I can understand this, but I see it as everyone’s job to help build the community. We’re just taking the on-campus, in-classroom community and extending it online. Yes, it helps the marketing, but its not really about that. Its about being authentic and transparent and giving others a real inside look. Most people on my campus embrace the Web but don’t really understand its strengths and goals.

Social media does scare our traditional media people. People could say bad things about us! The horror! People say the same things offline. Why don’t we learn to take criticism and fix the legitimate problems? Then again, looking at the typical YouTube comment doesn’t inspire much hope in humanity.

I’m working on a more articulated plan to encourage the campus community to participate. If I come across any miracles, I’ll certainly share them.

An aside: For RSS to become mainstream, it needs to be marketed differently – for one, we need to stop calling it RSS, that doesn’t mean much to most people. We haven’t adequately demonstrated its usefulness. There will probably need to be simpler browser integration.

For faculty members, this can be a big plus because it adds well-organized, professional content to their google results.

This also neatly skips over the compromise of just posting a pdf of the print piece.