Getting back into the thick of things after a nice little vacation. Lots to catch up on.
There are some excellent new blogs on my roll. Robert “Bob” McPeak, creator of the incredible Goucher College website, has a blog full of fun things. Bob Johnson has a blog on internet marketing for higher […]
The Chronicle released a very interesting article (sub. req.) on how an anonymous faculty member’s blog contributed to the downfall of the President of SUNY College of Technology at Alfred.
The blog, which administrators including Ms. Gupta said they barely read, claimed that it was “a last-ditch effort to bring about a dialogue about the future […]
Coming to us via a newspaper blog (?), here’s a piece about how the Princeton Review rankings affected one high school student’s search.
The result is, as the Princeton Review says, “that which a college admissions viewbook by its very nature can never really achieve—an uncensored view of life at a particular college.” And they’re right. […]
If you work at a college or university on the socially liberal end of the student spectrum, you may have heard the word “community” used frequently with a kind of idealistic fervency. We encourage community at Warren Wilson. We espouse a system of shared governance. We craft “Community Meetings” to help students […]
After receiving many, mostly encouraging, remarks on its “public beta” of the new Brown website via the University Web Developers list serve, several Brown x-staffers and alums have stepped in and gave them a round thrashing over it.
It seems that Brown has made some web design faux pas over the years. One of the […]
Our rankings in the Princeton Review’s The Best 361 Colleges hit the fan this morning. Specifically, the various fun lists that make up a set of gray pages in the front of the thick book.
We got listed in the following:
14 on Most Beautiful Campus
1 on Students Most Nostalgic for Bill Clinton
15 on Most Politicaly […]
The redesigns are coming hot and heavy this morning as Andrea of Interllectual announces the new Humboldt website. Forefront to me in this refreshing design is the font treatment. Lucida makes a classy-yet-understated change to the sparer Verdana or Arial usually found in higher ed designs. The logo type, alphabet spread […]
Brown University announced a public beta of their new homepage design this morning. Coming at a time when many college homepages are reaching a kind of threshold of usability and design challenges, Brown has been one of the first to step through with a refreshingly different approach.
The design uses JavaScript to allow for […]
The new students are arriving this morning. I wore one of the shirts that have been given out to peer group leaders and the residence folks. As I was walking across campus from my house, I tried to make that extra effort to be helpful and personable. I remember my first day […]
Well here we are: number 37 in a category that has nothing to do with us.
Suffice it to say that I’m more likely to be publishing little news blurbs about Fiske rankings next week.
I tried to write something constructive about all this hullabaloo with US News rankings, but everything ended up being a half-reasoned rant […]
College marketers are accustomed to putting their prospects under a microscope and taking them apart with market research. Imagine looking through the lens of the finely tuned instrument of demographic examination and seeing the eye of a blazing intellect staring right back at you?
Imagine a rising high school senior who not only researches colleges […]
When engaging in the conversation between media and audience that instills the sense of your brand, trying to boil it down to a memorable and effective home page can be daunting. This is especially true of colleges and universities, which have so many faces and audiences to represent. When faced with choosing that […]
Newsweek is releasing an article in their upcoming edition called 25 New Ivies that draws on its college guide lists. In general, I am skeptical about how much the opinions of guidebook publishers have to do with actual feelings within the market. However, it never hurts to have a look at the competition […]
Having read around and thought some more on the issues where I’ve played devil’s advocate recently, I realize that it is much more economically sound for a college with a yearly prospect pool of 5000+ students to engage in a campaign such as student blogs that will arguably only effect 10-20% (500-1000) of their prospects. […]
Hope you’re not dreaming of video podcasts as the next great way to reach your prospects. PVRWire brings us results of an LA Times / Bloomerang survey that suggests teens aren’t interested in watching video on their teeny iPod screens. Their survey says only 14% are interested in video podcasts. Compare that […]
[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.
I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]
When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]
