Sunday Afternoon Thoughts Part 11

I was overwhelmed by the hits and thoughtful responses to my last post. It became obvious that the changing nature of our respective fields is on the minds of a lot of professionals. I would appreciate any other thoughts.

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Virtual manipulation! Watch your avatar! Fascinating article about an experiment with avatars and human behavior.

I was reading with mild interest until I hit this sentence: “That kind of manipulation can also be used by marketers and advertisers. And author Mr. Bailenson foresees widespread use of virtual reality by commercial interests to push products or services.” Fascinating in a scary sort of way.

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Andrew Careaga ribbed me for lifting his title and adding a “the” and “blog”. Here’s the story. Two years ago I thought I’d experiment with a blog just to see what it was all about. I had my Jedi Web Geek, Jared Barden, help me set it up on Word Press. We sat in my office after dining at MacDonald’s, his favorite restaurant. When we finished he said, “What do you want to call it?” I had thought about it but hadn’t come up with anything. I knew enough about blogs to know the title should relate to the subject. After a half hour of doing searches and finding all my ideas taken, we tried “thehigheredmarketingblog” because “higheredmarketing” was already in use. (Such a small world.)

My JWG argued against it because it’s long and clunky. I agreed and still do but in this world of change, I’m going to remain steadfast after working to build a community of readers. I told Andrew in a comment that occasionally I’ll ask my readers to go up to my url, delete “the” and “blog” and hit enter. Off they go to higheredmarketing.

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Congratulations to Andrew Shaindlin. The Chronicle picked up his posting on what alumni associations might look like in 10 years. You can find his original post  here or at BlogHighEd.

I’m a little behind because the last post took longer to write than I anticipated. Actually, a final draft that’s clear, concise and hopefully a little entertaining is, as Bush said about being President, “a lot of hard work.” (I think he said it 10 times in that one short speech, meaning being a Presidential speech writer is really hard work).

I know it’s against the quick-turnaround philosophy of blogging but I usually write something, set it aside, come back and revise 3-5 times. Why?

I’ll answer that in an upcoming post.