September 2009 – Page 6

Dear Blogroll:

I’ve been neglecting you. I know this. I haven’t updated you in ages, and some of the sites you contain are defunct or nearly so. I rarely even click on any of your sites anymore, even though you include some of my favorite reads. I’m just not that into you these days. The thrill is gone. I’m sorry.

There was a time, of course, when I visited you daily — hourly, even, on some days. But that was before I started using RSS heavily. Google Reader made it so easy to subscribe to blogs, news sites and other information sources. Rather than go to individual sites, one at a time, the latest posts from those sites would come to me, right there in my iGoogle dashboard.

With RSS, I can swiftly plow through the feeds of hundreds of sites, star those that I like and share others with fellow Google Reader users. I can even share those items right here on this blog. (See that box way up there above you, blogroll? Up above the Twitter feed, the comments widget and the feed from BlogHighEd? Yeah, that’s my shared items widget. Oh, dear blogroll, how far you have fallen.)

And then came Twitter. Oh, Twitter! Where the stream of links flows free, pre-screened, recommended and retweeted by hundreds of my closest online friends. It’s a constant stream of information from which I can drink at any time of day. It never ends.

So, dear blogroll, it seems your time has past.

But I just can’t bear to part with you. We’ve had some good times together, and there is much about you that I still like.

I guess you can stay, for old time’s sake. Just don’t get the wrong idea.

P.S. – OK, blogroll. One quick update, but that’s IT! I just got word that Liz Allen now has a blog — called Adaptivate. I’m adding it right now.

The resignation over the weekend of President Obama’s green-jobs chief Van Jones should serve as a reminder to us that we are all public figures.

No, we’re not White House czars of any sort, and we’re not likely to be in the national spotlight. But on a microcosmic level, we are public figures. And like Jones, whose past controversies forced him to resign from the White House post, most of us in higher ed communications, marketing and PR positions aren’t subject to intense scrutiny when we are hired. There are no Senate confirmation hearings for a university spokesperson. Not even a Faculty Senate confirmation hearing.

But on our campuses and in our communities, we are in the public eye, and more frequently than many political appointees. We serve as campus spokespersons. We present at conferences. We share our expertise and our views in the social media sphere of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace. We post pictures on Facebook. Some of us freely choose to “thrust [our]selves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved,” and that, my friends, makes us “limited purpose public figures,” according to the legal definition.

I use the term “public” in a very broad sense. But the nature of the public space is changing, thanks to the always-on mediasphere. A savvy attorney could easily argue that any blogger or tweeter is a public figure to some narrowly defined segment of the public.

I’m a part of that sphere. And if you blog, tweet, Facebook, post on forums or otherwise partake in online conversations, so are you. You don’t have to be Tila Tequila — who recently has done a pretty good job of thrusting herself into the forefront of controversy — in order to be considered a public figure in the Internet age.

We should remember that.