Introduction: While the UW Bloggers strategy was an innovative first step for UW's entry into the blogosphere it is only a first step. UW needs to move forward by revamping the UW Bloggers concept and by increasing the level of communication within UW and between UW and the outside community.

Plan

UW Bloggers shortcomings are:

• The bloggers come off as marketing puppets and not real people leading prospective students to wonder just what life at Waterloo really is like. This is because the bloggers are handpicked, paid, and not reflective of UW's students.
• Not enough variety (age, faculty, experiences...) is represented.

Were I put in charge of UW's blogging strategy I would immediately shut down the 'UW Bloggers' as we know them today and roll out the following:

• Setup some enterprise blogging solution enabling any UW community member to create a weblog for free (see Weblogs At Harvard Law).
• Hire a UW blogging evangelist (to keep costs down we don't need someone of Dave Winer's stature, just someone who is a good evangelist ).

Our new Blogging Evangelist would be in charge of the following:

• Promoting departmental level blogging. This person would go around to departments and demonstrate the usefullness and effectiveness of a group department blog. This group department blog would enable other UW community members to be able on a daily and/or weekly basis to keep up with what that department is accomplishing in terms of research and teaching.
• Promoting faculty blogs. Encourage the development of more weblogs such as Professor Ragde's CS251 weblog which gave students an insight into how a course is taught
• Promoting student blogs. Though I don't think students need much encouragement as there are already lots of student blogs (see UW blog ring and LiveJournal community)
• Editing a 'Life at Waterloo' blog. What would happen is that our evangelist would read a number of blogs belonging to members of the UW community and would then select posts from these blogs that they felt were representative of life at Waterloo and post them to a central weblog. Also, much like people email Chris at the Daily Bulletin links, people could email the evangelist links to posts they felt reflected life at Waterloo. This would provide a more realistic and accurate reflection of life at Waterloo than what is provided by the current UW Bloggers.
• Editing a 'Research & Teaching at Waterloo' blog. This blog would be editted in the same fashion as the above one but instead the focus would be on providing a central location for people to keep up to date on current research and teaching practices at Waterloo culminated from individual and departmental blogs. This would replace the proposed 'brochures telling the world about particular themes of Waterloo research'. As Canada's 'most innovative' university it would only be fitting that we communicate our research initiatives online instead of through glossy brochures.
• Provide Feds with the support they need to provide transparency to student government via blogging. I know Liam is working around the clock as VP Ed but if I didn't know Liam I would have no clue just how hard he is working. Till students understand how much Feds does they will continue to be apathetic and unsupportive. Feds needs to make a case for itself and I believe blogging would be the best mechanism to do so.

Conclusion: This is a rough quick and dirty guide to what I feel Waterloo should strive to do in the blogging arena. Unfortunately several American schools have taken the lead on blogging, but it is not too late for Waterloo to show the rest of Canada that it is able to use technology to effectively communicate internally and externally.
4:34:45 PM   []

UW bloggers

Why do I find them so bloody annoying? Does everyone find them annoying? And it's not even like I dislike just *one*, but tolerate the others... No.. I just don't like any of them. I find them annoying.

4:10:02 PM   []

i saw an ad in the imprint on friday advertising for a few positions, including arts editor and assistant arts editor. i was on my way with tony to another indie rock discussion meeting, so i think, "this is perfect, i can apply to a position and use my new sway to promote a local music scene in the student paper." so prompted by the ad's instructions, i send an email to the editor asking for some more information. i don't get anything back till this morning, when i get an email which says "come to the staff meeting at lunch, we're voting to decide the positions". so i go, and darned if i'm the only person there who wants the arts editor position. well, i say my piece and then get informed that i may not be quite experienced enough to handle the full editor position, but do i want to be assistant editor? sure, i say. turns out though there's another guy there who wants to be assistant arts editor, someone who's held the position before. so, he gets that job and i get bumped up to editor.

i may have gotten myself in over my head, but we'll see.

12:04:28 PM   []