News Releases in the Social Media Era
Matt Herzberger | Web Designer, Texas A&M University - College of Engineering

Not started yet, but his opening slide has (cc) on the bottom. I like this guy already. OK - here we go.

He shows the “old school” way of doing  things. Looks a lot like what we are doing now :(

• He highly reccomends WordPress and so do I.
• Social media press releases: www.socialmediarelease.org a good templat for doing modern press releases.
• Need to add links to digg, technorati, etc.

Make the news SEXY!

RSS - the plumbing that pulls it all together.

Your writers can be a problem if they are used to doing it the old-school way.

He leaves the comments open. Decreases barriers of entry. But, not everyone expect/knows that they have the ability to leave them. Make it obvious. I wonder if they have had any problems with racism, sexism and general internet asshats???

Getting images and multimedia can take a lot of work.

They use flip camcorders to grab video.

He shows a short video and then opens it up to comments. There are some really good comments.

So the flight was canceled after hours of delays…

No more flights out of Denver.

Next possible flight option wouldn’t get to Springfield till late Sunday evening. Who knew that the Denver airport shuts down at 6pm on a Saturday?

We decided that it would be better to drive. At 12+ hours it might be grueling. But really, it is the only option at this point.

Hours later, with 3 new friends: Randall, Jake and Traci (two of whom are are attending the conference) - we had rented a van and were on the road.

Even with GPS, we initially took some wrong turns (through tolls), but quickly got back on coarse.

Then…

An hour outside of Denver, the check engine light started blinking and the the engine started stuttering.

Now were stuck at a Denny’s waiting for a tow.

After presenting in 2007, I was asked to be on the conference committee for the 2008 HighEdWeb. This next conference will be in Springfield Missouri, and I have been selected as multimedia representative (though I am not entirely sure what that means yet). We have already had several meetings (via the telephone) and many items are set, or underway.

The theme for the conference will be “Infinite Solutions” and this year we have decided to set up a  competition for designing the logo and website template. Along with the deepest admiration from your peers, you are also set to receive $200 cash if your submission is used. So all of you out there in higher education land should take a look and show us what you’ve got!

But, you better get started. We need to get everything rolling, so submissions  are required by January 21.

Details on the conference and competition can be found at: www.highedweb.org/2008

Mark A.Greenfield - U of Buffalo

This was a great one to end on. Mark, a very professional speaker, had put together a great presentation. He covered the changes from mosaic to google earth to the mobile browser. Then he began to look beyond.

One interesting argument covered was that the web page, once thought to be the smallest unit of the web, is being re-examined. RSS feeds, widgets and audio casting are allowing content to flow outside the page container. Just as how we now buy tracks, where we used to buy full albums.

Scott Lenger -Duke Law

Anything created after 1989 has automagic copyright applied to it. The fair use laws were enacted to protect the publics right to still use limited pieces of material without going to jail.

Scott spoke about DRM and the creative commons, but for the most part he tried to explain the fair use guideline. Unfortunately, the guidelines were intentionally ambiguous.

Missed breakfast.

Last night, after podcasting, were a series of poster presentations and special interest group meetings. Again, I had a good chance to speak with the conference organizers.

As the SIGs wore down, the buses had arrived to take us to the planned outing. The HighEdWebDev people had booked the local science museum for the night. It is like OMSI, only about 5 time bigger. There were catered food stations and free, open bars located throughout the exhibits on all five floors. The even booked the planetarium. In the darkened dome, the guide tried, yet failed to stump the drunken nerds on the names of the autumn star patterns.

After several hours, we arrived back at the hotel. I was all ready to go to bed, but when I stepped on the elevator it was full of people and beer headed up to the 25th floor. The organizers, reserved the presidential suite during the duration of the conference and everyone was headed that way…

Daniel Harvey, Eastern Illinois University

This one’s for Monica:

Easter IU not only supports podcasting for their instructors, but they have created an online CMS that allows instructors to to maintain their own feeds. It was scripted in PHP - allows for mp3s and most mp4 codacs. When I talked to him after the session, he agreed to send me a zip of the code base.

Don Albrecht - U of Rochester Medical Center

Polling was so good, that I decided to stick around for the next propeller hat presentation on SGV. Scaler vector graphics, in my opinion are the next step in web presentation. This W3C backed open-source implementation of Flash is created through XLM and play well with both CSS and JavaScript. However, like most good things, microsoft has been slow to implement the standard.

He showed a great graphical example of Edward Tuff’s sparklines created with SVG. Even more examples could have been good- some of the crowd began to nod off after 20 minutes of XML.

Daniel Frommelt - U of Wisconsin, Platteville

Snuck over to the TPR track to hear about polling and feedback from a techie’s perspective. Dan was a very blunt, but impressive speaker and held the crowds attention the entire time. Even though he thought that polling was a waste of time, he found good was to set up an impressive system.

What was the most importing thing that he learned. Filter the comment section before showing the results to the administration.

Cal Anderson - Truckee Meadows CC

Finally, someone else from a CC. He being by running over the basics of PDFs (static vs. dynamic vs. interactive), but quickly ramps it up. Looks like the view version of acrobat pro includes an extra app called “Designer”. It makes creating PDF forms much more exact. Pixel locations, extra input types, expanding text boxes, etc.

Oh, and the non-pro version of acrobat 8 (due out next month) allows users to save data! Very nice.