Serendipity35

Higher Ed Experts is a professional development & social networking site aimed at higher ed professionals working in Web, marketing, PR and admissions. It's headed by Karine Joly who I have referenced before here for her excellent blog collegewebeditor.com. (She also writes for University Business magazine on Internet technologies.)
As Karine says: "You can register to become a member (membership is free yet loaded with benefits). You can enroll to attend one or more webinar series or apply to become a webinar speaker or even post job ads for your institution for free."

Higher Ed Experts (HEE) has a one hour webinar coming up as part of "Crisis Communication 2.0 Week" featuring Mike Dame, director of Web communications at Virginia Tech who will share his experience and lessons learned during the tragedy last month in Blacksburg. My son attended VT during that tragic event, so that caught my eye. It's part of a 3-webinar series that is priced at $250 including $100 that will be donated by Higher Ed Experts, in the name of the higher ed community, to the Memorial Fund at Virginia Tech. The June 26, 27 & 28 series also features Joe Hice, AVP at the University of Florida and Andrew Careaga, director of communications at UMR. That's another reason why I'd like to get as many attendees as possible. So, I thought I would give you an extra incentive to share the news with people that might be interested.

There is also a free inaugural webinar (for the first 300 HEE registrants - still open as of this writing) on "How to go viral with your videos on YouTube: What makes a YouTube success? Is it within your institution's reach?" That's on June 14 and features 2 presenters: James Todd, writer and producer for the Office of News and Communication at Duke University, who is responsible for his institution's online videos available on YouTube and other video sharing websites and Dr. Michael Wesch, Kansas State University Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology. He's the author of the most viewed (2 million+ views) higher ed YouTube video, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" which I blogged about earlier and have included in my own YouTube playlist for visual design course. (Yes, you can find educational video content on YouTube, but the instructor will probably need to be the compiler - at least at first.)

If you want to explore social bookmarking, you can add some bookmarklets to your browser's links bar so that with a click you can add a web page to Digg, delicious or any one of the services listed here. (A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program placed as a bookmark in most browsers. A portmanteau of bookmark + applet and applet being a small application. Internet Explorer uses the term "favorites" instead of bookmarks, so you might see the term favelets too.)

I found this listing at http://social.front.lv and copied it over. (Luckily, "sweat of the brow" work can't be copyrighted.)

If you visit that site, you can read an explanation, but basically what it does is allow you to create bookmarklets for all these services from their site. Now, you can do that individually service by service too using the tools the service itself offers. For example, to add that bookmarklet tool for delicious if you use Firefox, go to del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension.

I imported this list not to offer the bookmarklet service, but because it's a quite a good list of social bookmarking sites. There are a number I use now (the big names mostly - Digg, delicious, Reddit, Technorati...) but also a bunch that I have never used or even seen mentioned.

Clicking any link here will take you to that site. You will need a free account to use any of these services.

1. Backflip
   
2. BlinkBits
   
3. Blinklist
   
4. blogmarks
   
5. BlogMemes
   
6. Buddymarks
   
7. CiteUlike
   
8. Complore
   
9. Connotea
   
10. del.icio.us
    
11. de.lirio.us
    
12. digg
    
13. FeedMarker
    
14. FeedMeLinks!
    
15. Furl
    
16. Give a Link
    
17. Gravee
    
18. Hyperlinkomatic
    
19. igooi
    
20. kinja
    
21. Lilisto
    
22. Linkagogo
    
23. Linkroll
    
24. looklater
    
25. Magnolia
    
26. maple
    
27. MesFavs
    
28. netvouz
    
29. Newsvine
    
30. Raw Sugar
    
31. reddit
    
32. Rojo
    
33. Scuttle
    
34. Segnalo
    
35. Shadows
    
36. Simpy
    
37. Spurl
    
38. Squidoo
    
39. tagtooga
    
40. Tailrank
    
41. Technorati
    
42. unalog
    
43. Wink
    
44. wists
    
45. Yahoo My Web
    
46. zurpy

Remember when that MTV flag showed up on the moon back on August 1, 1981? MTV quickly became the thing to watch, the place to advertise to young people, the way to launch new bands, a creator of a new TV forms (reality television in the form of The Real World), even a way to reach young voters (see Bill Clinton,1992).

But that was almost 26 years ago and though they liked to say that videos killed the radio, the Internet killed the videos that MTV pioneered. In fact, MTV seems to run more reality programming than music these days (they moved music to the MTV2 channel).

Their TV ratings may be down but their Net presence is way up. That is mostly due to MTV's Laguna Beach Virtual, an online virtual world companion to their Laguna Beach reality (well...) show. MTV execs realized that kids watching the show were going to web sites not in the MTV domain to talk about the show and post, and they wanted those viewers to stay within their MTV.com portals.

This initiative comes from a small group within MTV called Leapfrog. Their mission is portrayed as an attempt to leapfrog sites like MySpace & other social networking sites.

Leapfrog is led by Matt Bostwick, a marketing exec who previously worked with Coca-Cola in Japan where they set up vending machines that rang up the cell phones of people passing by and asked them if they wanted to download Coke ringtones & free beverages.

He was brought to MTV 3 years ago to work on “off-TV activities” and Leapfrog started building a virtual version of Laguna Beach in March 2006. The site uses the technology that runs There.com (another virtual space created by Makena Technologies) rather than the Second Life engine. That makes their VLB less freedom to create than SL, but a faster, smoother world that is largely developer-controlled.

VLB officially launched last September. By November, it had 300,000 people sign up. They like to point out that Second Life took 3 years to get that many users.

The process is similar: register for a free membership, download the application, pick an avatar & clothing and hit the beach. It's more limited than SL, but therefore the learning curve is gentler.

There's an economy in VLB too, but it doesn't seem to be the main goal for right now. There are purchase crossovers (show DVDs, t-shirts for you or your avatar) and a premium service ($6 month) will be available. You get 180 MTV bucks for a US dollar. Brand (show) loyalty is certainly part of the aim of this initiative.

As is often the case for Net ventures, advertising becomes the business model. And, like broadcast & cable TV, product placement is becoming common (IM windows look like Cingular cell phones, virtual Pepsi cans, a Secret deodorant contest about confessing secrets)

Demographics: 55% teenage girls; 40% of users under 17; users average 6 visits a month and average sessions are 35 minutes a session. That 210 minutes a month compares very well with a regular web site for a TV show that averages 30 minutes a month.

What's next from MTV? It seems that they might get back some of their music roots with a music virtual world that looks like a trendy club. You discover bands, share & promote them and if you are good at doing it, you might get to program the music too. Bands can have virtual concerts that can lead to airplay on MTV.

One thing that is clear in all this is that it will be more difficult to be clear about the directions that advertising vs. information and reality vs. virtual reality take. How will this change our incoming students' perceptions, and will it drive changes to the way we deliver our educational content or the way we market our schools?

Protopage is usually promoted and thought of as a homepage service. That puts it in with providers like Netvibes, Webwag, Pageflakes, Yourminis, Google personalized pages, and Windows Live.

Part of my interest in Protopage was that it was one of the first sites that I saw that was using an Ajax desktop that lets you move items around on the page with a simple drag and drop. Others have that now too - Netvibes, Google, Microsoft Live and Zoozio. Goowy is similar but using Flash. Microsoft Live is the only one that is extensible allowing a number of widgets and tools to be added.

But that's not my point in posting all this.

These online applications are great ways to get students online fast. They require no web design knowledge, no HTML, FTP, software, no fees, your own customizable URL, free hosting and support. What a deal! For schools that can't or choose not to offer students server space, these are alternatives.

It's not MySpace or a blog, but students can be fully operational sites within certain parameters. Adding widgets can make them look more multimedia or they can become a mess of widgets. That extreme offers good lessons on usability.

This is more of the movement of applications online.

I assigned my design students to create a Google Pages site and review the user interface. Most of the students who have web experience found the app limiting and a bit frustrating (trouble changing the CSS and "breaking" the template etc.). Still, if you are a web newbie in need of a small, basic but attractive site (with free hosting and support from Google), this is a good choice.

Here are 3 of my students' Google Pages as samples - one on web design, another on the photography term bokeh and a simple site on technical writing. The assignment was just to use the app and review it, so these are not full blown sites (especially on the content side) and probably represent just an hour or two of design work. For that small investment, they are not bad at all.

Protopage is actually more limited in design (most of us couldn't handle the Ajax even if they gave us access to the code!) but offers more add-ons, so the results can look media rich.

Protopage offers more than 270 widgets (preview the widgets before adding them, an internal RSS feed reader for viewing news articles as well as cartoon feeds, video podcasts, and audio
podcasts.

If privacy is a concern, version 3 has the ability to create tabs and categories, make the tabs public or private, and password protect group of tabs.

Your text content goes in "sticky notes" that you can click and edit. of text inside the widget. There's even a search box with 750 preloaded search engines. Protopage supports most popular browsers - IE 7/6, Firefox 2/1.5, Opera 9, Safari 2, and even viewing in Nintendo Wii.

There were actually 30 new features in Version 3. I like that the sites are protected by a password, so you can set up instant collaboration by setting a password to let others see or edit your page. For info on new features, check their blog blog.protopage.com.

Here's a sample Protopage site I put up as a demo protopage.com/teachnology

Get started with Google Pages at googlepages.com and with Protopage at protopage.com

5/3/07 - A reader emailed me to say (use the comment feature!) that you should also check out http://jimdo.com as a tool for easy web page creation.