Gentle readers, welcome back. In this edition, we’ll be analyzing several passages of Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, discussing his use of text from Bacon’s work and how…what’s that? You’d rather just have a round of tech news from around the Web? Yeah, me too.
A Meal Ticket for Delicious
A hue and cry arose when it looked like Delicious was headed for the scrap heap. But in the space of about two weeks the future has brightened significantly for the bookmarking company, as YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have appeared as white knights, buying the company from Yahoo. On May 9, Hurley and Chen’s new venture AVOS announced the purchase of business intelligence platform Tap11.com and Mashable reports AVOS wants Tap11 and Delicious to get cozy.
“From a reporting perspective, publishers and marketers could potentially get better insight into how many people bookmark, tag, share or discover a link using Delicious. For certain types of engagement, this could be very powerful,” Mashable says.
But, Mashable also points out Yahoo was basically trying the same strategy and couldn’t make it fly. Keep your eyes peeled for what happens next.
Blogging: Dude, Don’t Be Lame.
The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog is a great read and resource, if you don’t already have it bookmarked. Reporter Jenna Johnson recently held an online chat on campus blogging with Trinity Washington University President Patricia McGuire, Daniel Creasy, an associate director of undergraduate admissions at Johns Hopkins University and Lauren Hockenson, a senior at Boston University who is the publisher of The Quad.
Hockenson suggested college officials can avoid being thought of as lame when they launch an official blog by keeping in touch with their student blogging communities or even partnering with them.
“The Quad is partnering with Boston University Public Relations on a series entitled ‘The Senior Bucketlist,’” she said. “Essentially, my writers and I pick one thing that an underclassmen or prospective student should do before graduating BU… BUPR gave us the freedom to come up with the content, and we cross-promote to get people onto BUPR’s new blog, BU Now. The result, from my point of view, has been really positive…”
The Post has the whole transcript linked too.
The Student Loan Debt is Real, Though
The University of Hawaii recently had a virtual commencement ceremony in Second Life. Twenty-two students received their master’s degrees in educational technology during the ceremony, which included a speech from Christine Sorensen, Ph.D., dean at of the College of Education. College officials told digtriad.com that the virtual ceremony was far better attended than an on campus ceremony would have been.
Students were taking classes online and the leap into Second Life seemed like a natural one, school officials said. Some family members also logged in to attend.