The New York Times makes note of an Internet-era irony: The boom in online retail, it turns out, has left college mailrooms swamped with packages that can only be delivered by snail mail.

The University of Southern California now receives nearly twice as many packages as it did four years ago, according to the Times, and students shopping on eBay, Amazon, and any number of clothing-store sites are driving that surge. And mailroom managers aren’t just getting more packages; they’re getting weirder ones. The State University of New York at Albany has recently handled a dishwasher, a pool table, a refrigerator, and a car muffler. Meanwhile, the USC mailroom recently received a set of car tires — which came unwrapped, with postage affixed and a tag identifying the student who’d placed the order. —Brock Read

A growing number of colleges are switching to e-mail services offered by Google and Microsoft, but the University of Michigan won’t be making such a move any time soon. A campus official told The Michigan Daily that the university sees “no compelling reason” to outsource its e-mail.

For the most part, Michigan students seem happy with the university’s current Web mail client, an open-source program created by a group called the Horde Project. In fact, just 5 percent of Michigan’s undergraduates forward their e-mail to other accounts.

That figure seems surprisingly low, especially compared with the statistics we’ve heard from other colleges. Any idea what percentage of students at your institution forward their e-mail to other accounts? —Brock Read

It’s now been a year since Larry Sanger created Citizendium, an open-source encyclopedia catering to academics turned off by Wikipedia’s disinterest in credentials and its combative editing style. So how’s the project going?

According to Mr. Sanger — who co-founded Wikipedia before growing disenchanted with the site — it’s humming along nicely. Citizendium now boasts about 3,900 articles, he writes in a progress report, although only a fraction of those pieces have been “certified” by the site’s staff of volunteer editors. That number pales in comparison to Wikipedia’s two million or so English-language articles, but Mr. Sanger predicts that “at some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively.”

Citizendium is only now stoking its efforts to recruit contributors, Mr. Sanger says, and the site is also intensifying its fundraising efforts.

For many scholars, though,...

Theoretically appealing though they may be, e-book readers haven’t lived up to the hype, say most campus librarians who have chatted with The Chronicle. Will the Kindle, Amazon’s new version, change that perception?

If not, the price tag might be partially to blame. “I’m going to have to reserve judgment until I try it out myself,” writes Rob Hof, of BusinessWeek. “And at $399, I’m not sure how soon that’s going to be.”

And David Rothman, of TeleRead, mentions a survey which argues that lower prices, not nifty new devices, will drive the e-book market.

Even if the Kindle were $100 cheaper, though, it would still have its critics. Mr. Hof wonders if the device’s heft—it weighs 10.5 ounces—will prove problematic: “I’m doubtful that I’m going to hold that sucker up over my head lying in bed.” And Valleywag offers a tongue-in-cheek chart comparing the Kindle with the hardbound books it might...

If you’re busy watching over your campus network or trying to earn tenure, then you probably haven’t carved out much time for keeping up with blog chatter. But what if someone were to hand you a list of the 100 blogs that seem to have covered big Web news before anyone else? Tempted yet?

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have produced just such a list. A team led by Carlos Guestrin, an assistant professor of computer science and machine learning, scanned about 45,000 blogs and ran them through an algorithm that measures how information propagates. (The same algorithm can be used to detect contamination in water-supply systems, the researchers say.)

If nothing else, the study shows that conservative politics has found a home on the Web — and that conservative bloggers are skilled at spreading news. Four of the top five blogs — including Web titans like Instapundit and Michelle...

Sure, both MySpace and Facebook are social networks, and both are beloved by college students. But the two sites are hardly created equal—at least not in terms of the significantly different groups of students who tend to frequent them.

Now Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, has shed some light on what sets MySpace partisans apart from Facebook fans. Her report, “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites,” published in the October edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, argues that a student’s race, ethnicity, and upbringing play important parts in predicting which online social networks he or she will join.

Ms. Hargittai, an author of an earlier study of women’s confidence in their Web-surfing skills, draws on the work of other social-network watchers. Several anecdotal reports...

Here’s an unhappy sign of the times for college computer-science departments: Even Cambridge University, which boasts one of the world’s most prestigious technology programs, is having a devil of a time attracting students.

At the turn of the century, Cambridge’s computer-science program received about 500 applications a year, and accepted about 100 applicants. But last year, The Guardian reports, only 210 students applied, and just 70 were accepted. That decline has left professors in the department — the oldest of its kind in the world, according to The Guardian — worried that the program will have to become less selective in order to stay afloat.

Cambridge professors blame the dwindling enrollment figures on their field’s ongoing image problem, a theme that should be familiar to almost anyone who teaches technology. While computer science was once thought of as cutting-edge, many...

In its latest wave of pre-litigation letters, the Recording Industry Association of America’s has asked 16 colleges to pass out-of-court settlement offers to 417 students accused of pirating music.

The notices, sent this week, went out to officials at Boston, Brown, Central Michigan, Columbia, Duke, North Carolina State, Princeton, and Yale Universities; Dartmouth College, and the Universities of Chicago, Connecticut, Maine, Nebraska at Lincoln, Pennsylvania, Tennessee at Knoxville, and Texas at Austin. —Brock Read

It’s too early to tell whether college students will be turned off by — or, indeed, whether they’ll even notice — Facebook’s new targeted-advertising scheme. But privacy advocates and some other observers are already raising red flags, and as David Weinberger argues at The Huffington Post, they may have reason to be concerned.

The key piece of Facebook’s plan is the social network’s new means of communicating with other businesses’ Web sites: When a user rents a movie online from Blockbuster, for example, the video store’s site will relay that information back to Facebook, which will ask the customer whether he or she wants to share news of the rental with friends. That process gives Facebook a lot of information that will pique the interest of advertisers, and the social network has a plan for that data, of course. Facebook will let companies like Blockbuster buy ads that target certain ...

The House of Representatives education committee passed a bill this morning that would set higher-education policy for the next five years — and despite the efforts of campus officials and lobbyists, the measure directs colleges to take steps to combat illegal file sharing.

The legislation tells institutions to “develop a plan” for offering legal alternatives to piracy, and it also commands colleges to consider “technology-based deterrents” that attempt to block infringing peer-to-peer transactions. Higher-education groups like Educause and the American Council on Education — which have long stressed their opposition to the antipiracy dictates — organized a last-minute effort to quash the controversial language. But the file-sharing provision was never discussed during a markup of the bill yesterday.

The measure will now head to the whole House for a floor vote, but that vote may not take ...