Mark Greenfield

Clay Shirky is one of my favorite commentators on the social and economic implications of the Internet.  His book “Here Comes Everybody” is a must read. He recently gave the keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York called “Information Overload is Filter Failure”.

Shirky’s take is that information overload has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press.  What has changed with the Internet is when you filter for quality.  In traditional media, this filtering for quality is done by the publisher.  Whether it’s a printing press or a television tower, it costs a lot of money to get started and stay in operation. To stay profitable, a publisher needs to be responsible for filtering for quality.

With the Internet, we have entered what Shirky calls post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything has fallen through the floor and you don’t have to filter for quality before you publish. The filter for quality has moved way downstream - to the user. This has helped fuel the exponential growth of information on the web. Information overload is here to stay and not only are our tools to filter information inadequate, our social systems to handle both inbound and outbound information is broken as well.

As college web professionals, we need to focus on creating credible content that is easy easy to find.  As Peter Morville stated in “Ambient Findability” , findability is more important than usability.  You can’t use what you can’t find.

Here is the video of Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo:

Matthew Levy and Rachel Beanland did an excellent job of covering the Web 2.0 Expo on both Twitter and at their web site He Types She Talks. Mike wrote this great summary of Shirky’s speech and the implications for higher ed.  I’m planning on attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco in November. It should be quite a show.

On November 11,  I will be teaching a webinar for Higher Ed Experts as part of the “Social Networks MBA” series. The objective of this series is to help you decide if your institution should launch its own private niche social networking website, and how to nurture and develop a thriving online community around your own social networking website.

My webinar is called “Besides and Beyond Facebook: Do’s and Don’t’s for your niche social network” and will borrow many of the concepts from my “Long Tail of Social Networks” workshop. I will explore how niche social networks can meet business objectives and best practices for getting your network off the ground.  In addition, I will share my experiences with launching several niche networks, showing both what did and did not work.

Niche Social Networks are growing exponentially.  On Ning alone there are now over 450,000 sites. Chris Anderson described it best in his blog post Social Networking is a feature, not a destination when he says:

As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else (which is why I like Ning, which suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts. See this post for more on that.).

Instead, I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

Descriptions of the other two webinars that are part of this series and registertion information is available at the Higher Ed Experts site. If you have any specific topics or questions you would like to see addressed during the webinar, please let me know.

Our campus is in the process of implementing a new student system.  After a lengthy assessment, we selected PeopleSoft and we are now in the early stages of implementation.  During the assessment, I was a vocal advocate for selecting a product that was both usable and accessible.

This week I was sent the online training materials to familiarize myself with PeopleSoft. I’ve been using Chrome as my browser the last couple of weeks and when I opened up the link to the training materials, I got the following message:

“The Player requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later.”

I tried to open the site using Firefox, Opera and Safari, and got the same message. (Yes, It works fine in IE.)  I have a very bad feeling about this. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come with our student system.

If anyone of you have expereince with PeopleSoft, I’d love to hear from you regarding how valid their code is.  I sure hope that people won’t be forced to use IE.