Internet and web – Page 182

Robert Morse, the guy who develops the methodology behind U.S. News & World Report‘s annual college rankings, is now blogging about the process on the U.S. News website. His blog — cleverly titled Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings — is billed as offering “deeper insights into the methodologies and is a forum for commentary and analysis of college, grad and other rankings.”

I’m not sure how much of a true forum Morse’s blog will be (there’s no option to leave comments on Morse’s post) but it’s heartening to see U.S. News is attempting to get transparent about the rankings process. In fact, it warms the cockles of my rankings-wonk heart.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Robert! Don’t forget to bookmark us.

Jeremy Pepper over at POP! PR is doing a bang-up job covering a big corporate communications event sponsored by Cisco. He shares some thoughts from a panel discussion on the changing media landscape featuring some Silicon Valley A-listers like Dan Gillmor. The money quote, from my perspective, comes from Gillmor:

All your corporate sites are media. Monetizing audiences is traditional thinking, and what is now is that you need to assemble a conversation and community, and monetize directly or indirectly. It will be useful in a non-business model way. What is being done is that corporations are creating media, and would love it if companies approached the sites like citizen media, with the tenets of traditional media.

There are those two C words again: conversation and community.