Nicholas Carr's new piece in The Atlantic (July/Aug 2008) raises provoking questions about the effect of the internet on human cognition and progress. Are we embracing artificial intelligence at the expense of human intelligence?

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org has provocatively suggested that del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service, makes a better search tool than Google. He runs a couple comparison searches to demonstrate his point, and he garners widespread agreement in the comments on his blog. Even some who do not concede that del.icio.us is actually better than Google (see Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb, for example) are ready to allow that data from social bookmarking and ranking sites could usefully add "social relevance" to the apersonal algorithms of a search engine like Google's. Search results from del.icio.us are the fruit of massively parallel human evaluations, but the beauty of del.icio.us and other tools of its ilk is that their usefulness for searching is largely a by-product of self-serving individual efforts. I use del.icio.us primarily because I find it convenient and efficient; the fact that my bookmarking activity contributes to the collective project of indexing the web is just icing.

Ben Vershbow , a fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, is interviewed in this month's Library Journal in an article entitled "The Social Life of Books". In the interview, Vershbow does a nice job of highlighting many of the Institute's concerns and activities. Their work focuses on, as one might guess, the possible futures of the book. They divide their time between dissecting various experiments in electronic books, writing soon-to-be-released software for creating networked texts, devising grand new schemes for new types of publications, and in thoughtful worry over how corporations like Amazon and Google are taking the field in the wrong direction. Of particular interest to educators is the next/text project, which is exploring what networked textbooks might become.