After an all-too-short winter break of hectic traveling and several bouts of illness, I’m back at work and firmly ensconced into my stunted left brain! After a nice, comfortable time cultivating my claim to the titles of “marketer” and “designer,” I’m working on growing into a programmer as well. It has been neither nice, nor comfortable. Once I’ve managed to press some roots into the stony soil of Object Oriented Programming in PHP a little better, I will share some of the fruits of the process. (And now I thankfully abandon the agrarian metaphor…)

In the meantime, higher ed marketing blogland has greeted 2007 with plenty of excellent thoughts! There’s a new blog in the blogroll: The Higher Ed Marketing Blog, and the excellent eduStyle by Stewart Foss. A few highlights from the rest of the blogroll:

Kevin Guidry writes about generational demographics and “Generation We” (one of my favorite subjects) on Mistaken Goal.

Michael Stoner also expounds on Generation We (Wii?) as well as several on social networks.

Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast of Interlectual takes on Bite Size Standards.

Andrew Careaga’s Higher Ed Marketing blogs the CASE conference and puts in a word on social networks (do I sense a theme in blogland?).

The prolific Karine Joly at College Web Editor calls them “Generation Next” (I prefer Millinials) and provides extensive resource linkage. She also shares her most popular entries of 2006, wraps up the cycle on website redesign, starts a higher ed YouTube station, and plenty more.

So in catching up on blogland, it looks like the podcast binge is drawing to a close with maybe a few hangovers here and there, and it seems that social networking is gearing up to become the next trend-du-jour. With yet another new year comes the sense that Web 2.0 (yech) is finally “here” rather than being “new.” In its place is a largely predictable flurry of predictions about the future of the internet (for higher ed and the rest). I sure don’t call myself a futurist, but I’ll make a prediction: whether it be in the next year or the next three, good old-fashioned text and images will still be the bread-and-butter for college websites, but they will still be given the least attention.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 9:05 am and is filed under Links, Marketing, Youth Culture. It has been viewed 1329 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!