AT&T’s (ATT) top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to all of the telecom giant’s 300,000 employees on Sunday, urging them to express their concerns over a net neutrality proposal under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission. Check out his letter and comments on the Actuarian Outpost Web site.

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“We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not,” read a recent one. “But we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”

Then, from this week: “Sen Byrd (91) in hospital after he falls from ‘standing up too quickly.’ How about term limits. Or retirement age. Or commonsense to prevail.”

What makes these tweets significant is that they were written by Raju Narisetti, one of The Post’s top editors. As one of two managing editors, he’s responsible for The Post’s features content and oversees its Web site. But he also sits in on news meetings and occasionally gets involved in “hard” news.

He has closed his Twitter account.

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Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet.

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Thousands of fans gathered in Ashburn last week for the opening of Redskins training camp, separated from their oversize heroes by a long barricade. But when the players left the field and returned to the locker room, fans suddenly had unprecedented access to the players’ thoughts and whims through their laptops and mobile devices.

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To all of the bystanders reading this, pardon us. The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism–two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them….Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (WPO).

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If you value your spare time, don’t start posting comments and reviews on Amazon (AMZN), Mark Espinosa suggests. It can be a hard habit to break.

Given his rank as the online retailer’s No. 1 reviewer, he would certainly know.

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“I spoke to a lovely reporter today,” wrote cwalken on his (or her) Twitter account this week. “I don’t know if she was really who she said she was but that’s fine. I secretly used an ironic tone.”

Sounds about right. But does anybody know who anybody really is anymore?

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If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside email accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside email log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

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Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print–the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands–The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal–will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

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“You’re fat!” screams the ad. But in an online world of supposedly hyper-targeted advertising it’s hard not to take offense. And offense the Washington Post’s Rachel Beckman takes.

In a rather fun article, Beckman describes her own experience of Facebook’s ad platform. The site’s “proverbial brain” knows a little more about us than most Web properties, and certainly traditional media such as television and newspapers. In particular, Beckman has declared her age and marital status.

When Beckman told the so-called social utility that she was engaged, she was targeted with weight-loss ads, specifically “learn how you can shrink your waist.” Another offending ad asked: “Do you want to be a fat bride?”

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Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about one million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the ten most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

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