Category: social networking

Loads of links: March 13, 2008

So it’s St. Pat’s Week here at Missouri S&T, where we’ve been caught up in all manner of revelry and enjoyed a beautiful spring day yesterday to welcome the Patron Saint of Engineers’ arrival into our fair city. Not only is it St. Pat’s Week, but it’s the 100th Annual St. Pat’s Celebration, and that makes it extra special and extra busy for us. Ergo, not much time to blog. But the RSS feeds are running over with good stuff to share. Here’s some of it. More in my shared items.

  • Facebook? Not in our house! A nice rant about student recruitment in the era of social networking, with great discussion in the comments. Chime in.
  • Data like a drug. Why do we love to web-surf for data so much? Because it triggers a feel-good opiate-like chemical in our brains.
  • Worst. Mascots. Ever.
  • Yet another blog to feed our data jones: Measurement Matters, a new social media/PR measurement blog. Hat tip: @kdpaine via Twitter.
  • Dennis Miller’s Observations from CUPRAP and how the times for higher ed PR they are a-changin’.
  • How to influence the eduStyle awards.
  • Roger von Oech on avoiding arrogance. “This [arrogance] is devastating to the creative process; in a world that is continually changing, every right idea is eventually the wrong one.”
  • Faculty members should learn to dance, and their students should teach them. A psych professor’s modest proposal.
  • Experimenting with the social media release.
  • Sproutbuilder is a site where you can create all kinds of multimedia content — or “sprouts.” “Sprouts are interactive and portable chunks of web content. Some people call them widgets, mashups or mini-sites but we just call them sprouts.” Gotta check this out. Hat tip to @JeremyWilburn via Twitter.
  • 20 free ebooks or white papers on web design.
  • The unexpected trap of writing for social media, wherein Copyblogger cautions us to “always remember that the quality of the content is paramount and be vigilant not to sacrifice that quality upon the altar of optimization.” (Keywords: content, writing, search engine optimization, SEO.)
  • 25 marketing ideas from the SXSW swag bag. Good stuff. (Note to self: Metanotes.) But the swag would be nice, too.

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    Now playing: Clash – Somebody Got Murdered
    via FoxyTunes

    Unplugged

    squarehead.jpgMost of us were probably too busy monitoring our gadgets to notice, but Monday, March 10, was apparently a day to disconnect from all of our computerized tools and take a break.

    “Rewire Your Life Day” was celebrated yesterday by at least one academic. She is Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor of human-resource management and organizational behavior at Michigan State University. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education news report, the professor did not check email all day, kept her cellphone turned off, and even “went out to lunch with a colleague from another department who, until today, she’d known only via electronic correspondence.”

    It’s not a bad idea to get off the grid every once in a while. We could all use a break from technology, don’t you think? Discuss. Or better yet. Don’t discuss. Step away from the computer, turn off your cell phone, and do something non-techie. Go for a walk. Read a book. Listen to music on something other than an iPod.

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    Now playing: Various Artists – Stay That Way – The Plastic Constellations
    via FoxyTunes