University of Southern California football standouts, Heisman winner Matt Leinart and Heisman finalist Reggie Bush, have started a video blog. Although I will not be spending much time with these videos (no RSS feed, among other reasons), I have to admit these are among the slickest videos I’ve seen on a video blog. Last year, Leinhart had his own blog, sans video. (Link via Washington Post.)

This via The Hurricane Online (registration required): In an mp3, President Shalala welcomes new students and shares ten things every new student should do during their first weeks on campus. I’m hoping they add an RSS feed for this service, which currently only provides a downloadable mp3.

One of the advantages of running industrial-strength blogging software like WordPress is the variety of plugins available for customization and control. For example, with the addition of one or more plugins, it’s possible to get a variety of stats about your WordPress blog without having to leave the WordPress Dashboard. In this post, I briefly describe two WordPress plugins for tracking blog stats, as well as a free hosted stat tracking tool from SiteMeter.

Earlier this week, I installed the WP-ShortStat plugin. Getting it working is as easy as uploading a file to the plugins directory and then activating the plugin. It reports hits, uniques, browser, recent referrers, search strings, page requests, and countries, to name a few. The block below shows this blog’s repeat referrers, and here is a 1280×800 jpg showing 80% of the report.

I also downloaded and installed BAStats, also a plugin, which provides similar information but with selectable date ranges as shown in this 1280×800 jpg. I find myself using the WP-ShortStat report to get a snapshot of what’s been going on and BAStats for deeper inquiry into patterns.

Lastly, after seeing Jean-Claude’s write-up, I have just installed SiteMeter and will be comparing its reports to those of WP-ShortStat, particularly for referrals and geographic location of visitors. SiteMeter adds some helpful information, including visitors by entry page and exit page.

Widgets are tiny single-purpose applets residing on your desktop. This widget reads an RSS file hosted by Yahoo with content provided by Thomson Peterson’s.

This via Wordlog: University of Florida news site is powered by blogging platform WordPress, the same platform on which Syndication for Higher Ed is built. The same post mentions that the news page of the Department of Sociology at the University of Paris - Saint Denis is also using Wordpress. Follow the feed: University of Paris - Saint Denis Department of Sociology.

Jackie Burch, a junior at Colgate University “wants to share her experiences with you through her online blog.” The blog is intended to depict the student’s life as a soccer player and pre-med student at Colgate. The blog has a feed.

In her first post, Burch seeks the silver lining in a season-opening loss to Siena.

Among those blogging Katrina and the aftermath are Louisana State University communications prof Kaye Trammell and her student Josh Britton, who just remarked on the CNN report that parts of New Orleans are under 20 feet of water.

Follow the feeds:
Kaye Trammell
Josh Britton

From today’s San Diego State Universe: English professor Laurel Amtower incorporates Flickr, blogs, wikis, and RSS into her curriculum.

Says Amtower, “The format is everything because that makes them look at [the information] differently.”

In November I’ll be presenting at AACRAO SEM 15, in Chicago. I’ll be talking about how we conceived, produce, and evaluate the Podcasts@Peterson’s series for college-bound students, which are still among the only podcasts of their kind. I’ll also be offering some suggestions about how to approach creating podcasts for the college-bound market.

If you are going to be in Chicago the week of November 14, and would like to get together and talk about RSS, podcasting, videoblogging, etc., drop me a line.

Reading Rob’s post about one’s tendency to self-identify (or not) on a website, I’m reminded why RSS appeals to me and also how complex the existence of RSS is making things for information architects. RSS appeals to me in large measure because I can get the information I want without having to visit a website, and I can usually do it without revealing any personal information at all. This prompts me to wonder how often information architects consider those with a tendency not to self-identify, and how often RSS in particular is considered as a possible alternative and then crafted in fashion. Companies and institutions invest a lot in the IA of their websites, which is probably why I’ve never seen a call to action like, “Never want to visit our website again? Here’s a set of RSS feeds just for you.”

One of the things I stress when speaking with institutions about RSS (including here publicly) is the importance of remembering that the existence of RSS means that there will be those who visit your website one time, grab some feeds, and then never visit again. With more and more RSS directories online, more of us will grab RSS feeds without having visited an institution’s website even once. This demands that the RSS feed be designed to stand alone as an information resource even as it complements an institution’s web offerings. Among institutions, RSS is in the “me-too” stage, but it will soon move beyond this and become an object of dedicated craft in its own right, as it already has in a few places. As practice surrounding RSS matures, there will be a real need for tools that, for example, support templated-like inclusion of branding information in a manually maintained feed–but this is a topic for another post.