Technology

Real-Time Stats from Google Analytics

Today, Google unveiled Real-Time Google Analytics and released it to a handful of accounts. You could request to have it turned on for your account, and within a couple of hours of making that request they turned it on for me.

September 29, 2011 — 2 Comments

Yes, You Should Chase Shiny Objects

If Google does something, we all notice. If a hot, new social network hits, we all notice. So this week, the world is a-buzz with the latest social network, Google+. And if you’re a cynic, like me, you’re thinking, “Great! Another social network. What makes this special?” Here’s the thing: it’s ok to be intrigued or cynical.

July 06, 2011 — 2 Comments

Tales from the Cloud

Last week, the hard drive on my laptop stopped spinning. I knew it was coming, after hearing the dreaded clicks and very luckily getting the machine to boot and function again for a few days before the next round of clicks. When the drive finally met its end, I found myself with a fresh install o...

March 29, 2011 — 0 Comments

Emergencies and Your Web Design

After a major campus crisis, schools often respond by scrambling to put together a crisis plan. Often this stops with a “business continuity plan,” or how they’ll keep things going despite a crisis. At Notre Dame, my colleague Julie Flory helped establish a Crisis Communications...

November 18, 2010 — 2 Comments

Can you unlock your digital assets?

Notre Dame has recently begun to tackle the problem of our many content silos, with digital assets being captured, stored, processed, and delivered in so many ways. Last year, our interviews with faculty and staff revealed a troubling conclusion: It’s often faster and easier to re-create c...

October 22, 2010 — 0 Comments

Right Person, Wrong Job

Years ago, when I was running my own little web business, one of my clients was a car insurance company. We designed their website, but had inherited an online quoting system written in approximately 100,000 lines of terrible Perl code. Every few months, my client would send me updates that requ...

June 03, 2010 — 0 Comments

3 Dirty Secrets of Enterprise Content Management

Every year universities and colleges embark on a quest for an elusive beast: the content management system. Many of these organizations have a dream: a single system for the entire university to store, manage, and distribute content. They call it enterprise content management (also known as eCM)....

May 11, 2010 — 0 Comments

ND, UStream, and Faith: the Evolution of Television

In February, Notre Dame’s Alumni Association did something remarkable: it launched an interactive television program entirely online. The program is called Tender, Strong, and True: Living the Gospel Daily. It’s a panel-format show discussing a topic of faith with academics and spiri...

March 30, 2010 — 2 Comments

The 6 Speeches Web Professionals Make

The web profession is a client-driven one, even when we don’t technically have clients. We’re always teaching, educating the various stakeholders as to best practices, how to use new technologies, and why they shouldn’t waste their time on the flashy buzzword-du-jour. If youR...

March 09, 2010 — 4 Comments

Why Google's Social Networking is Different

A recent question on our internal campus communicators network prompted a question about Google’s social networking entrant, Buzz. There’s been plenty of chatter about it, so I don’t feel the need to summarize what Buzz is. As @donschindler pointed out, Jeremiah Owyang has a gre...

February 11, 2010 — 0 Comments

Marketing and the 2010 Horizon Report

If you haven’t checked out the Horizon Report in the past, it’s an annual publication that highlights key technologies expected to affect higher education in the next five years. This year’s report was published on January 14 and has some real gems, as usual. What’s On the...

January 16, 2010 — 0 Comments

An API Culture

In software, an API is a way to get data into or out of a system. It stands for “Applicant Programming Interface” and basically allows outsiders to access or manipulate the information in the software. The Twitter API lets you access tweets, search users, post tweets, and so on. The A...

December 03, 2009 — 0 Comments

The Mobile Horizon

This week I presented to our team at AgencyND about Mobile – what’s the deal and what’s coming. I call this the Mobile Horizon, as a nod to the Horizon Report which aims to inform higher education about the future technologies and their implications. Mobile is all the rage, and ...

November 05, 2009 — 0 Comments

Does Ning Make You Nervous, Too?

I recently looked at using Ning to power a private social network, but one little red flag was a deal-breaker. From the Terms of Service: You hereby grant Ning, during the course of your usage of the Ning Platform, a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicenseable a...

October 13, 2009 — 1 Comment

What I Demand from Software

If software requires a manual, it’s too difficult. We’ve been looking for some decent agency-minded project management software and frankly, it’s been frustrating. What we need most is solid resource management; we need something to help us forecast our workload out for the com...

April 05, 2009 — 0 Comments

The How, What, and Why of Mobile in Higher Ed

The How of Mobile Mobile development in 30 seconds: Schools create separate websites for mobile access. Some schools use special stylesheets on the same content. MIT establishes a platform-specific approach to serving content to mobile devices. Stanford students create an iPhone app suite for Sta...

March 08, 2009 — 0 Comments

5 Top CMS Features That Will Ruin Your CMS

Content Management Systems are always a hot topic in higher education, especially those of us who manage web. CMSes (ideally) let us create and update content on websites without a lot of technical know-how or staff expense. But we’re a greedy kind of folk, and we want to get the most of ou...

January 25, 2009 — 0 Comments

Websites Look Different on Mac and PC

Today, I fought a battle about why our websites look so good on Macs and bad on PCs. My short answer was that Macs make text look prettier. After a diatribe about why we have to start designing to make these look good on PCs, I pointed out that it’s nothing we can change – it’s ...

December 04, 2008 — 0 Comments

A Freaky Marketing Moment

An hour ago, I was watching a DVD from the first season of AMC’s Mad Men. As I finished the second episode, I posted to Twitter: i think i like mad men… it’s going to take some time to get used to. it definitely makes me want to drink scotch. Suddenly, I was followed on Twitter ...

September 14, 2008 — 0 Comments