The Vancouver Education Blogging Sessions at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net

What I refer to as Web 2.0, D’Arcy calls the read/write web. Others call it a “live” site- but the idea of 2-way interaction with the user is the concept we are trying to define. The original cool thing about the web was that a user could guide their experience through your site- choosing what they thought was important- vs. what you thought-an example:

Companies have been publishing brochures for a long time. There was always a battle over how much detail to put in them. With the web, you can keep drilling down to more and more detail until the customer has the information they want, with a brochure- if it isn’t there, oh well. But, until recently- that was as far as it would go. Now, you can give feedback right away, ask deeper questions, or even rearrange how you view the data. There is no reason to still create a printed “brochure”- since it’s always going to be inadequate.

When it comes to education- especially higher education- the dialog between teacher and student was the core value added proposition in the learning environment. Secondary, was the interaction between students under the guidance of the teacher. So forward thinking educators are using the blog platform to create these linkages. But with all things new, how to do this is still being established. I am now asking all interns to set up their own WordPress.com blogs- just to get some experience with the new web, and to see how they think and write. I have also guided a forward thinking doctoral candidate to a blog to build his resume to the world. But D’Arcy has brought up a key point on ownership and oversite of these blogs- if they are truly part of the learning experience, shouldn’t they remain with the student after they leave the institution? I’m even wondering if WordPress.com is a viable solution as opposed to a totally owned domain (See “how to blog” on this subject).

All this aside, the most important thing D’Arcy brought up was that blogs don’t need IT support as we know it. The simplicity of a blog is the beauty of it. It empowers people to do thier own thing on the web- which is why Blogosopher exists.

Today I attended the “How to drive traffic to your website, and what to do when it gets there!” seminar at Wright State University and sponsored by the SBA and the Ohio Small Business Development Centers.
From the Dayton Daily News article, it is a “3-hour workshop presented commercially nationwide for $295” – which it turns out- isn’t true. “Dr. Jerry” said that that seminar was an all day seminar- but that he was going to speak faster for us so we would get the same info- just in a shorter period of time. If I made this claim, the Dayton Ad Club and the Better Business Bureau would be all over me.
There were almost 50 people in the room, and I did everything I could do not to say anything to correct some of the patently incorrect information that was given. My favorites were his explanations of how search works- mostly based on scores of keywords- which might have been fine 4 years ago- but is no where close to how page rank is established now. He claimed that links in weren’t important for building incoming traffic (my stats would say differently).
A woman asked about new entries to the web; “Do you get a better position when new” was totally wrong. He claimed that Google actually won’t index a new site for several days- and there is a “Sandbox effect” where a page will rise in rank over time. Google knows the web is changing daily- and that most of the time people are looking for the most recent information available. A perfect example of current topics rising to the top of search was within days of launch of the new Apple iPod nano, a kid blogged about how his broke- and Apple wouldn’t fix it. Not only was his site instantly a huge hit, it attracted so many other stories that a class action lawsuit was filed soon after and Apple changed its repair policy.
The list of things we cover in blogosopher would exceed the 21 page handout he provided- but, to briefly cover the most important things he didn’t talk about: Blogs, RSS, CSS, how to build online relationships, Open Source solutions, Static vs Active vs Live sites, web standards, accessibility standards, alt tags, how search is changing site design, mass e-mail management, how URL’s are largely irrelevant (his suggestion was to buy every URL variation, and extension including misspellings because they are cheap), how the web will change the way we do business even more so in the future. (more…)

The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University

Here are the researched and documented guidelines on how to make your site credible.

We have a saying at The Next Wave: Create Lust•Evoke Trust- in other words: have something people want, and make them trust you- it’s marketing in a tagline.

The most important part of staying at the top of search is to update your site often- which is one reason WordPress makes so much sense.