College Web Guy

Yes, I’m going to keep posting this collection every month. Here are personal favs from my morning google reader habit. Old folks read newspapers to start the day. The rest of us do rss.

Gold Nuggets for July 2008

10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments - Derek Powazek

Newsrooms are top-down places, but the internet is not. Get used to the fact that people online won’t do things just because you told them to. In fact, the only thing you can absolutely count on is that something will happen that you didn’t expect. When it does, you’ll be defined by what you do next.

The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I’d Never Write - Schalk Neethling

I don’t think it’s reasonable (no matter how much I would like to try) to make our devs and designers into accessibility experts, so what can we do? If we can’t yet achieve excellent accessibility, what about simply doing better than we are doing now?

Being the Conductor of the Web - Ron Bronson

The problem can be when the voices of the orchestra are louder than that of the conductor. Some conductors simply aren’t given the freedom to actually choose the ‘music’ and lead the band the way that she does best. That can be a real problem when you measure your success on benchmarks set by actually getting the web to a different place.

So How Dumb are we? - Lisa Anderson

Ironically, Web sites demand that people read, but their information often is more to be accessed than retained, more to be consumed than assessed and more to be gulped than savored, unlike with a book, a poem or a lengthy article. “The material isn’t lodging in their minds. There is not enough internalization of knowledge,”

On Being a Web Communications Guy at a University: - Dave Baker

When I was trying to come up with a snappy title for this blog using the words ‘University’ or ‘Higher Education,’ nothing seemed to capture the amorphous challenges that we wrestle with as web people in the college setting. The concept of making websites for a university is like grabbing a handful of pudding. It’s not HTML anymore. It involves building coalitions, exploiting technologies, using vendor applications, open source and social tools, herding a collection of web presences spanning servers both on campus and around the world, identifying content contributors and subject matter experts and thought leaders and so on. It’s simply hard to explain. When someone asks me what I do, I usually mutter, “computers,” and then we change the subject and start talking NCAA sports or how nice it is to raise kids in a college town.

Dancing around it - The Old College Try: High Marketing Ed

It’s kind of like in higher ed, we dance around the meat of what we really are. We think people want to hear about a “community” and “belonging” when all they really want to know is “Do you have my major?” and “What are my job chances when I graduate?” and “How much in scholarships will you give me?”