Viral is all the rage, it seems — in video, in marketing, in sickness. Or at least it’s enough of a rage to give me enough Friday Five fodder.
- Let’s start off with SCADshorts, a viral video campaign developed by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Developed by the Dandy Dwarves, a group of SCAD alumni who put their video production education to work, the campaign consists of a series of oddball videos — one a month — that are part of a puzzle prospective students must solve in order to win an iPod. Morgan Davis of erelevant offers his take on this clever campaign.
- More about viral video from Karine Joly, who discusses how Vancouver Film School made the most of one graduate’s video, “Piece of Mind” (YouTube link), by creating and releasing on YouTube it’s own “making of” video (YouTube link). “In this 7-minute video,” Karine writes, “VFS manages to let this talented student promotes the Canadian institution, its professors and its offering – all this done by presenting the work that went into ‘Piece of Mind.'”
- Great writing, unfiltered. Seth Godin extols the benefits of infectious prose that is free from corporate filters, and creates a mini-virus by uncovering some pretty decent, linkable bloggage. “The filter,” Godin writes, “is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.”
- In what we hope will become a viral campaign across campuses, 70 presidents of U.S. colleges and universities have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, a move to make college campuses more sustainable.
- Virality is not confined to cyberspace. Take the underground press movement. It’s alive and well on a campus where you’d least expect it: right here at UMR, a predominantly engineering- and technology-oriented university. While the official student newspaper (The Missouri Miner) is threatening to sue the university and student council for cutting the paper’s budget, a group of students have created an alternative newspaper called The Mineshaft. (Tag line: “Where the real news is buried.”) This weekly publication sprang up in December. In the fine tradition of Soviet samizdat newspapers, The Mineshaft is printed on 8 1/2-by-11 paper, photocopied and distributed throughout campus. All the writers use pseudonyms, but according to the latest edition, that may change. (Writes Sybil, the editor in chief: “While we initially thought that anonymity would allow for all discussion to be on our content, we have found instead that the issue of who we are has just become even more controversial.”) The writing and reporting isn’t terrific — as I said, most of our students are here to study engineering, and we have no journalism program — but the spirit behind The Mineshaft is right.
Andy writes! 
I agree with your observation on The Mineshaft’s motivation. Less ties with formal university practices would set writers free to cover controversial topics that need to be addressed. I only hope that, while using pseudonyms, the authors act in an honest, unbiased manor in their observations.