the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hey everyone – as has happened in the past, my site was recently hacked! : (

This doesn’t seem to be the same thing that happened last winter, but is rather just some strange little exploit that allowed someone to insert some evil javascript into some wordpress files. It only affected www.samjackson.org/college, not any other sites of mine. This happened while I was offline in Shanghai,and I fixed it when I returned – however, Google has not yet updated its “unsafe browsing” to remove my site as a risk. Therefore, if you use Firefox or Chrome, you will continue to get warnings. However, there should no longer be any vulnerabilities. Please let me know right away if you see anything amiss – strange ads (shouldn’t be any!) or pop-ups, anything like that. I’ll fix it right away, but I need your help, since I can’t always detect what is going on.

Thank you for your patience, and your understanding. I try to keep the site as safe as possible, but sometimes hackers get the best of me. The internet is a dangerous place. As always, keep your anti-virus software updated and check fo malware regularly.

Hey everyone, as is readily apparent, I haven’t made very many updates this summer. I’ve been having a pretty good time in San Francisco with Google, and will try to share some photos of non-confidential fun.

In the meanwhile, in the interests of testing out my employer’s neat products, here is a Google Voice call widget which will let you give me a call and leave me messages, in case somehow you read my blog and are too intimidated to leave so much as a comment (please!) but are less fearful of actually calling me. Anyway, go have a ball. Please don’t make your number private, because it will discourage me from calling you back if you leave an unintelligible voicemail. : )

43 Folders is one of my favorite “productivity” sites on the web – unlike many of the others, it’s somewhere I can go and know that I can actually learn something about how to use my time / life / neurons more efficiently and more happily. I was reading the other week a post by Merlin Mann from some time ago titled “What Makes a Good Blog?” outlining some of the key principles he saw as key to having a blog really be worth reading.

He went into more depth with his list, but I will reprise the titled bullets here. He says good blogs should have 1. a voice 2. focused obsessions 3. attention * interest 4. paragraphs 5. style and curation 6. weirdness 7. the ability to make you want to start your own blog 8. trying-ness 9. rule-breaking . My efforts to condense his paragraphs into single nouns doesn’t work perfectly, but I think the idea is clear. My own blog fails at the current moment on a great many of these counts, and in some respects perhaps never lived up to all of them. While I think there are definitely exceptions to the rules here, I think that his are good guidelines to think about, fine criteria for blog judging.

What does this mean for me and my blog? Aside from the fact that I am committing that fatal sin right now, by blogging about blogging (!), my personal authorship creates a problem for the blog because while I give it a voice, today I have trouble executing focused obsession about college admissions and higher education marketing. Is this something that I am still passionate about? Yes, absolutely. But more importantly, it is not a niche that I want to focus on exclusively forever — I don’t want to be stuck in a rut, and I feel that in many ways the higher education blogosphere is not moving in any exciting directions. The integration of technology and education, and technology and marketing, is never-ending; yet somehow the same topics feel stale, perhaps because they come up again, and again, and again. So, this has been a serious de-motivation in blogging; a vicious cycle which produces less content, which leads to less interaction, which leads to less content-creation, and brings us to the level of stagnation you see here today.

So, I’m not trying enough, and I’m finding myself wanting to focus on other obsessions — if I had any that I wanted to focus on strictly enough. What I’d like is a platform where I could post my thoughts about a related series of subjects and get a good interaction with the online community going – but the problem I have today is that too many of my blog-readers are now (or have always been) less interested in that and more interested in “finding the angles” — either “how to get into yale” or “how to market to kids who want to get into yale” — less about talking about the issues, less even about Q&A! Is it my own fault that I have generated so many lurkers? Come out of the dark, readers!

This post is a little unfocused because I’m quite sick, but I wanted to try to write about it and have people share their thoughts about what they would like to see from the blog. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t write it so much for my own personal satisfaction so as to help others and to instigate discussions, so what others think after reading does have a big impact! Please let me know.

Though we have seen college blog networks come and go over the last few years, there is one especially promising network on my radar that I thought I would share with everyone today. The College Blog Network is a recent entry to the scene but more blogs join daily. It’s intended to facilitate communication between student and other college bloggers (with .edu e-mail address). You can create feeds of the general college blogging firehose, get links to new blogs, compile favorites, vote for the best, etc.

I wanted to encourage all readers with .edu email addresses to both sign up their own blogs, and also to go to the site and give the current Yale blogs a “thumbs up”! You have to register, but it only takes a second to do so.

I saw that TCBN was advertising for “college blogs” on some search engines, and driving traffic in some other ways, and I hope to see some strong growth here. The site is developing a great blog widget, which you can see in action on the homepage and at rocloop.com right now. Once it is less beta-y, I might try to put it up here.

Anyway, classes are over for most people (I have one which meets during reading period) and I have 3, 20 page final papers due in the next week and a half or so, and will have to blog correspondingly less. In the meantime, check out the archives for my blog, and go look for other interesting posts on TCBN! And don’t forget to bump this site and any others you find interesting : )

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.