the Sam Jackson College Experience

Finding a good student blog is harder than it sounds. Finding a good blog in general is very much a needle-in-a-haystack affair, of course–finding good student blogs can be especially tricky because the same queries and topics which bring up the best-written, most thoughtfully enunciated expositions also drag out the most inane and unhelpful of MySpace scrapings.

In my current position as a research intern working with danah boyd under the Berkman Center, I often have to find entries from lots of students blogs online about specific subjects. Additionally, I’m always on the hunt for great student blogs to highlight for prospective students, higher ed marketers, wary admissions officials, etc. I like to try to encourage student bloggers wherever I find them, explaining to them how their efforts can prove to be really worthwhile, so forth.

I was contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter a few months ago who was looking for blogs and student writing on a particular topic, and I was quickly able to give them some tools to help with their piece: here are some of the tips that can help you too if you’re looking for blogs about student life at any given school. This guide could be handy if you’re looking for students to recruit for an official blogging venture, if you’re a prospective student wanting to learn more about a school, if a school wants to find evidence for random expulsions… all sorts of uses. The blogs you’ll turn up searching this way tend to be unofficial student blogs, rather than school-directed ones.

1. Look for “student blogging networks” like StudentBloggers.org or The College Blog Network (favorite my blog!) and see what they have to offer. College Blogs Network was the first one of these I can think of, but it sold out last year (no new developments yet). You don’t always get much quality control, but few people take the time to enter their blogs into blog networks unless they’re at least a little serious about their efforts.

2. Use Google Blogsearch, Technorati, IceRocket, vanilla search engines, whatever you like: Here skill comes into play. What kind of blog post are you looking for? For certain more reflective kinds of posts, limit your queries to Livejournal; Vox tends to host a different flavor of blogger, and Xanga and MSN Spaces gets you another category altogether. Leave things open if you want to cast a wide net, noting that although there may sometimes be some mild differences between Blogspot or Wordpress.com and Livejournal, you can find great blogs everywhere. The right way to search here is to be exceedingly specific: I randomly decided to try to find a student blog about Pomona, and to find one that was worthwhile I searched for “pomona school class blog.” After a few pages of search engine results, I came to the Claremont Conservative: a nice blog maintained by a few students which talks a lot about what’s going on at the schools from one given perspective. Not so hard to find things, see?

3. Does the school have an official blogging program? Not as many as I would like do, but some highlight student blogs or have students blogging right on the main site. MIT has the gold standard here, with their admissions blogs, but lots of schools have blogs. Sometimes they’re hard to find, so do a quick search on the school’s site to see if they have some that they just want to hide from you somewhere as a test of your diligence. The fact that blogs are official in some way does not necessarily mean that they are biased or worthless or written by tour guides (Even if sometimes they are some or all of those things).

4. Ask someone who knows. If you chance upon a good student blog like Wesleying (which is super awesome, and right now has a custom unicorn cursor which is fantastic) or the Bwog (an excellent Columbia University blog), both of which are blogs compiled by many students, you will find ready links to many other school resources and student blogs. If not, you can ask and people are likely to know. At helpful communities like the one around William College’s EphBlog, links abound. At Yale, it’s hard to name all that many other student bloggers, but I could rattle off at least a few if you asked me. If you can’t ask a website, ask a student! They might know.

(If you’re looking for blogs about the Ivy League, you’re in luck. Without commenting on links between blogging levels and anything else, there sure seems to be a lot of blogging going on in the Ancient Eight. IvyGate remains a strong contender for general Ivy blog, and is a useful portal to other student blogs and provider of gossip. Harvard has a lovely (unofficial) blog aggregator which points those interested in the direction of quite a few blogs. From student Dartmouth blogs to official Cornell ones, there is a lot to see.)

5. Make your own! There really aren’t enough good student blogs out there, so if you’re an applicant, you could make a blog chronicling your admissions process and then keep blogging once you get to school (like me!) or if you’re already at school, it’s never too late to start! I highly, highly recommend getting your own domain–the $10 you pay yearly will be one of your best investments (more on that some other time). You don’t have to get hosting, either–you could just have that domain point to your freely hosted blog at Wordpress.com or somewhere similar. When you’re done (OR when you are starting) let me know and I’ll help spread the word!

Hope these tips are helpful! Comments, results, suggestions all welcome. I didn’t want to make it an exhaustive guide, but just point out a few ways that I find new blogs in the hopes it might inform others out there looking.

Headlines don’t lie–so what’s the quick payout from student blogging?

Why, awesome video game kitsch, what else!

Christian Montoya of Cornell had a photo contest on his student blog I Have Senioritis a few weeks ago, and on the spur of the moment I decided to enter it. As it turned out, I won, and will soon be the proud owner of a playable atari keychain! I’m pretty excited. I’m linking back so that in the future, other people will participate in his photo contests a little bit more. My caption was pretty good, but I have the sinking suspicion I didn’t all too much competition. I’ll put the word out next time he runs one, but his blog is pretty awesome anyways (I’ve linked before) so… another excuse to read it, I suppose.

Christian is affiliated with the very excellent Cblogs network, which should be a must-read for anyone looking for high-quality student blogging.

For the photo and my brilliant winning caption, take this link: We Have Our First Winner!

And of course my fantabulous prize: ThinkGeek Yar’s Revenge / Centipede Keychain

Let me begin this post by thanking Morgan Davis of Erelevant for a very insightful comment which has once again conjured a response from me which I am reappropriating for the front page. I love the discussions I have with readers, which is why I would encourage more of you to interact a little bit! You might learn something from each other, too. In the past three days, I’ve had visitors from 150+ colleges and universities across the USA and Canada: I see you! Embrace the new web and share your thoughts! I respond to everything.

Now, moving on to the content again… here is the comment Morgan made, excerpted from my recent post”Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning.” The comment is on student blogging generally and why, despite my begging, the world won’t see too many truly honest student blogs blessed and promoted by colleges anytime soon.

“authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else”

Amen.

Authenticity is still really scary for a lot of Admission and PR folks. We don’t use blogs at my school precisely because we know they would have to be *real.* We go out and look at our students MySpace and LiveJournal writings and imagine them with the college logo blazoned across the top. More often than not, we come away scared.

Sure, there’s lots of good stuff too [on MySpace], and even the bad stuff is RELEVANT and AUTHENTIC, but I don’t think many institutions are ready to invite real-life, open discussion of the good and bad in campus culture to their official namespace. And, honestly, the reason is not to fool or deny prospective students at all–it’s parental, donor, administrator, and media opinions that drive these decisions (sad but true).

So the best bet for learning about colleges via blogging will probably remain third-party and personal sites. Officially sanctioned blogs are most likely going to read like viewbooks in first person and without the glossy photos.

I read this and was sad to realize how true it was. So, through my tears of naiveté, I typed up an e-mail response. Here’s that response, lightly edited:

Thanks for the inspiration! I started thinking again about the looming danger of too much of the wrong kind of information about a school. Certainly photos of bong collections and voyeur shots are in vogue when it comes to social networking, but would absolutely not do for a visible school-affiliated blog.

A polished admissions blog might pretend to target the same audience as these great unofficial ones (prospective students, others) but we’re not lambs to the PR slaughter here. High pageviews and visit counts will be a consequence of high profile links to the blogs; plaster them on the main site and all those applicants are going to look at them, whether they derive any value from them or not. If a school was seeking to fill its ranks with witless dupes, then these might be fantastic recruitment paths. To the best of my knowledge, they’re not.

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Usual promotional fare of school-sponsored admissions blogs, one might expect. We’ll have to look forward to what Cornell students can put out in terms of blog content… The school seems particularly well-intentioned with these blogs. Here are the mission objectives:

The student voice is largely missing from Cornell’s web site and, in this project, we have a golden opportunity to bring it to the forefront

• Draw attention to Cornell in the “blogosphere” and bring us up to par with our peers in academia
• Supplement the work of Undergraduate Admissions and Campus Relations by sharing information about life at Cornell with potential students and their parents.
• Share the Cornell story with the world.

They are, as usual, compensated:

Assuming that each student makes a minimum of two blog entries per week (one entry per week during breaks), they are eligible for a total of $50 in gift cards per month. These cards may be distributed in either $50 or $25 increments and must be chosen from the list of approved retailers below. Students will receive their cards no earlier than the last Monday of the month.

They can use these gift cards at College Town Bagels, iTunes, the school bookstore, etc. The “man” in this admissions-sponsored blogging setup purports to allow free reign in terms of content; that remains to be seen. Certainly there will be a certain level of professional self-censorship. For this reason, though I do look forward to these blogs as a valuable source of cornell-related information from a fresh perspective, unofficial Cornell blogs–namely, The Unofficial Cornell Blog, which tipped me off to these–will still have their place in my heart.

Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.”

Davis cites polls which have shown teens–namely prospective students–are not very hip to the blogging jive.

I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.

This got me thinking about my own peers, and how many of them were familiar with the blogosphere, how much of them read anything from it, etc. It’s completely true that we as young people are far more concerned with social networking (read: Facebook, MySpace) than with the blogs so highly touted in the 2004 election. I’m not entirely representative of my age group.

It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.

Right you are sir. Then again, it’s certainly easier to find student-collegiate resources on Facebook when one can simply navigate to the “Friends” list, find some senior you knew last year who goes to whichever school you might be looking to find anything out about, and drop them a line. If student blogs were as easy to find and access as that, I’m sure they’d have better market penetration.

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