But that was then, this is now. Life is seldom simple and deciding who’s going to be a Facebook friend, a Twitter follower or a LinkedIn connection has become murkier still. What to do?

Lee dissects the issue in his post Personal vs. On-line Identity – And The Winner Is? Lee advises us to “…chill. Be yourself. Let others be themselves [...] Wade in – the rich rewards of friendship, knowledge, and amusement are worth the effort to learn a new way of being.” Sage advice to consider the next time you receive an invitation to friend, follow or connect.

“The tooling update allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod touch, devices that were previously closed to them. Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for iPhone. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes,—Adobe AIR and Flash Player—it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.” (continues here)

Although (thank God) this won’t make building iPhone apps as easy as, say, laser printers made desktop publishing back in the day, it’s still huge. How big? I’d say fasten your seat belts and get ready to watch App store sales go from two billion served to four almost overnight.

True to form, Scott tackles the opportunity and challenges of using games in formal education head-on:

Let’s take a look at the kids we’re trying to reach today. They are the first generation that will have never known a time without the Internet, Google, or mobile phones. They are connected to the world through a variety of different digital, gaming, and communications tools. They are comfortable with many aspects of media creation. Every day they are presented with an unlimited menu of informal learning opportunities by simply following their passions online and choosing tools that suit their learning styles. How can schools compete with a similar level of engagement and interest through digital media inside the classroom?

Post continues here.

According to CEO Steve Jobs in a press release:

The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone. The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.

With our own suite of iPhone apps in the development pipeline, I’m loving it too.

Peter Alden, Richard Primack & E. O. Wilson

As part of the research for a new virtual world project this summer I worked with the Pulitzer-winning naturalist and Harvard professor emeritus Dr. E. O. Wilson, naturalist-author-guide Peter Alden and Don Henley’s Walden Woods Project on Biodiversity Day. For the second time in eleven years more than 100  scientists, professors and amateur naturalists gathered for a 24-hour “bio blitz” to find and identify every living thing in the Walden Woods – Concord, Carlisle and Lincon, MA – visible to the naked eye. The combined results of the field work identified a total of 2,579 species, making you realize how much we overlook every day. Stay tuned for more on the virtual world project in coming weeks.

In the meantime, the summer has yielded a few lessons about project management. About how work expands to fill the time allotted; how several equally intelligent people can see round as square, or red as blue; and the importance of establishing clear communications; and how in some cultures saving face is better than fessing up. People!

But I’ve take solace from knowing I’m not alone (ha, you too?). There’s even a website called project cartoon that let’s you customize your own storyboard to show how things went horribly wrong. Sometimes you’ve just got a laugh and get on with it.

The biggest problems, he said: children studying languages do not get to practice the language in their daily lives, they do not get much attention from teachers in large classrooms and they are often afraid to make mistakes when they do try to speak different languages.

Those are the problems that Wiz World Online aims to solve. Kids choose an avatar and pick a scene, like a castle in a fantasy land or a supermarket in the United States. They are confronted with challenges, like dodging flying monsters or buying fruit, all of which ask them to use English. If they hit a ceiling in their language capabilities, they go to the wizards’ library and read so-called magical books that teach them lessons.

The company is initially focusing on kids age 7 to 12 in China but plans to expand globally, eventually teaching many different languages to kids all over the world.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are increasingly interested in Web companies that have to do with education, an area they say has not yet been transformed by the Internet. “The fundamental education business models are coming down,” said Alex Finkelstein, a general partner at Spark Capital, which led a $7 million venture capital round for 8D World.

Only a few years ago, he said, people did not think education could be done on the Web, but companies like Rosetta Stone, a language learning Web company that went public this year, has proven them wrong. “Those are educational products that not only teach people but are becoming very very big, profitable companies,” he said.” Story continues…

While there are many discussed problems with the app store from a developer prospective, it has really taken off with consumers. The word revolutionary seems to be thrown around a lot in relation to the iTunes App Store. But the app store really has done things for consumer app shopping that we’ve never seen before. Even others that have tried to reproduce the functionality of the app store since it was launched just over a year ago, such as Google and Blackberry, have failed to even come close. Steve Jobs commented on this fact in the announcement:

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

With 58,088 active apps in the US app store today, and 300 new ones added every day, will the growth ever slow?

We recently asked our readers to weigh in on how many apps and how much they have spent in a survey. The average number of applications and games downloaded thus far by the 160 respondents was 230.” Story continues…