Each year we look back at what’s attracted the most buzz on the blog. Out of the hundreds of stories we’ve posted this year, here are the five that readers clicked on the most:
1. Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts — Last month we broke the news that Boston College has decided to drop full e-mail accounts from its list of basic student services starting with next year’s freshman class. It will offer a forwarding service instead, so students will still have an e-mail address ending in bc.edu, but the move was symbolically important. The message: Students may not need college e-mail accounts at all these days, since the vast majority of students come to campus with one or more digital identities. A follow-up Chronicle article explored the issue in greater depth.
2. Web Site Promising ‘Juicy’ Campus Gossip Faces Backlash — Juicy Campus is a gossip Web site that seems to love getting people worked up about its salacious material, all posted anonymously by students. And if the site judges success by the number of angry customers, it is a giant hit. Students around the country have protested the site this year, and two colleges recently took the unusual step of blocking all campus access to it. Many of you chimed in in our comments section as well. Said one reader: “This is not only a legal issue – it is a moral and ethical issue that tests our concept of what is simply right and wrong. It is a giant test of the image that this generation wants to put forth for their own children in years to come – currently they are failing miserably.”
3. 3 of the Funniest E-Mail Messages From Students to Professors — and What They Say About Technology — Students say the darndest things in their e-mail communication with professors. So we started a series that highlights “‘favorite’ student e-mail” messages submitted by professors to The Chronicle’s forums. The lead-off item in the series was the most popular, but the second, third, and fourth installments were almost as popular.
4. 6 Degrees of Wikipedia — How many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Apparently many readers wanted to know (see the item for the answer). Software created by a researcher at Trinity College Dublin maps links between pages in Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Many readers noted that the researcher’s software is not the first of its kind, but it does show that many academics are fascinated by Wikipedia (some of that fascination is positive and some is filled with loathing).
5. New Study Debunks Myth That Most Tech Entrepreneurs Are College Kids — The average age of U.S. technology entrepreneurs when they start their first company is 39, according to a study released this year. So that means most dot-com entrepreneurs are not starting out from their dorm rooms, as some might think. One commenter said this was “a pretty dumb thing to do a study on,” but people checked it out anyway.
As always, thanks for all the comments and suggestions. —Jeffrey R. Young
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