Mark Greenfield

I came across this great SlideShare presentation today by Graeme Wood on the future of social media. It covers a wide range of topics at a high level and references the thoughts and ideas of people like Gorden Moore, Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, Tomi Ahonen, and Seth Godin.  Be sure to view the slides and read the accompanying text.

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.

The 2008 Campus Technology Conference is being held in Boston from July 28-31. Here is a description from the conference website:

Campus Technology 2008 welcomes attendees to its 15th annual summer conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning in a Web 2.0 world.

This year’s conference offers a blueprint for adapting to the new demands of Web 2.0 teaching and learning, both in and out of the classroom, and explores how educators are coping with the ever-increasing demands on their resources, skills and time. You’ll come away armed with tricks, tips and techniques to survive and thrive in the “Next Gen” educational environment.

This is the one conference that I really wanted to attend but had previous commitments.  The good news is that Jay Collier will be providing coverage of the conference through Twitter and a conference coverage wiki (thanks Jay).

I will be following the proceedings and encourage you to do so as well.

eduWeb is now less than a week away.  Brad Ward and I are teaching a workshop called Join the Conversation: Social Media in Higher Education where we will be providing an in depth look at how higher educational institutions can leverage the full power and potential of social media.

We are using a wiki to compile a list of colleges and universities using social media and we  would like your help creating this list.  Please visit http://higheredsocialmedia2.pbwiki.com/ .  The invite key is located at the top of the page.

Thanks in advance for your help.  I hope to see many of you at the workshop.

Over the past month I have returned to Twitter. Previously I had been using Jaiku, mainly because of their channel feature. But with so many of my colleagues using Twitter, it was time to make the switch.

I have been amazed at the value Twitter has provided for me professionally. The one thing I didn’t expect was how it creates social capital and strengthens the relationships I have with my professional peers. I’ve learned more about people in a month of following them on Twitter than I have in years of following their blogs. Twitter really lets me see the human side of people that I don’t necessarily see from blogs and other social media.

I am now thinking about how Twitter might be used to augment our student blogging efforts. Our main goal with our student blogs is to give prospective students an authentic view of life at our university. These blogs work best when students identify with the bloggers at a personal level. Twitter can do this better than traditional blogs. So I’m thinking of asking our bloggers to use Twitter as well. Their tweets would have to be relevant for prospective students, but I see great potential.

One challenge is that not many high school students are using Twitter, but I expect that will change. In the meantime I can pull the RSS feed from Twitter directly on to the individual student blogs.

So what do you think? Is using Twitter to augment student blogs a good idea?

I have been blogging for several years and the post that received the most attention by far was
Will Higher Ed Websites Become Irrelevant?. I’ve talked about this at recent conferences by sharing the following observation:  In 2005, 100% of my time was spent working on sites within the buffalo.edu domain. Here in the summer of 2008, I spend about 70% of my time working on sites in the buffalo.edu domain.  The remaining time is spent developing our presence on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Ning, etc., time that is well spent.

Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post The Future of the Corporate Website involves People continues to explore the future of corporate web sites. I particularly like the idea of “fluidity”:

“Corporate websites of the future will be less about canned content and more about fluidity. Meaning, the consumer will demand websites that are connected to the ‘users’ and ‘consumers’ personal networks which will promote and instill word of mouth as a best practice for business development and ultimately sales. The infrastructure will be designed in a way that company developed case studies, webinars and such will be replaced by real consumers leaving messages and user created video’s. …”

To stay relevant, higher ed websites will need to focus on authenticity, transparency, and a willingness to cede control to fully leverage the power of social media. And the time has come to think outside the proverbial box. It is no longer about your web site. Instead, it is about your web presence. Information and commentary on your school is no longer confined to your site, but instead lives in numerous places including Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and countless individual blogs.