Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Friday Five: places to go, people to see

It’s Friday Five time:

  1. As reported here earlier, Elizabeth Allen (@lizallen on Twitter) is now blogging. Huzzah! Liz’s blog is called Adaptivate, and it should be on everybody’s blogroll, RSS feed, delicious faves, whatever you use to manage your required reading resources. Liz is associate director of alumni relations at the Caltech Alumni Association and is one of the best around when it comes to integrating social media tools with traditional alumni relations practices. Her blog may be new, but Liz is no stranger to the craft of blogging. She’s guest-posted here a couple of times — first, about her lessons learned from a CASE conference we attended in April 2008, and more recently some good insights about working with unofficial Facebook groups.
  2. Another newcomer to the higher ed blog scene is Davina Gould (@davinagould), who started her graduate/professional school marketing blog in August. Davina is a marketer at a law school somewhere in Florida, and her blog (so far) offers practical and thoughtful insights on such topics as promoting social media on your campus, using Google Documents as a productivity tool and handling the death of a campus public figure. Welcome aboard, Davina!
  3. Have you tested Facebook Lite yet? It’s got a third less sidebar gunk than the regular Facebook. Great taste, less filling. Here’s a review of the new interface.
  4. The CASE website has a new look. The site also provides a nifty section to guide you through the changes.
  5. Remember what happened on this date eight years ago. Here’s a video to help you remember: 9/11: Stories of Survival and Loss, from the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Or if music’s more your thing, listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Into the Fire, from his album in memory of 9/11, The Rising. I think I may listen to that entire album today.

What role for the blogroll?

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.