Mark Greenfield

It is well documented that Millennials consider e-mail to be old school and prefer to use IM. At UB, we have started to experiment with the MeeBoMe widget that will allow people to IM our various offices directly from a web page.  We have added it to two of our sites and so far, so good.  Our students like it because they can IM directly from the web page they are viewing, rather than open a separate IM client.   More to follow in the coming months.

Here is more information on MeeBo and MeeBoMe:

• MeeBo
• MeeBoMe
• Review from cnet

A recent post on Read/Write Web titled 2007 Will Be A Big Year For RSS explains how the arrival of IE7, Vista and other new products should bring RSS to the mainstream. I agree that RSS is ready for prime time. I have been using RSS for quite some time now and find it a real time-saver. In this age of dynamic content, I couldn’t begin to keep up with the flow of information without RSS. It also has simplified the syndication of content across multiple web sites which both mitigates the risk of inaccurate content and improves the user experience.

I was one of several people interviewed by Karine Joly for the article “10 Tips for Surviving a CMS Switch” in the October 2006 issue of University Business” magazine. Karine has also published my five tips on the collegewebeditor.com site.

Content management continues to be a goal for almost everyone I talk to in higher education. But CMS systems are not a silver bullet and I recommend everyone read this article, along with the various CMS articles available on collegewebeditor.com.  The main thing I always recommend concerning CMS is to understand the business problem you are trying to solve. These systems can be very complex and difficult to implement and knowing why you need one is a crucial first step.

In most of my presentations I mentioned the importance of 3G cellular networks and the impact it will have on the Mobile Web. 3G will bring broadband speeds to cell phones which will greatly improve the Web experience for anyone using a cell phone to access the web. While the U.S. is still in the early stages of rolling out 3G cellular networks, China will be rolling out 4G cellular networks within the next couple of years. 4G mobile testing facility approved from the Shanghai Daily News explains how 4G ” could eventually enable cell phone users to watch high-definition TV, browse the Internet and hold video conferences using their mobile handsets”.

The speed available through a 4G network is impressive. “The 4G wireless technology is expected to provide data transfer rates of up to 100 megabits a second - about 100 times faster than current networks and 50 times faster than a 3G network.” My personal experience with using a smart phone to access the web has been frustrating and I anxiously await the arrival of the faster cellular networks.

At the recent HighEdWebDev2006 conference in Rochester, I had the opportunity to conduct a workhop called “Emerging Web Technologies: Building New Connections in Higher Education” with my friend and colleague Jim Leous from Penn State. Jim and I have always wondered about the title of this presentation and if these technologies were really “emerging” since most of them have been around for quite some time.

Jim shared with me the Evolving Technologies Reports from Educause which contains a collection of great reports. We both decided that evolving was a better term than emerging as we look at the new tools and techniques loosely joined under the Web 2.0 umbrella.