Recently danah boyd (not a typo...Ms. boyd is, shall we say, hooksian in her approach to capital letters), of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, tweeted the following question:

So I decided to do an informal survey of my collegiate Twitter followers, and was surprised to find that the majority of people who responded said Chrome was what they used. I recently started using Chrome as the primary browser on my media center. But for my laptop and my work computer I use Firefox almost exclusively. I like Chrome, but I don't yet see the real need to make a switch. Am I now relegated to the older generation of the Internet simply because I don't use the new browser like all the cool kids?

This worried me a bit so I asked my friend Anne, Utah Valley University's Director of Web Resources Services, to give me a breakdown of the browsers used to connect to the public portions of the UVU home page. Here are the results for the last 30 days:

1. Internet Explorer / Windows 365,962  44.36% 
2.  Firefox / Windows 217,124  26.32% 
3.  Safari / Macintosh 108,676  13.17% 
4.  Chrome / Windows 62,047  7.52% 
5.  Firefox / Macintosh 40,370  4.89% 
6.  Safari / iPhone 5,984  0.73% 
7.  Chrome / Macintosh 5,525  0.67% 
8.  Safari / Windows 4,741  0.57% 
9.  Safari / Android 2,924  0.35% 
10.  Firefox / Linux 2,776  0.34% 
11.  Safari / iPod 2,577  0.31% 
12.  Safari / iPad 2,310  0.28% 
13.  Mozilla / Windows 697  0.08% 
14.  Chrome / Linux 587  0.07% 
15.  Opera / Windows 434  0.05% 
16.  Mozilla / Linux 420  0.05% 
17.  Safari / (not set) 410  0.05% 
18.  Firefox / SunOS 216  0.03% 
19.  Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone 128  0.02% 
20.  BlackBerry9530 / BlackBerry  89  0.01%

The first thing that I was struck with right away was how many damn people still use Internet Explorer. No wonder there are so many complaints of worms and viruses on our network! Because so many employees use the uvu.edu website everyday it is hard to to tell exactly from these numbers how many students are using IE. But even so, close to 50% of UVU users are experiencing the internet on one of the lamest browsers known to man.

Now compare the UVU numbers to the overall browser market share numbers:

That means that everywhere else the numbers for the top two browsers are eerily inverse (IE in all its versions at 31%, and Firefox at 46.6%). Weird!

So getting back to the results of my informal Twitter survey (in which I simply asked "What Browser do you use?"), 71% of students who responded said they used Chrome. Since I generally regard my Twitter Friends as the most savvy of all my social media groups I can only conclude that Chrome is the new black and that soon the masses shall follow.

So which browser do you use? Why? And does it really matter?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

But money isn't everything, and sometimes the attainment of material wealth comes with an unequal portion of entanglements and responsibilities. When money is our sole motivation for attending college we really narrow not only our experience but also our expectations. This often sets us up for disappointment when we don't immediately get that expected salary right after graduation. Often students with this attitude get frustrated when they don't see "real world" applications for what they are learning. They tend to think that the only thing that matters in the "real world" is dollars and cents.

The current mess in this country's financial sector is a direct result of college-educated criminals who have infiltrated corporations, regulatory bodies, and elected offices. But it isn't just Wall Street, as Utah (and Utah Valley in particular) leads the nation white-collar crime. Again, you get the feeling that these folks went to school for the sole purpose of making more money. When greed is our motivation it becomes our occupation.

There are other, shall we say nonmonetary, reasons to get an education, and while sometimes they aren't as easy to quantify, they do provide tangible improvements throughout our lifetime. There is plenty of research out there that shows that college graduates tend to contribute more positively to society. College grads tend to vote and volunteer more often. They also live longer and happier lives (and not just because they make more money and thus have better access to health care).

But what I hope you get out of your time in school is a healthy respect for the complexity of the modern world and its issues. Political parties, advertisers, and the media love to put things in simple, black-and-white terms. It makes for a handy narrative when you can paint your side as good and the other side as evil. Couching issues in such stark relief makes the masses so much easier to market to, and ultimately control. Do you want to be so predictable that any politician or product can count on your unblinking devotion?

I hope the time you spend in the classroom provides you with a more nuanced outlook. Your views should be challenged. Your understanding should be more complex. Your actions should reflect your values while recognizing a vast diversity of thought. College is more meaningful when it isn't all about money.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

First of all, last month’s graduation reminded me that I couldn't ask for a better work environment or a more rewarding job. Seriously, it was a great moment to shake your hands and give you hugs as you came off the podium with your "diplomas" in hand. Congrats!

Now comes the scary part: what do you do next? I have been there myself of course. It took three years of iffy part-time employment before I finally landed this job. Once the classes end you get anxious to start making that green. You want 40 hours a week, health benefits, and a 401k. It would also be nice to be using your newly acquired skills in an industry you enjoy. But you may have noticed that no one is knocking down your door and clamoring for your communication knowledge just yet.

Some of you have prepared for this eventuality and took the time during school to really investigate possible careers. A few of you even started building the network and the skill set that would make your dreams possible. Bravo.

But a sizable chunk of our graduates (and I would say all graduates) just barely squeaked through college. I have a sign in my office that says, “Feel free to do the absolute minimum. See how far that takes you.” If the absolute minimum was what you gave you might be feeling that the time you spent in college was a waste.

If you feel that way then I am sorry…perhaps we could have been more inspiring. We should have done a better job preparing you for the realities of a job market that is downright hostile right now. We should have done more to connect you with your industry. This department is relatively new and we have a lot of room for improvement. If you feel you didn’t get what you paid for I apologize.

But then I think about those students that really tried during their time here, even if they weren’t “Straight A” students. They got involved at the UVU Review or PRSSA. They sacrificed time and money to take an unpaid internship with a high-profile company. They volunteered to be part of the Bateman Case Study team or they held a position in the Wolverine PR Club. They took classes in Digital Media or Graphic Design, not for the credit, but because they knew they needed technical skills in order to compete in the modern workforce.

The students who did these things are better prepared for what is next. They have contacts in the industry. They have people who are looking out for them. They have professors that will write them beautiful letters of recommendation at a moment’s notice. The job market will be tough for them too, but I have a feeling that their next step will be a step up.

What is your next step?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Last night I found myself at a meeting of the Social Media Club's Utah Valley chapter (http://smcuv.org/). For those who know me that probably seems a little out of the ordinary. I am not usually the guy who goes to these types of things, mostly for the fear that a MLM pitch might break out. But last night I picked up a couple tidbits, and had some tasty buffalo-chicken stuffed French bread.

For me the real benefit of these kinds of events comes in the thinking that I get done afterward. Same goes for when I read a good article in Wired, or stumble upon some cool little nugget online. Call it "expanding my paradigm" if you want to be a tool about it, but basically these kind of experiences get me out of my rut.

So social media was on my brain while at a meeting this morning. I work for a college and the last 6 months I have been on a committee that puts on an annual symposium concerning Civil Rights and Martin Luther King. It is a good cause so I volunteer my time and my talents (mostly graphic design stuff). This morning we had our postmortem where we talked about what we did right and what we did wrong. As so often happens when you get a bunch of old guard academics together they started talking about Facebook and Twitter and how we should have used social media to drum up interest in the symposium. Academics know that these tools are powerful for two reasons: 1. They can't keep their students off of it during class. 2. Everything they read tells them that "this is important...this means something". But they don't know what it is and they sure as hell don't know how to use it.

So when clueless people get around to confronting the whole Facebook/Twitter thing they tend to treat it like traditional media. After spending 10 minutes saying that posters and flyers get lost in the noise, they suggest doing things like blast e-mails and fan pages and spam tweets. It is like they want a whole new way to have their message ignored.

I explained briefly that the power of social media is not in how it approaches mass communication, but in how it approaches interpersonal communication. If social media is treated like traditional mass media it becomes noise. Messages need to be personalized.

So let's look at our case, where the problem is getting students and faculty interested enough in our symposium to actually participate. In the past our attempts at solutions have been flyers, printed invitations, posters and the campus LCD screen network. These physical manifestations of our message are important and they do get noticed. To eliminate them completely would be a mistake. But the main problem with these messages is that they are not personalized. And because the nature of how they are produced they can never be personalized.

Attempts at PR or advertising using social media often fall into a similar trap. An impersonal message gets spammed out to everyone on a friend list and somehow we feel all Web 2.0. Our friend list becomes a junk mailing list, and the message gets treated the same way, maybe even worse because this crap has come from a "friend".

If we consider these people friends we should treat them as such. When we are looking for participation, for someone to buy into our idea, we need to make that invitation about them. What are they going to get out of it? In the example of our symposium, imagine a student getting a Facebook message from a professor that personally invites them to join the event. As a friend we know what they are interested in (and if not their profile pretty much spells it out) and we can tailor our message to them. "I thought you might be interested in this session...I know you are looking for vita material for grad school...I think this is a great way to share your unique perspective."

This means more work, more interaction, and more willingness to accept the fact that some people you know and like simply won't give a rat's ass about what you are doing. These messages shouldn't go out to everyone. Be selective, be personal. And damn it...be social.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Many of you know that for the past few years I have been involved with the production of a documentary film that focuses on the life of UVU professor/artist Alex Caldiero. Last night I was lucky enough to see a rough cut of the film.
The project has been a collaboration of two amazing UVU Integrated Studies students named Torben and Travis. These guys, with the help of a handful of other students, have put together something quite amazing. I can't wait for you all to see it, and you will get your chance soon enough.
Alex Caldiero is a weird and wonderful man, and this movie captures him and his work so completely. When you see this movie (and trust me, you are all going to see this movie) you are going to be blown away by Alex and by the fact that this is a student project.
UVU does a lot of talk about engagement these days. OK, they beat the term to death most times. What bothers many on our campus is the fact that this idea of engaging students with learning by getting their hands dirty in the real world is not something new. It is often presented as a top-down mandate from the powers at be. The truth is that real engagement has been happening here all along and that only now does it finally have a name and a marketing campaign.
This film is also an example of what is possible in local cinema. As Torben and Travis have been slugging along with The Sonosopher, there are two other Utah Valley documentary projects that I have been lucky enough to be at least mildly involved with. One is from former UVU student Matt Eastin and the other is from two guys named Andrew and Josh. All three movies couldn't be more different, and yet all of them have things in common. In future posts I will tell you more about these other films, and about the exciting future of filmmaking in Utah Valley.
For now I just want to say how proud I am of Torben and Travis. They have made something very special and I know you folks are going to love it.

Check out www.thesonosopher.com in the coming weeks for more details.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

After absolutely dreading every day of K-12 I fell in love with college, and in particular I fell in love UVU. Now I will get a chance to help other students make their way through this maze, and I am really relishing the opportunity. As a vertern student I was always being asked for advice anyways, now I will get paid for it. Higher education can be a lot of fun, but it is also a series of hoops to jump through. In many ways a college diploma is a way of telling your future employer, "I was able to put up this amount of bullshit". I hope I can help some people along their way.

I will miss all my friends at the School of the Arts. We had a hell of a first year, and I think we really made our mark. Thanks for all the laughs.

Now I am trying to soak up all the training I can so I can be ready for the fall onslaught. I am also looking into starting an on-line masters program in academic advising offered through Kansas State in January.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The wife and I ducked out of work early this afternoon so we could pretend to be lost. A buddy of mine at UVU, Scott Hammond, has been training his Golden Retriever, Dusty, to perform search and rescue for about a year now. Errin and I being dog lovers have been talking about helping out for months now, but today we finally did it. For the "victims" it is a pretty easy deal...you just get lost. Well, it was easy for me. Errin had a much tougher area to be lost in and consquently she looks like she has been attacked by the Swamp Thing.

Scott and his friend Jan are part of Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs, a group of volunteers that spend years training their dogs to find folks lost in the woods. There are very few happy endings on these rescues, Scott tells me that most of the time it is a dead body that they are looking for. Still, it seems to be a very rewarding way to spend time with your canine. The training is quite rigorous and there are many certifications that both the dog and the handler must pass. You can also tell that working with these amazing animals is a lot of fun.

Scott and his group are always looking for folks to help play victims for an afternoon. If you live in Utah County and this is something you might be interested in let me know and I'll hook you up.

http://www.rockymountainrescuedogs.net/

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Spent a few minutes the other day trying out the office's new Nikon D90. I walked outside and this bird was chowing on this worm. Click!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

For the past week or two, folks at my employer (Utah Valley University) have been trickling into the school's Yammer site. For those of you not familiar with Yammer it is basically an intranet Twitter. Only people from your company's domain (in our case, uvu.edu) can join. You can create various groups, follow co-workers, tag and index topics, and fill out things like organization charts.

The strength of Yammer is that unites people who face similar problems (in our case a massive state-run bureaucracy running on a skeletal budget) who might not normally converse with each other. My role in my office might be unique, but chances are there is another person doing a similar job for a different department on the other side of campus. Yammer allows me to shout out an issue or question and watch the crowd come to my aid.

What is interesting about UVU's Yammer right now, and this seems to be the case with most social media channels in their infancy, is that the community is small enough to be helpful. Twitter was downright hospitable in the early days of its evolution when you were just happy to find somebody else using it. Once the spammers and the phishers and the marketing trolls got a hold of the system it changed the nature of the conversation forever.

Yammer has a built in limit to its size that should prevent it from devolving into the Twitter of today (I still love Twitter and use it everyday, but I wouldn't consider it really helpful). The only comments you see on Yammer are from folks with your same domain address. It would be nice if the collective knowledge base was broader, right now the participants are the typical early-adopters (nerds like myself), but the small size seems to increase people's willingness to share what they know.

But I fear if it gets too big the candid nature of typical twitter-like conversations will be hindered by a fear that everyone is watching. This subject came up today when my buddy Don and I were talking about one of the school's vice presidents jumping on the Yammer-wagon. What happens to a social network when the boss is watching? Are the same kinds of conversations possible? Is their a chilling effect?

Recently there has been a movement among some forward-thinking companies to use the tools of Web 2.0 to increase workplace candor.

If employees are allowed to be honest in their complaints about their environment, those in charge can be more responsive to their needs. As an employer I would want unfiltered access into what my employees really thought of my latest initiative. This kind of candor is only possible when folks feel free to speak without fear of retribution.

Of course this kind of free-flowing dynamic also depends on a community that is committed to a constructive attitude. Think of the Yammer network as a Wiki–an environment that is constructed, maintained, and some cases policed by its own members. Right now that vibe exists on my company's network, but it will be interesting to see if it continues as usage increases. The Geeks Greeks said a perfect democracy could only exist amongst a limited amount of participants, it will be interesting to see what that number is on Yammer.

VEG

Permalink | Leave a comment  »