Yale actually has blogs that it hosts on its own, at blogs.yale.edu. They’re open to faculty, students, etc to be set up. If I knew about this, I forgot. Not the best consolidated resource for student blogs, as it doesn’t appear to be especially well utilized, but worth a look all the same. This site is separate from the special admitted students website that Yale has, which has some student bloggers on it.

I found…

• the Center for Language Study has a blog (and a twitter–language labs are often very trendy)
• A lot of information about Yale’s Windows server infrastructure from Ken, who works for Yale ITS.
• Beth Castle, another person who works at Yale but is not a student
• The best one of all is perhaps this old defunct blog about a Labrador retriever puppy (not to discredit the other blogs, just to showcase my love of puppies)
• Interesting academic blogs (mostly now all abandoned) on projects like ethnographies of Islam in Egypt.
• A very cool art blog called Range of Vision, from Ken, technical director of the Yale center for Digital Media Center for Arts at Yale (I was afraid it was related to DMCA–digital millenium copyright act). Married to Beth, I think? Hasn’t been updated in a year.

… and a few more. But essentially, no one was home. There were a few official blogs for Yale institutions of one or another variety, but nothing really especially active. Does no one know about the blogs? Were all the bloggers abducted by aliens? Anyone with a NetID can make one. They are blocked from being indexed by search engines, which might stop some from getting involved: I know there would be opportunity for abuse, but it can be very limiting. Apparently “This service was developed in response to a number of requests from students, faculty, and staff for a publishing tool kit that would allow people to post and maintain blogs for a variety of topics.” — but I’m not sure where all these people requesting blogs went.

What doesn’t exactly make sense:

What you should know. Privacy, commenting, etc. All accounts on blogs.yale.edu are considered “personal space.” While many bloggers intend for their material to be widely distributed and easily accessible, we need to balance the ability to publish with the privacy of users. In line with this policy, we have disabled search engines from indexing the content of blogs.yale.edu, which means that a Google search will not find your blog. If you would like to publicize your blog you are free to do so. There is, however, an internal search engine that you can use to explore blogs.yale.edu

Why not make this a user-adjustable option? If the privacy is of the utmost concern, what’s the point of enabling an internal search which could turn up results? It just feels like a bit of a strange situation here, where there is clearly uncertainty with what to do with this pilot program.

Here’s the Yale Alumni Magazine’s take on them:

September/October 2005
It’s like traveling back in time to when only geeks knew how to navigate the Internet: in April, the university launched the pilot version of a tool that will host blogs for students, faculty, and staff. As of mid-August, though, the Yale University Weblogs site had not yet been publicized, and the early adopters were mostly IT types from around the campus. But not all the posts are about “OVID interface problems” or “Site e-mail aliases in Sakai”: you can also turn up some nice pictures of a Labrador puppy named Willie and speculation about the plot of the new Dukes of Hazzard movie.

Nothing seems to have changed, although there sadly haven’t been any updates about Willie for several years. Whatever happened to the development of the blogging project? The university needs to move forward in technology adoption. That’s part of why I applied to be on the library policy standing university committee. We’ll see how that goes.