The post Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog. Facebook has always been a wipeout for me, LinkedIn a utility. In the early days, tons of folks took to the blogging medium, but over time, many burned out. Well, that’s going to get my attention. MORE >>

Rubel says that he has quit the network because there just isn’t enough going on there in terms of engagement , and so he has retreated to his Tumblr blog and to Twitter (Rubel, the head of digital strategy for the global Edelman PR agency, recently nuked his blogs and switched over to Tumblr as his main communications channel). MORE >>

His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog. The Sharer, as the name implies, makes sure that something to be shared – be it a string of text, or a link, or a video, or a blog post, or whatever – ends up going out over the negotiated channels. diaspora facebook plexus socialnetworks MORE >>

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud? MORE >>

That may make Twitter, like blogs, best suited for personal learning environments (PLE) in academia, so that learners can use it for several courses and connect to their non-academic networks as well. Blogs allow this asymmetry but social networks like Facebook don’t. Twitter & blogs foster broadening networks. MORE >>