I have a lot to tell everyone about a great CASE conference -- Communications, Marketing and Technology: Staying on the Cutting Edge -- I attended in Baltimore.
My presentation was about building social networking with Web 2.0 tools. It was a lot of fun to discuss ways that news stories, blogs, podcasts, video, and photos can build relationships with constituents and create networks -- networks that work for your institution because they have a clearly defined theme or message at their core.
There also were a lot of great discussions about higher ed institutions toying with myspace.com, products for alumni social networking, what Gen Y is doing and thinking, and an interesting primer on Second LIfe.
We also had a demonstration of building our very own social network using Ning.
That's Ning. And you need to check it out.
We had our own social network built in about 15 minutes. It's easy to add a ready-to-use discussion forum, modules for uploading and displaying photos or videos, a blog, member profile pages, and more. And you control where the modules or pieces go, or if you want them at all.
Very interesting stuff. I can foresse all sorts of applications for this kind of software, and I can see it as a way to extend blogs and make them more inclusive.
There's an interesting review of Ning and a comparison with Nexo here.
Lots of conversations, too, about CMS tools and redesign efforts. I'll catch up with that next time. In the meantime, any Ning users out there with any tips or advice?
Comments (3)
I just started one today for the members of our team out in the bullpen.
This is great - has all the functionality of MySpace and you can customize the layout with no knowledge of style sheets.
Posted by Rob Patey | April 27, 2007 8:27 AM
Posted on April 27, 2007 08:27
Rob, Would you mind sharing the link? Or is it more inside-baseball than for the public? I'm just very curious about the applications of this in a vareity of settings.
Posted by Tim | May 1, 2007 12:08 PM
Posted on May 1, 2007 12:08
Sorry Tim, we already have content on there that is for "serfdom only". General bitch session bulletin board stuff.
I configured it though to mirror a MySpace page and that's the really cool part of Ning. You can pick and choose the elements you want to have and where they appear on the page.
The page is configured by simply dragging and dropping elements into the template. No need to understand CSS or HTML.
The other great part is that you can set it to private use for only specific users.
My suggestion is just go set one up. It took me roughly 10 minutes to register and configure.
Posted by Rob Patey | May 1, 2007 1:55 PM
Posted on May 1, 2007 13:55