The autocomplete seems to help quite a bit, but even still I think people are going to need some sort of thumb therapy in about 10 years.

Social Networking Sites
Facebook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Originally designed for college students; facilitates interaction between friends and colleagues who can leave messages, post articles, photos, add applications; virtual equivalent of “hanging out”

MySpace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
Social networking site targeted towards a broader audience; more garish, wild and wooly.

Linked In
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_in
Professional networking tool; individual fill out a profile and invite colleagues to join; connections are suggested in a “7 degrees of Kevin Bacon” fashion.

Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Prefaced on a simple question, “what are you doing?”, Twitter helps its users broadcast their status over the internet to IM clients and SMS-enabled phones. Twitter feeds are published as RSS feeds.

Social Media Sites

YouTube
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
YouTube allows users to upload video where visitors can view and comment. YouTube videos are also distributed via RSS feeds and can be published on remote sites and blogs.

Flickr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr
Photo-sharing site where users can upload and tag their photos. Visitors can view and comment. Photostreams can be delivered via RSS.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia that is the scourge of educators everywhere. Editable by anyone, Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors to keep the mob in check. Often a great quick resource, a best practice is to verify Wikipedia information with more reliable sources.

iTunes Podcast Directory
A podcast is little more than an RSS feed with links to mp3 or mp4 files. iTunes and other RSS aggregators alert users to new episodes of their favorite amateur (or not-so-amateur) radio or TV show.

Technorati
A search engine for blogs

Slashdot/Digg
Users submit news articles and engage in discussions about said article. Both sites are known to cripple smaller sites by directing unexpectedly large numbers of visitors to a single page.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Del.icio.us / Ma.gnol.ia / Stumble Upon, etc
Ever say “I found an article online but I bookmarked it on my computer at home”? If so, then social bookmarking might just be for you. Sign up for an account and you can save your browser bookmarks online and access them from anywhere. Delicious allows users to tag their bookmarks, creating a “folksonony” where users give their opinion of what an article is about.

Concepts and definitions

Cluetrain Manifesto
“if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get… ‘We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp.’” Written and signed in 1999 this document is one of the seminal statements of the Web 2.0 movement.

Blogs
Short for “weblog”, blogs are the digital equivalent of the printing press. Anyone can sign up at TypePad or Blogger and start publishing their opinions online. No real understanding of HTML, FTP, Apache or any other web technology is needed other than an internet connection and a browser.

Wikis
As described earlier, a wiki is a document that can be edited by anyone. Every iteration is logged and saved allowing for rollback to previous versions in the instance of vandalism.

RSS
“Real Simple Syndication” is a standard XML format that allows for standardized distribution of information. It is the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement.

Tagging / Folksonomy
Tagging is a more organic system of categorizing content. Blog postings, YouTube videos, Flickr photos are all “tagged” with short, descriptive words to facilitate sifting and winnowing through content more organically.

Web 2.0
The post-bubble internet trends towards social media via RSS as well as the prevalence of APIs to allow the sharing of data and content between web sites and applications.

Not so fast.

The New York Times article How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free describes how difficult it is to close your Facebook account completely. It seems that even when you leave, Facebook retains your profile in the event you decide to opt back in. This makes it really hard to become fully removed from the Facebook databases.

From a user support angle, I can actually see the logic in this practice. No matter how many “are you sure you want to delete this?” dialog boxes, someone invariably will complain that “I didn’t think you would delete it completely.”

From a higher ed marketing perspective, however, this inability to completely hide data you have entered raises some serious privacy issues. If an institution decides to use Facebook or some other social networking tool as a means to connect students, faculty and staff only to find in the end that they cannot completely wipe the data even after explicitly requesting that very thing, it opens that institution to everything from bad publicity to legal action.

Hopefully Facebook will address these concerns and adjust its account deletion polices and procedures. Sure the tech support staff will be faced with the unavoidable “I didn’t know that deleting my profile would delete my profile” complaints, but maybe they’d be better off without those customers anyway.

What it does is tack on extra information to the URL for analytics tools (like Google Analytics and LiveStats) to chew on.

Here’s an example:

Every month the Office of Marketing and Communications sends out the School of Business Gazette in the form of an email. That email contains links to web pages on the school’s site that have the following format: http://www.bus.wisc.edu/gazette/month2007/article_name.asp

To track the number of clicks on a particular story in the email, we need to find a way to differentiate those clicks from other clicks, say from folks stumbling around our site and getting to the Gazette through the administrative resources section.

So, what to do? If we go to the URL Builder we can define specific information about the link. I enter the following information:

Campaign Source: gaz042007 (short for gazette 04/2007, note that I left out the slash since it’s a reserved character for use in URLs)
Campaign Medium: email

And the tool spits out the following URL: http://www.bus.wisc.edu/gazette/april2007/article.asp?utm_source=gaz042007&utm_medium=email

Notice the information we added comes after a question mark as follows: ?utm_source=gaz042007&utm_medium=email.

Both URLs load the same page, but the URL-Builder page tags extra information for the analytics tools to consume. That’s the information that we can use to track the campaign. Google Analytics will consume that auto-magically (assuming you’ve got the proper tracking code on your page, (email me with questions on that)) and LiveStats would require some custom report definition.

Please leave questions or comments below. Thanks for reading!

Some quick numbers from the article:

• only 15.8 percent of iPod users ever played any video content on their iPod or iTunes
• only 1 percent of the content items played on an iPod or iTunes was video content

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t talk much about the demographics of the 400 iPod users they sampled. It would be interesting to run a similar study of college student iPod use where lecture videos were available via iTunes.

That’s an excellent question, and we actually have an answer. The School of Business has an excellent statistics package that monitors the traffic to web pages on www.bus.wisc.edu.

But here’s the hitch, it needs to know which pages to track.

If you have pages you want tracked, just shoot me an email and I’ll get you set up. There’s a great Web interface where you can view all sorts of things from the number of page views each page is getting to what kind of browser your visitors are using, what country they’re browsing from, heck, even what screen resolution they’re browsing at.

We can even collect your pages into a content group for easier analysis. Just let me know. It’s all in-house and ready to use. Here’s a sample: Download file