Pattern Finder

Universities Grappling with Blogging

Image via Wikipedia

There’s an article in The New York Times this morning (”M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to the Nth Degree“) that discusses how colleges are using student blogs to publicize life at the college and entice prospects. It notes:

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

It's an interesting read because it's a nice encapsulation of the fine line organizations must walk between (1) going for the PR angle and (2) reflecting reality. An admissions officer at MIT says,

“You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” he said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”

And not all posts are positive. Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.

In the past, the way to deal with the problem would have been to sweep it under the rug; today, the solution--with some help from blogging--is to actually fix the problem.

See, It's Proof I'm Using Windows Live Writer

For those wondering what the Temporary Post Used for Style Detection is doing on my blog, it's an artifact of my installing Windows Live Writer on my laptop. Live Writer generates the post to detect the CSS styles in the blog and sometimes is unable to delete the post. The bad news is, I can't either. My Typepad view of my blog doesn't think the post is there, so I can't flag it for deletion. Apparently 23,000 other bloggers are in the same boat.

Supposedly it's fixed in the forthcoming version 2.0. Let's hope.

(By the way, I figured out how to get rid of it from the front page: I republished my blog.)

Yep, Guy, You Got It Right

Read Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Sucking Down." As someone who has worked in Customer Support, I highly recommend it.

Trying out Google's Blog Search

Well, I've been trying out Google's new Blog Search.  I like it -- of course, maybe that's because if you search for "Web cookie," the first entry in the results list is Tekrati's Blog pointing to my recent report on Web cookies.  In contrast, if you look for "Web cookie" in Google's Web search, that same blog entry turns up in position 29 (at least at the moment).

As Charlene Li points out in her blog, rank in Blog Search appears to be a combination of "timing, links, and keyword frequency."  Getting the ranking right is something that's going to take everyone awhile to figure out, as the value of an entry to a reader is a combination of the person, the entry content, and its timeliness. Google has grappled with timeliness in its News Search, but the source as a variable is new.  For example, let's say President Clinton starts a blog (which he may already have done, for all I know).  Initially, before the blog is known, it wouldn't have many inlinks, and its importance may appear to be low.  But based on his previous employment history,  shouldn't his entries rank a bit higher in value than that of a selectman in Andover, MA, for example?  Of course, if he writes boring stuff, the rank will eventually go down; however, I'm thinking he should get some initial rank boost based on his experience outside of the online world.

Or, maybe he shouldn't, as the blog world is a free market of ideas, and no one should get a subsidy for aura.  In any case, blog search and results ranking is in its early stages, and it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

The "Blogginess" of Newspaper Readers

An interesting post by Ethan Zuckerman on how "bloggy" certain newspapers are.  You need to read the post to understand the methodology, but the Christian Science Monitor comes out on top with a score of 134.90; the LA Times is at the bottom with a score of 11.21.