I have a confession to make: I'm not a techie.

I am, though, a tech believer. A tech advocate. A guy who knows enough to be dangerous. A guy who can make the ITS folks cringe with sentences that start with, "How about we try..."

I'm also a guy whose brain seems to have a finite amount of usable space, not unlike a hard drive, and new info that comes in sometimes requires old information to be erased.

That's OK if the erased data is funny lines from season one of "Scrubs" (there are a lot of those). But it's not great if learning new HTML code pushes out rules for proper comma usage when dealing with essential clauses.

It's a bit of a conundrum. I need to talk knowledgeably with ITS folks about improvements I want made to our content management system, but I also need to be able to coach a student intern who has just written a poorly organized story about a Pulitzer Prize winning author visiting Colgate's campus.

A comment (thanks for writing!) on my previous post says: "So they (IT) have created a behemoth CM solution ..."

Yikes.

Any content management system is supposed to make things easier for those with website responsibility, not harder.

At Colgate University, we are using an ASP.Net product that has been greatly modified in the past four years. When I first came aboard (in '03) I could not update stories on our homepage, I had to go through ITS. Not a good way to keep a site fresh and engaging.

Who among you have used Contribute as a CMS? A commenter asks for assessments of that tool.

Contribute

I had a good discussion a couple weeks ago with Bucknell University about Ingeniux.

Ektron?

Lots of options are out there ....

I like LinkedIn. I can say that now that I have some people listed as connections. I guess that means I'm plugged in and I count somehow. Online validation. There's a new spring in my step and my fingers are positively flying across this keyboard.

LinkedIn is social networking with more of a genuine purpose, in my mind. I've touched base with former colleagues and former classmates, which was fun in a professional sort of way. It's made me think about my resume and my profile, which I believe is always helpful as an exercise for stepping back and considering where you are, where you've been, and where you might fit in in the greater scheme of things.

And there is always this about LinkedIn: I don't feel creepy using it, which I sometimes do when poking around in myspace.

I meant to note this earlier this week, when Apple made its announcment that it had sold the 100 millionth iPod. That, as they say, is a lot of iPods, considering the first iPod was sold just five and a half years ago.

If a student here on campus doesn't have a cellphone pinned to an ear, earbuds are firmly implanted.

We see iPods and podcasting as a great tool for our media relations/communications efforts here at Colgate. We will soon be releasing our 20th episode of Colgate Conversations, a podcast series that highlights members of the campus community.

While it's hard to track, we do know that subscribers to our iTunes site have roughly doubled since we launched the series back in February 2006 (Colgate president, Rebecca S. Chopp, was the first guest). We also list our podcasts on our website and write stories about each guest, which generate additional "listens."

An unbelievable and horrific day at Virginia Tech University.

This tragedy in which at least 33 people were fatally shot again reaffirms the need for a solid crisis communication plan and it highlights how important the web is in that plan.

University relations officials used the university website to update the campus community and hundreds of concerned parents and others about the unfolding events. Though the website was down for part of the day, several updates were posted on the site, including a text and audio message from President Charles Steger.

In reading the news reports, some students expressed anger over the delay in communication between the first shooting and the second shooting, saying a broader and more timely message should have been sent to campus, expressing a greater sense of urgency.

It's difficult to even begin trying to understand what the campus community was going through at the time and what the university administrators were up against.

But it's a lesson for everyone involved in communications and in website management at any kind of workplace. Be prepared, and be transparent.

Our thoughts and prayers to everyone at Virginia Tech and their families and friends.

A comment on my previous post raises a great point. Michael Clendenin says the fact that the Virginia Tech website was down for parts of the day on Monday underscores the need for a "dark site" that can easily be switched on.

We've talked here about having a homepage stripped of images and graphics that would help ease download times and perhaps spare the server from crashing in the event of some kind of crisis and the resulting spike in web traffic.

Does anyone have that kind of secondary homepage in place, and has anyone had to make it live?

I thought these two items from the Chronicle of Higher Education were particularly interesting:

Virginia Tech Student's Facebook Group Offers a Way to Grieve

and this:

Students Turn to Facebook for Information on Their Friends

If anybody still needed convincing of how fluid and how open the world of communications and public relations has become, in a crisis or in everyday efforts, look no further. Students turned to the medium they use the most, online social networking sites, to look for friends, get updates, and then share their grief and confusion over Monday's tragedy.

Tom Keefe points out in a comment to my previous post that Facebook put a real "face" on the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting. That folks far removed from the VT campus were given a chance to connect in a personal way with the students and faculty there.

And it's not only social networking sites. I thought it was interesting that The New York Times also provided an interactive online forum. See it here

It's generated a lot of comments and it too puts a face to the names you might only hear briefly on a TV network news report.

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.

I listen to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, through his weekly podcasts. The one I listen to most often is taken from one of his many radio shows, the one that now airs on the Premiere Radio Networks. I like him for the most part, and usually pick up something new each time I listen. (He's also on TWiT.TV with other techies).

So in searching for him today I come across a YouTube video, taken from a TV show in which Laporte is talking about msdewey, the Microsoft Live search engine with an attitude.

(You must go to msdewey.com for a laugh. I'm not sure google has anything to worry about, but it's a great alternative when you want a chuckle and you're searching the web.)

So here's what I learned today:

1) Spending way too much time on the computer can be a good thing.

2) Creating an iGoogle personalized page is incredibly easy, but where oh where is the way to add my RSS feeds. C'mon...

3) Laporte gets "pwned" in this video, which I learned, by checking Wikipedia, is not a great thing in the gaming world or in any other world, for that matter.

4) You just gotta love this stuff.

Check out the Laporte video by continuing to read this post.

I constantly seem to be marvelling and mulling social networks and their adaptations these days. I just read in the Syracuse Post-Standard an interesting article about Meetup.com and a group that was formed by expectant and new moms.

The group grew from a half dozen original members to 60 in a few months, and members now plan and organize walks and play-groups and use the message boards to exchange advice. Some say the tips from other moms is more helpful than the pile of parenting books they have stashed on the bookshelf. Others say they get a huge boost from sympathetic postings when they are at their wit's end when baby Sally or husband Bill won't stop crying for hours.

So what other groups are available to me within 50 miles of my tiny burg of Hamilton, N.Y.?

I'm going to write about what I think is an interesting online project because, well, as a partial owner of this blog, I can write about what I want.

At Colgate we just posted an online map that shows where more than 200 members of the Class of 2007 are going after graduation and what they'll be doing, whether it's a job, grad school, or fellowship.

I use Technorati as one of the ways to see how Colgate is being discussed out here on the wide world of the web. It was interesting to see how they've redesigned their homepage. It now lets you check all aspects of what they call the Live Web, which includes blogs, user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, and games.

The same day they announced the redesign on their blog they also suffered a major network outage. Brought down by the bot army. Ouch.

FeedBurner, which we've been using here for some time, has been bought by Google. What hasn't been bought by Google lately?

I like FeedBurner, which provides a simple way to give your RSS feed a little more juice. I also use FeedBlitz, a quick way to allow users to sign up for e-mails that contain links to your news stories. Both are quick and simple.

The part of the acquisition that has me most interested is this, from the FeedBurner blog:

No, I don't mean Down with Tyranny, though I'm certainly in favor of that, too. I read Toby's post yesterday about the most important emerging technologies and how mobile devices are at the top of the list. Lo and behold isn't there an article in today's USA Today about multitaskers gone wild who are text messaging on their mobile devices while driving.

Perhaps you're guilty of steering with your pinkies as your thumbs text away. If you are, shame on you. Keep your paws on the wheel and eyes on the road and wait until you slide into that parking spot to respond to that message. Better yet, take the train to work and text message like crazy.

I know that you already are tired of reading about the iPhone, so I'm going to head into another direction: (First, though, watch this very funny iPhone video by the NY Times technology guru David Pogue) Should your university or institution use existing platforms such as flickr or YouTube to publicize and promote your multimedia?

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in posting. I've been "on the set" here at Colgate as we work to bolster our virtual tour with several videos. It's been a great process but very difficult work. Condensing your message, whether it's that of a higher ed institution or a company, into two-minute slices is not easy.

Several members of the communications office, our digital media director from ITS, and an assistant dean from our admission office held several meetings to talk things through and to refine our key messages.

Hi,

I just wanted to add to the conversation about podcasting. There is an interesting item in today's NY Times about how advertisers are seriously looking at podcasts as yet another way to reach consumers online.

I can't say it pleases me that I might have to listen to ads on my favorite podcasts, but what it says to me is that podcasting is seen as a viable and growing enterprise that is worth investment from advertisers.

The article says about 15 companies, including Apple and NPR, have formed a new industry group, the Association for Downloadable Media, that will help executives improve methods for creating, distributing and tracking advertisements in podcasts.

Very early beginnings for sure, but perhaps an interesting indicator of podcasts' potential.

A Colgate colleague, he of the Intermedia blog, led me to netvibes a long time ago. I love it, it's an easy way to collect everything you might want to peruse on the web on one webpage.

You control the page, organize it, and manage it. I love how customizable it is, you move these neat little boxes around as you see fit and organize content into tabs. I have all my Colgate- related searches and feeds on one tab, web 2.0 news and higher ed blog feeds on another tab, general news and gossip feeds on another tab, and of course, all things Rangers, Mets, Jets on another.

I have e-mail and weather feeds, as well.

Why am I writing now? Well, netvibes just rolled out a Facebook widget.

I want to share an interesting takeaway from a recent STAMATS webinar I sat in on with our admission office.

The importance of the university course catalog was much higher than we anticipated in terms of reaching prospective students. In several instances high school students ranked the catalog just below visiting campus in terms of helpful items used in choosing a college.

I had the opportunity to speak recently with two longtime network news executives and, boy, what a bummer. If there was any doubt about what is in store for mainstream TV news outlets, it was erased by these two gentlemen.

An article in today's USA Today focused on Arianna Huffington's blog, The Huffington Post. It is the fifth most linked to blog on the web. The others, from top to bottom, are:

I had the chance to talk about redesigning websites with three other faculty members at a great conference in Houston last week. More than 50 people heard ways to conduct research for your site, do usability testing, work with a vendor, handle stakeholder feedback, select a redesign team, and more.

There was good discussion about process and ensuring that your redesign sees the light of the day.

So, we've taken the plunge. On Tuesday the communications office at Colgate started using a a blogging platform for posting and distributing our stories, and -- this is the cool part and potentially scary part -- we've opened up our stories to comments.

We hope to create a dialogue and build relationships among those interested in Colgate through the comment feature.

Here is the blog, which we've designed to mimic our main site to a large extent, while hopefully utilizing the power of blogs in an efficient way.

I know plenty of universities are using blog software as content management systems, but I don't know of any using the comment feature. If you know of any, please share.

Maybe it's the Leopard hype, or maybe it's the TV ads. Who knows. But I'm seriously considering jumping from my IBM PC to a MacBook Pro. It might be time.

Tonight, you can watch the premiere of a new show -- on your computer. Maybe you've heard of this new online-only series called "quarterlife" developed by the creators of that hit TV show from yesteryear: "thirtysomething."

Now I found "thirtysomething" mostly annoying, built on the premise of who could whine the loudest.

But I'm intrigued that its producers -- Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick -- have decided to take their new show to MySpace. com and bypass network TV, which rejected the show several years ago.

Ever have a great conversation that gets you jazzed about where things are headed in terms of technology? I did a few weeks back and I want to share that discussion here.

John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox who writes extensively about the digital world and collective innovation, was on the Colgate campus to formally dedicate our newly expanded library and technology center. He stopped by our audio studio for a podcast interview about technology's role in enhancing collaborative learning. He was amazing.

The democratization of the web continues. Here's an interesting article about what seems to be a quick and easy way to get you own web site address without using a commercial hosting service.

How much easier can this all get?

The article talks about how to have a full-featured website with e-mail accounts, blog or static web page hosting, and other services for free.

There is a difference between getting a web address and a domain name, and there are good arguments made for going the route of getting a domain name established.

Greetings, everyone. Here in Hamilton, N.Y., there is a freshly fallen six inches of snow on the ground, courtesy of an overnight visit by Mother Nature. The snow won't affect any New Year's Eve revelry, I'm sure, as we expect just flurries the rest of the day.

Not that I have huge plans. A nice dinner out with just the family at a local restaurant and then some friends over for a cocktail or two until the ball drops.

I hope everyone has enjoyed the holidays. I know I have. I've been out of the office since Dec. 21. I'm sure I'll struggle to remember the 19 different passwords I use for my day-to-day work and, in a rare move for me, I've not gone near my work e-mail. I'm sure that alone will take a good part of Wednesday to clear up.

I wanted to take this time to wish everyone all the very best in '08. It's looking like a very interesting year ahead and I hope we can have some good conversations about new projects and new adaptations of technology that continue to shape the ways we communicate.

ath bhliain faoi mhaise!
(Happy New Year, in Gaelic)

Tim

Who has time to watch webcams? Apparently, lots and lots of people. At least lots of parents of students currently enrolled at Colgate and lots of alumni who want to stay connected to campus.

An effort to reposition our webcams resulted in a mini-flood of e-mails from cam users who were upset that they were temporarily unavailable, eager to offer suggestions for new vantage points, and then thrilled that they were restored and offering nice, new views.

It's been a great exercise in learning how this type of social media tool can really build community among constituents. I've had some great e-mail exchanges with webcam users who feel appreciated, at least I think they do, that we've taken the time to listen to their concerns, and who now feel "plugged in" to campus via our tiny Axis cameras.

As the search for the ever-elusive inexpensive, user-friendly, stable, Web 2.0-applicable content management tool continues, one option to consider is a blogging platform, such as the one I use for this blog and for posting news stories to www.colgate.edu

Using Movable Type as a content system is one method we're considering for posting the stories and features that appear in our main alumni publication, The Colgate Scene.

So I read that Bill Gates, yes that Bill Gates, has joined LinkedIn. I jump on and hunt for Mr. Microsoft only to find a question that he posed but, alas, I can't access his profile. It seems he employed the privacy setting that limits his profile to folks who share a connection with him. That's not me, aparently; I'm obviously not connecting with the right people.

His question -- How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology? -- spurred more than 3,000 replies. And it has helped LinkedIn advertise the fact that it will be offering its users ways to update their status through a new tool it's developed.

The whole idea of "status" is an interesting one.

Very interesting to see that iTunes is now the second largest retailer of music in the country. Only the big box Wal-Mart sells more, and iTunes is expected to eclipse it later this year.

What a juggernaut. Who would have thought that Apple would be such a dominant force in a relatively short period of time.

This info, from market research company NPD Group, includes this tidbit: 48 percent of teens didn't buy a single compact disc last year, up from 38 percent the year before. The company also notes that a million people stopped buying CDs in 2007.

Talk about a favorable trend for iTunes and a not so favorable trend for music retailers.

Do you still buy CDs? The last one I bought was The Rising by Springsteen. I bought Magic, though, his latest, on iTunes and now have The Boss fully represented on my iPod nano.

Just makes so much more sense to use the iPod as my music source, especially since I bought an Altec Lansing dock, which I love. Great sound, recharges my iPod, five-hour battery, and an FM tuner, to boot.

Wow, now I've seen it all. The IRS has several video spots on YouTube talking about the rebates that are coming our way. I only hope the videos didn't cost $93,421 each to produce, thereby taking yet another bite out of my check.

Just goes to show how mainstream YouTube has become. My daughter has some videos she created melding photos, lyrics, and songs of bands like Boys Like Girls. A couple of hers have more than 9,000 page views.

I'm hoping the videos we are putting up there from Colgate do that well. And I can only hope the videos do better than IRS videos.

Check out one of the IRS vids here.

It was great to read Toby's informative post about Facebook. We recently joined the wonderful world of Facebook as an instititution through the creation of a Colgate University page.

This easy-to-create and administer page was a way for us to have a presence on Facebook without imposing ourselves on students who don't want to be bothered in that space. Anyone and everyone can become a "fan" of the page. We have 107 fans as of this minute, and we've done next to nothing to promote the page since launching it about three weeks ago.

Has anyone used Box.net before? I used it for the first time the other day. It's an online storage and collaborative space that allows you to upload photos and files. We used it the other day to work with a vendor on a Flash e-mail. The vendor created a shared space and I was able to upload photos and a Flash file so they could work on them.

Pretty interesting. I don't know if others have played around with it or are using something similar. The "lite' version of Box.net is free, and there are different levels of capacity at different montly cost levels after that.

We struggle sometimes when working with vendors on sharing large documents. This seems to be one solution.

I use a cellphone. It's not attached to my ear, as they seem to be for every student here at Colgate, but I use it fairly often. It's a lame phone; I still use a pay-as-you-go plan, but it works for me.

On The New York Times site there is a Most Popular section that lists the 10 stories or columns most e-mailed, blogged, and searched.

And at No. 1 today is this story: Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer

So I had seen these URLs -- http://tinyurl.com/6l8d5f -- popping up all over Facebook pages and on Twitter, and wondered how they came to be. Now I know. It's the TinyURL.com website, where you can quickly transform a long torturous URL into something short and sweet.

I don't think I'll use this for everything, but I can see some value here.

We're looking at modifying our content management system during the summer, and one of the things we're looking at is the ability for the user (me) to create web redirects on the fly. I'm dying for this feature because now I need to put in a formal request to our IT crew to do that. Not a difficult process for them, but not one they jump on the minute the request comes in, either.

Redirects obviously give more control and are better for links on print publications that tip to the web, and we're doing more and more of this. But these tiny.urls have come in handy for quick posts here and there.

Try it if you haven't used it yet, and see what you think.

Facebook provides some interesting analytics for 'pages' that anyone can easily create. We created one for Colgate University in early May, which I wrote about in an earlier post.

We're now up to 1,599 fans as of this morning, and it continues to grow each day. What the Facebook "insights" shows me is that many more women are fans of our page than men: 62 percent to 38 percent. Not quite sure what to make of that yet.

I also can see the age breakdown, and that data are less surprising: