : June 2008 : THE Journal – Now you're talking. Forget the sage on the stage, and even beyond the curious curator, change is so fast that effective teachers will adopt the role of wise co-learner.

• Poking Holes In The Long Tail Theory – An updated view of the Long Tail. No big news here – it has always been an "leverage the tail in addition to the head" not a "leverage the tail instead of the head" proposition.
• Dawn of the Un-book — Internet Time Blog – Jay Cross takes a look at the decline of book readership and proposes the "un-book" to consumerize authors work. Includes interesting statistics about book reading in the US

• All Sites Must Go Social – "Companies are integrating social media applications into their own site to add personalization and create a sense of community." Think of how this can be used to turn any e-learning site into a social learning site!
• Wasps Reveal Clues about the Evolution of Intelligence: Scientific American – Experts have long suspected that complex social interaction drove the evolution of large brains in humans. Now a study in wasps supports and refines that theory: it seems that dominant individuals have larger brain regions responsible for higher-order cog
• Web Strategy: The Three Spheres of Web Strategy (and the skills required) – A great graphic model from Jeremiah Owyang about the balance of community, business, and tech needed for successful websites. Like most three-legged stool models, it can be extrapolated to other things such as biz in general.
• Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp – Applied Trends – I'm greatly looking forward to joining Scott Gavin for the first delivery of the Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp in London on 30 September. If you will be in London that time, please join us for a great day of strategic learning.

• The Value of Believing in Free Will – I've never been a fan of predetermination theories/beliefs becuase I believe it undermines individual potential. It turns out it is not good for our society either…
• Corporate Policies on Web 2.0 (Enterprise 2.0) – Tony pulled together some policies from companies re: using Web 2.0 tools at work. As we cover in our Web 2.0 University courses, the processes and culture aspects of Enterprise 2.0 implementations is usually a bigger challenge than the tech.