Listening to the good, the bad and the ugly.
This is the theme (or should be) of any social media initiative by any company or university. The idea of social media to many administrators is just a place where students are listening and will read anything thrown at them. The truth is completely opposite, students have [...]

It has been two months since the launch of the new wayne.edu and I wanted to take some time to give an inside look at the process, goals and results of the project.
The Wayne State homepage was getting to be a dinosaur. It was over six years old, which is at least three life times [...]

Like most universities, our photographers are out every day taking photos. These photos go into our photo library to be used for publications, web, press releases, etc. Unfortunately, the numerous people in the photos never get to see them.
If one wanted a printed photo, they had to request the photo from the photography department it [...]

Previously had no concrete statistics about which social networks our current or prospective students use. Last week we ran some statistics for the visitors of the wayne.edu homepage to figure out which social networks they had visited.  We ran it on the weekend of May 31 to June 1st to get the largest percentage of [...]

Google search is powerful, so powerful at finding important information it can also be used to find exploited information. By exploited information I mean pages that have been used to increase the page rank of advertisements by attaching their links to a high page ranked domain.
Its easy to search just your site for commonly used [...]

We have just expanded our vcard microformated university address from the university homepage to all pages in the universities Content Management System. The list can be found here, it doesn’t include all the pages by far but it is a crucial step to integrate microformats into all pages at the university. Not only the vcard [...]

Branching out past the confines of our university homepage means working with public API’s and services. We started yesterday with Twitter, the first of many social and external sites we will be pushing information.
We choose twitter mainly because of its simplicity. The idea of having a full blown facebook application with no street credit seemed [...]

Over the past two months have been slowing down our client work in an effort to focus on the universities main homepage and central university tools. Being the second day of work things seem to be going as planned, we squashed a few bugs in the homepage and are discussing additional features to the child [...]

With the new year comes new endeavors. 2008 has started and we are back to work, here is a few things we are bringing with us.

Welcoming Nick West to the team! Nick as worked as a student assistant for about a year and has been hired full time.
A blog dedicated to the daily work of [...]