College officials are often asked to predict the future: What will classroom technology look like five years from now? What devices will today’s high-school freshmen be carrying when they make it to campus? It’s easier to get those questions spectacularly wrong than it is to answer them sensibly.

In the latest installment of The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast, Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a tech consultant, talk about how to predict the future of technology — and whether that’s even possible.

This Sunday The New York Times Magazine’s cover story asked whether Rick Rubin — the famous record producer who recently became co-head of Columbia Records — can “save the music business.” As part of an attempt to do just that, Mr. Rubin conducted an informal bit of market research, asking 20 college students about their classmates’ music-listening habits. A Columbia executive summed up the results: The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth.

Most campus-network administrators will find those admissions less than revelatory, but Columbia is taking the “word of mouth”...

A few years ago, it seemed as if everyone was talking about folksonomies — Web projects that let users “tag” items with keywords and create their own collaborative categorization systems.

And to be sure, there have been plenty of folksonomic success stories. Sites like Flickr (which lets users post and tag images) and del.icio.us (which does the same for Web pages) have built up reasonably robust classification systems, and plenty of blogs — the Wired Campus included — now make at least some use of tags.

But some observers are beginning to wonder if the promise of tagging has gone unfulfilled. Despite the popularity of folksonomies, writes Matt Mower of Curiouser and Curiouser, “the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003:”Tagging in 2007 seems to have advanced no further than a means by which one or more users of a site (or application) can group content around a loose...

What makes a great college football coach? Motivation skill, perhaps, or tactical brilliance? Those are great traits, writes Peter Kerasotis of Florida Today, but there’s another criterion to consider: experience in HTML.

College coaches, Mr. Kerasotis writes, are developing ever-slicker Web sites — or, to put it more accurately, they’re asking Webmasters to build fancy sites for them. The site for Urban Meyer, the head coach of the University of Florida’s national-champion team, might take the cake: A Gator helmet held aloft and the words “THIS IS GATOR COUNTRY” greets you when you go to CoachUrbanMeyer.com. Move your cursor over the helmet and it divides and the Gator logo appears accompanied by a menacing growl and the theme music to “Jaws.” Along the bottom of the Web site a ticker rolls by. One day, it might be stats from Florida’s most recent game. Another day, it might be which...

Before there was Facebook, there was … what, exactly? Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the site while studying at Harvard University, gets most of the credit for bringing social networking to college. But several of his classmates have stepped forward to dispute the tale of Facebook’s conception.

First came the creators of ConnectU, a like-minded social-networking site that made its debut just four months after Facebook. ConnectU’s creators say they hired Mr. Zuckerberg to do some programming, only to have him turn around and steal their idea. They’ve filed an ambitious lawsuit asking a U.S. District Court in Boston to give them control of Facebook along with all of the site’s assets.

And now there’s Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard alumnus, who says his experimentation in social networking predates both Facebook and ConnectU. Half a year before Facebook was unveiled, he built a Web site...

An eight-year conflict between the University of California and the Microsoft Corporation over the patent rights to a lucrative Web-browser technology has been settled out of court.

The fight, in the courts and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, revolved around the discovery of a method for launching and displaying software plug-ins from Web browsers. The university owns the patent to the technology, which it licenses to Eolas Technologies Inc.

A federal jury in Chicago found Microsoft liable in 2003 for infringing the patent and ordered the company to pay the university and Eolas a total of $521-million. But a federal appeals court in 2005 suspended that judgment and sent the case back to the district court for a new trial.

Read the complete Chronicle story.

Drexel University took the reins of the Internet Public Library at the beginning of this year, and the institution is now starting to put its stamp on the project. Drexel announced this week that it intends to turn the online library — which was created by researchers at the University of Michigan — into “a virtual teaching and learning laboratory for digital reference.”

Since its inception, the project has run a question-and-answer service for researchers and has provided access through its Web site to a wide range of digital library collections and exhibits. Now Drexel, armed with a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, plans to build an online learning community and to determine whether it can create a “technological training center” for digital librarians.

In the meantime, the library will continue its popular question-and-answer service. The grant...

Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner has already outed politicos, company spokesmen, and college employees as occasional, but biased, contributors to Wikipedia. Now the site has managed something a bit more surprising: It has prompted Johan Friso, the prince of Holland, to admit that he too did a bit of tinkering with the encyclopedia.

According to The New York Times, Mr. Friso took issue with a Wikipedia’s article on his wife, Mabel Wisse Smit. The article stated that the princess had provided the Dutch government with “incomplete and false information” about a liaison she had had with a drug dealer, but early last year someone in the Dutch royal palace softened the clause by removing the words “and false.” The couple now say they were the culprits.

The contested Wikipedia entry has been locked down, but it’s likely that the prince and princess, now suitably chastened, would have stayed away...

Facebook applications have been all the rage since the social network started letting people add accouterments to their profiles this summer. But librarians have expressed concerns that they’re being prevented from designing their own scholarly applications for the site.

Still, there are plenty of Facebook add-ons that librarians might find helpful, and iLibrarian is selecting its top 10 of the genre. In the first post of a three-part series, the blog profiles Facebook apps like Librarian — a tool, designed by a library student, that lets users vote on the value of reference resources. —Brock Read

Ohio University may be turning the page on a string of high-profile hacking incidents that stung the institution last year. The university is already working its way through a thorough revamp of its beleaguered IT office, and now it appears to have dodged a lawsuit filed by two disgruntled alumni.

The suit, filed last summer, charged Ohio with negligence and asked the university to pay for credit-monitoring services for anyone whose personal information was left unprotected. But a judge with the Ohio Court of Claims dismissed the suit yesterday, ruling that the alumni hadn’t proved that they suffered any real damages from the computer-security breaches.

There’s no evidence that anyone whose personal data were exposed has been the victim of fraud or identity theft, according to campus officials. The university said in a statement that the hackers who broke into Ohio’s network were intent on...