templatedata

From Higher Ed Marketing via Seth Meranda: Colgate are using blog software to run their news website.

A simple idea that really should be used more often. For those who still maintain 'news' is not 'blogging', this doesn't mean that the news website suddenly becomes a blog, it just means you can have an off-the-shelf product (in this case Movable Type) that can deliver a whole lot of things that are useful for news websites that happen to be parts of blogs. So you can easily categorise/tag, you have a CMS of sorts, feeds, all the plugins that are developed for blog software etc etc. My only concern would be allowing comments and that's simply because I know the work that goes on behond the scenes to monitor comments. People are becoming more and more used to commenting on news stories on major news sites but I am yet to see a highly intelligent, well-mannered comment thread on one of those sites that matches some of the things I've seen on large blogs. Sometimes refereeing such discussions is a step too far if you've already got a full-time job somewhere else.

Overall though, the thought of using MT or Wordpress or similar to handle other web content seems so obvious and ripe for exploitation, especially the culture of feeds that blogs have. The RSS feeds can be used not only to serve content to readers but to other applications etc. We already use RSS to feed news to other sites but using blog software to house the content in the first place would make it a lot easier.

Anyone can set one up but it's easy to get wrong. Check out Tom Johnson's 20 tips to find out how to get it right.

And Karine has added a whole section dedicated to higher ed bloggers. My feed reader is now straining under the weight of all those new feeds. Burp.

A post on College Web Editor brings together a list of other University web teams who blog. A few include:

• University of Buffalo
• Virginia Tech
• UC Davis
• Ball State University

There's more listed here.

One that's not listed, as it's not officially affiliated with a University is Animatty which is written by an old colleague of mine.

It's encouraging to hear from other people grappling with the issues around web development and support for Universities.

If you're a research student who also blogs, or even a fully-fledged researcher, the Third Carnival of GRADual Progress may be of interest to you. (Don't know what a blog carnival is?)

Check out the last carnival to get an idea of what it's all about.

Thanks to Zoe for the heads-up.

Much excitement.

Sounds like a few of the Uni's librarians are having a ball in Perth at the ALIA conference. They're blogging their way through the conference with aplomb.

While cleaning out my inbox this morning I noticed an email from the CHI-WEB list that I had previously missed entitled Blogs and Netiquette. After the interesting and very welcome response to the previous post on the new-look Uni site I thought it was timely to have another look at it. With the blogs dots usyd stable of blogs growing steadily I thought it might also be useful to look at a few of the issues.

The discussion in the email was related to the pros and cons of starting an in-house blog for employee feedback. If you're interested in starting a blog aligned to an organisation I encourage you to have a look at the email.

The relative issues for the University I see are as follows: