March 2009 – Page 6 – Andy writes!

Bloggers losing ground as authority figures?

That’s the question asked (and slightly reworded here) by Brian Solis in Techcrunch this morning (story here; hat tip to twitterer Andrew_Arnold there).

Solis argues that new micromedia platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook are eroding the authority — and value? — of the traditional blog. (Seems odd to call blogging a “traditional” communication form, but traditions seem to come and go quickly in Internet time. Oh, well.)

Says Solis:

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

With the popularity and pervasiveness of microblogging (a.k.a. micromedia) and activity streams and timelines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing for your attention and building a community around the statusphere – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

Fair enough assessment. Now that many of my offline social networks (friends, family, work associates, high school and college classmates) have migrated to online sites like Facebook and Twitter, I find myself passing little electronic notes back and forth in the form of tweets and wall posts, rather than comments on blogs.

This new genre of rapid-fire interaction is further distributing the proverbial conversation and is evolving online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities.

In most cases attention for commenters at the source post are competing against the commenters within other communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

True again. But what about the source material so many Twitter users fall back on? They pull from blogs and retweet the links, in much the same way old-school bloggers would quote and link back to a news source. Just as I was about to lodge a protest along these lines against Solis’ argument, he turned the tables on me.

Authority within the blogosphere demands a new foundation to measure rank and relevancy that is reflective of the real world behavior and interaction of those who are compelled to link back to the post and extend its visibility in new, engaging, and prominent communities.

Ah, the old devil’s advocate post. It gets me every time. Solis is a blogger, so I should have known he didn’t really buy his own argument.

But what about measuring authority?

Solis goes on to philosophize about a new sort of Technorati-ish measurement for Twitter links, and so on. (Read the post if you’ve got 10 minutes to spare and are interested in that kind of thing.) But as this-here post shows — a blog post that links to a blog that was discovered via a tweet from someone I follow on Twitter — the social media sphere is far too interconnected. The various strands of the social media sphere are far too entangled to tease out and separate into disparate, measurable units. What’s really needed is an index that connects blog authority to Twitter authority to Facebook authority to FriendFeed authority to …

Or maybe Solis and I just need to get out more.

P.S. – Comments are fixed now, so feel free to leave me one.

Tradition as a tool for student recruitment

Blogger’s note: There appears to be a problem with the ocmmenting form on this post. I hope the prblogs.org folks are working on it. Thanks for your patience. – AC

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And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: Tradition!

— Tevye, “Fiddler on the Roof”

The 2008 St. Pat, Paul Voss, watches St. Pat's Follies last March along with a throng of S&T students. (How'd that guy with the Michigan cap get in there?)

Every college and university has its share of traditions. Starting today, Missouri S&T kicks off one of its oldest and most celebrated traditions: St. Pat’s Week.

Last year, we celebrated the centennial of St. Pat’s, which began on our campus in 1908. (Full disclosure: We stole the idea from our sister campus in Columbia, where engineering students a few years earlier designated St. Pat the patron saint of engineers. But here in Rolla, where we had a much higher proportion of engineering students, we appropriated the celebration and rechristened it as our very own.)

This particular celebration is an important part of our history as a university. It probably means nothing to you, unless you happen to live in Missouri. (Research among Missourians in the 1990s revealed that our campus was known for two things: “excellent engineering programs” and “St. Pat’s.”) But it means a lot to alumni of many generations, who fondly recall it as a one-of-a-kind rite of spring and an important part of their college days. It means a lot to a segment of our student body, too.

But how important are such traditions to prospective students? Where does tradition fit into a recruitment strategy?

I haven’t read or heard much about this. It seems most colleges and universities neglect the power of their traditions as a marketing tool for prospective students. This seems to be a mistake, because traditions usually come with great stories. I know ours does.

We talk about our St. Pat’s tradition in our recruitment materials, but it is never front and center. We prefer to talk more about how our campus is the ideal place for a certain type of student. We talk about our range of majors, the availability of financial aid, and all the other stuff every other college or university talks about, only we try to do it in a way that sets us apart from everybody else.

But one of the things that really sets us apart is this tradition thing. Every institution has them. Maybe we should be using them more to distinguish us from the competition.

Although, to be honest, our St. Pat’s Celebration doesn’t have the greatest history. Like many things associated with St. Patrick’s Day, it has a lot of connections to drinking, and more than its fair share of debauchery. There have also been a couple of student deaths connected to a former student group that used to run the event. So maybe it isn’t the kind of thing you want to draw too much attention to.

Still, it’s part of what we are. Traditions, like family, stick with you, whether you want them to or not.

There ought to be some way to incorporate the best of our traditions into student recruitment. Don’t you agree?

Or maybe you’re already doing that. If so, please share.

P.S. – As part of last year’s 100th celebration, we started a blog to help promote the event and keep our far-flung alumni connected. We’ve resurrected that blog again, perhaps beginning a tradition of our own.