May hate Google for taking away Google Reader, but I love Twitter and its ability to allow me to connect to people much cooler and more famous than me:

This was not a great way to start a day that already involved relocating because of one downed WiFi connection:

Google Reader has been my daily goto since at least 2006. I have used no other Web product – including gmail – longer. While I realize not everyone is like me and (still) relies on RSS feeds to keep up with news, blogs, job postings and all sorts of other things I’m interested in, this has the potential to force me to fundamentally change the way I work and consume information.

Anyone else dreading the impending information Apocalypse? Anyone with suggestions on how to cope? Also interested in knowing what impact, if any, this will have on blogs that rely on Google Reader for at least some of their traffic.

Update: Lifehacker has some recommendations on what to do. In the short term, I think I’m going to try NewsBlur. Updates/reviews to fall, but so far I’m encouraged, as it looks like their mobile apps are a hell of a lot better than Google Reader’s were.

Pop quiz: What educational system are these statements describing?

• Nowadays more [students] attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing.
• During a [teacher's strike] I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.
• So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading…“Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea.
  
• We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that…we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.

It’s an op-ed in today’s New York Times about public elementary and secondary education in Mexico. But – and perhaps this is me simply being bitter in a long semester, three days before spring break – I am often left feeling statements like the ones above could just as well apply to public higher education in the United States.

You could say my decision to stop drinking on June 5, 2010 has led to close to three years of happiness, a chance to get chronic depression under control for the first time in my adult life and, with putting me in a place, with less than a week before my 40th birthday, where I no longer feel like a chronic under-achiever.

And you’d be partly right.

But that decision stemmed from one I made in February 2010, which was to seek treatment for Attention Deficit Disorder. I was just shy of turning 37 of the time and was finally starting to accept that these problems weren’t going to go away. I’ve been treated for ADD ever since and would argue that that treatment saved my life.

Findings from a new study include:

Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, and elsewhere assessed 367 young adults in Rochester, Minn., who were diagnosed with ADHD as children and compared them with peers who never had the disorder. Those who had grown up with ADHD were 88 percent more likely to have died, often from accidents or suicides, by the time they reached an average age of 27, compared with the control group. And 57 percent had been diagnosed with a mental health problem compared with 35 percent of the controls.

Of course it comes with a stigma, which the Globe explores in a must-read article for anyone who thinks they may have ADD/ADHD, “had” ADD/ADHD as a kid but discontinued treatment, or still thinks ADD/ADHD is a punchline to a joke (blog version for non-subscribers).

Believe it or not, this Prezi has some educational value and I’ll be using it in my Cyberculture & Digital Media class on Monday:

B.J. Mendelson, who wrote a book arguing that you can’t use social media to promote your brand or product by telling readers “why all the Facebook friends and Twitter followers in the world mean nothing to you and your business without old-fashioned, real-world connections” sent me this LinkedIn request over the weekend (which comes after he started following me on Twitter and Google+):

So Mendelson (who I have a history with) is not crazy about LinkedIn, but more than happy to do all the things on LinkedIn that his book essentially argues are a waste of time. And he’s not above begging for Amazon recommendations, which is shady and also violates Amazon’s service terms.

Normally I’d be happy to write an Amzon review for B.J., but the last time I did he threw a hissy fit. And before he whines, I have finished his book and still think it sucks; him using social media pretty much undermines his points and underscores the ones I was making in my original review.

I’m hanging out at Social Media Weekend in New York City today and will try to post updates of interesting tidbits throughout the day. Also follow #smwknd (https://mobile.twitter.com/search/?q=%23smwknd&s=typd) on Twitter for tons of updates by people a lot smarter than me.

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