Month: June 2011

License to remix

Recently, Michael Fienen wrote a lengthy but thoughtful and thought-provoking post over on .eduGuru about copyright and reuse issues (Copyright, Content, and Consumption).

Fienen’s focus was on whether the use of so-called “read later” tools like Evernote could be construed as theft of creative work or intellectual property. It’s an important subject and one that a Lawrence Lessig fanboy like me can appreciate. You should read Fienen’s post, because the topic could impact the way you read, share and save information online. And don’t gloss over the comments, because there’s more great info shared there.

But what caught my attention in a more practical sense was a point Fienen made near the end of his post. He asked readers to “please take the time to put a Creative Commons license on things you create … [t]o protect yourself and make it clear to others what you will permit.”

I’ve been blogging here for more than 5 years, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had never bothered to license this blog and its content under Creative Commons.

That situation has been corrected. At the bottom of this blog’s sidebar is now a statement of license. It looks sort of like this:

Creative Commons License
Higher Ed Marketing by Andrew Careaga is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you don’t have a Creative Commons license on your blog or other intellectual or creative work, maybe it’s time you did.

When it’s time to say farewell

GoodbyeJust a couple of days ago, I cranked out a farewell post for our university’s first official blog, Visions. Hitting the “publish” button was essentially flipping the kill switch for this blog.

Visions began as a grand experiment for our office. We started it in February 2006 as a tool to showcase campus research. At the time, it seemed like the logical step in our efforts to promote our campus’s research activities. We had been doing a quarterly e-newsletter about research (which few people opened and fewer read), and this blog you’re now reading was a few months old. Blogging was starting to gain some notice from the higher ed community. A co-worker had been reading Seth Godin’s ideas about flipping the funnel — turning our “funnel” systems into “megaphones” that fans could use to shout our messages. We knew the current system — that quarterly e-newsletter — wasn’t working.

And so these ideas about blogging and from blogs converged. We pitched the idea of creating an official, university-sanctioned research blog to the higher-ups.

The reception was tepid. They weren’t convinced that blogging was the right thing to do. It was an alien concept to them. They worried about staff time — Would it be diverted from more credible pursuits, like writing press releases? — and the whole idea of interacting with the audience — What if we received negative comments? How would we handle those?

We assured our bosses that we would screen the comments before posting, and judiciously edit if necessary. We also assured them that our productivity would not slacken.

So we got the go-ahead, created Visions, and proceeded to blog with vigor. Abandon, even.

We churned out a mighty 24 blog posts in February, another 36 posts in March (our record month), then 29 in April. We kept that pace going for a good while.

But then, you know, things got kind of busy. The blog became an afterthought. We started posted less frequently. Facebook happened. Other projects got in the way. We ran out of steam.

Our productivity — on the blog — did fall off. For the entire year of 2010, we logged a mere 45 posts . That’s 75 percent of the quantity of posts we pushed out there the first two months of this experiment. Before Sunday’s post, we had posted a grand total of one time in 2011 (back in February).

What happened? Where did our grand experiment go awry?

A number of circumstances converged to push this project down on our priority list. When our campus began a fast push to change our name, our department was front and center, and pretty busy with that project from October 2006 through much of 2008. Some of our energies were diverted toward new blogging initiatives associated with that project — a blog about the name change, another blog designed to further promote and build buy-in for the new name and one about an alumna-astronaut who was blogging from the International Space Station.

Furthermore, new advances in microblogging and social networking diverted our attention from Visions and toward Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Finally, we looked at the analytics and saw that our flipped funnel just wasn’t working. The numbers of visitors have stayed flat to an average of 30-35 a day over the past couple of years. The commenting has also been quite low. Even as we push our posts through social media in an attempt to draw more visitors to the site, it’s been a zero-sum game.

Internally, we’ve talked about pulling the plug on Visions for months. It took a long time for me to muster the courage to write that final post.

William Faulkner advised writers of fiction to kill your darlings. I think that advice can be applied to any pet project, including blogs.

One big takeaway from the recent social media workshop I attended last week (and blogged about) had to do with applying the lessons of evolutionary biology to social media. In evolution, the organism that best adapts to change wins. Social media is evolving. Just as in 2006, our efforts to promote our university’s research to certain audiences evolved from e-newsletter to blog, so today it is evolving into something else.

So, Visions will remain online for a while. Will it be missed? Judging from the lack of response to our farewell post, a virtual tree falling in the virtual forest, I’d say not so much.

Photo by Joybot via Flickr.