Category: technology

Sick day = blog catch-up day

I’ve been fighting an upper respiratory infection all week long, and today I’m staying home in hopes of sending this bug to its death.

But I can’t seem to sleep, daytime TV is too dull for words (except for a showing of A Mighty Wind on Comedy Central this morning), and I’ve got several neglected RSS feeds in need of a severe pruning.

Plus, it’s been a long time been a long time been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely time since I blogged. (For the previous sentence, blame the Sudafed. And too much Led Zeppelin during my formative years.) Anyway, it all adds up to lots of contextless links for your point-and-click pleasure:

A del.icio.us list of iconic icons for web design, courtesy of Seth Meranda.

cheeseburger-in-can-blog.jpgI Can Has Cheeseburger!. In a can, even. Yes, it’s true. Just what the world’s been waiting for, right? Right? Via Snark Hunting.

Wired‘s interactive life cycle of a blog post will just warm the cockles of any bloggeek’s heart. Via (dis)information architecture.

$100 for a link on Digg’s front page? A new low in online marketing?

Meet the new web influentials. They’re not necessarily the most people-connected, but rather the “people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. So says Publishing 2.0. (Note to self: More contextless links in the future.)

Hidden mysteries of marketing revealed! Anita Campbell, editor of Small Business Marketing Trends, asked a bunch of A-list marketing gurus to share their best-kept marketing secrets, and they obliged. A bunch of lesser lights also shared their tips in the comments. Lots of good ideas here. Link via Chris Brown’s Branding and Marketing.

seth_godin_action_figure_6.jpgWhile we’re on the subject of marketing gurus…no aspiring marketer should be without the Seth Godin Action Figure. Now with built-in BrandOMatic © and PurplePower ©. Via the man himself.

Use Hey!Spread to upload several videos at once.

Digital Perspective asks: What kind of tech user are you? And then links to ways to find out. Say hello to an omnivore (according to this Pew Internet quiz).

The rise of open-source mega-universities. “The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they’re arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information. And mostly, they are giving it away.”

All the presidents’ blogs. Bob Johnson updates his list of college and university presidents who blog. There are 32 in all.

OK, folks. Sudafed’s wearing off. Time to go.

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Now playing: Cat Power – Lord, Help The Poor & Needy
via FoxyTunes

Blogging about organizational change

missouri_sandt_bw_thumb.jpgToday — New Year’s Day 2008 — the university that has employed me for almost 17 years officially became Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T).

This name change comes after some 15 months of challenging communications work. Part of the challenge was trying to communicate to such a broad array of stakeholders in a relatively short time period. (Chris Brown of Branding & Marketing picked up on this in her Too many stakeholders post last March. “I think that rebranding a university is much harder than rebranding a company,” she wrote. “With a university the stakeholders feel much more ownership of the branding than the stakeholders in a company.” True that, Chris.)

One of the ways we attempted to communicate was through our Name Change Conversations blog, which we launched on Jan. 30, 2007. Over the past 11 months, that blog has been both a sounding board and a lightning rod for alumni, students, faculty, staff and others interested in the name change. As I posted that blog’s first post of the new year a little while ago, I reflected on this experiment in blogging for organizational change.

Over the past 11 months, we’ve tried to use this blog as an avenue to talk about the name change with our alumni, students, faculty and staff. As we said when we launched this site last January, we wanted it to be:

  • a source for useful information about the proposed name change.
  • a forum [for] discussion about the issues being raised by the proposal.
  • an avenue for providing up-to-the-minute information about the proposal.

When this blog experiment began, the idea of a name change was still in proposal form. It is now reality. But even after moving from proposal to recommendation to unanimous endorsement from the University of Missouri Board of Curators and on through the process of picking a logo and other details of the implementation, I’d like to think that this blog has achieved its purpose.

I hope you agree. But if you don’t, well, that’s fine. It’s not like we haven’t had our disagreements in the past. But I hope you can at least agree that this forum has allowed you to freely express your opinions about the name change and to participate in a process that we have tried to make as open as possible.

In my opinion, “transparency” and “conversation” were two of the most overused buzzwords of 2007. But those two terms best express what we have tried to do with this blog. We have used this blog to make the process more transparent than it would have been otherwise, and we have used it to try to engage you in a meaningful conversation about this change in your university’s identity.

It will be interesting where this experiment goes in 2008.

Update: this FC Now post today seems particularly relevant.

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Now playing: Thom Yorke – Analyse
via FoxyTunes