A full week has passed since the Web Communications and Strategies Conference, so it seems like a good time to take stock of the online output from the conference, and look for ways to increase it next year.

The conference was hosted at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, MD, a town near Maryland’s eastern shore, approximately 30 miles west of Ocean City, MD. Many of the 150 in attendance were university webmasters or marketers.

Conference Website

For starters, there is the conference website, which links to several presentations, podcasts, and blogs. Of the ten links to presentations (of a total of approximately 24 presentations given) , six are for presenters from the corporate space, three are for presenters from universities, and one lists both a corporate and university presenter.

Blogs

Several blogs have covered the conference. Here are the ones I’ve encountered that cover the conference with more than a passing mention.

Eduweb: Many reports filed under Higher Ed Web Conference.

Collegewebeditor: A number of reports filed under Conferences.

Sinkingships.net: Lengthy reports and outlines filed under 2005 Web Communications and Strategies Conference.

Audio/Podcasts

Using a wireless lavalier microphone, a small mixer, and a PowerBook, I recorded a few sessions from the conference. The audio is posted on petersons.com for two keynotes and four regular sessions. If you really want to, you can subscribe to the feed, although the last of the audio has already been posted. Regrettably, an inadequate mic setup for an afternoon panel discussion rendered the audio from that session unusable. I had planned to conduct some interviews and post the audio of those, but I was too busy to do the interviews. The conference web site also lists a podcast from the conference by TargetX.

Other Media

There was a TV crew at one of the sessions I attended (I’m fairly certain it was this session), but I didn’t catch the call letters, and I haven’t been able to find a related video or article on any of the local TV station websites.

Search Engine Results

What do some search engines turn up about the conference?

Google: Pages linking to salisbury.edu/webconf. Right now, this returns 15 pages.

Google: A search of .edu pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference” today turns up salisbury.edu and only one other .edu, bloomfield.edu.

Yahoo: Pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 238 pages. This turns up one or possibly two additional blogs beyond the ones I list above.

Technorati: Posts containing the terms “salisbury web conference.” Right now, this returns 107 posts, many of which do not pertain to the conference.

Technorati: Posts containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 20 posts from the last 26 days.

Commentary on the State of the Online Output

So I have to ask the obvious question. Why do there seem to be so few bloggers among the university web communicators and strategists in attendance at the 2005 conference? I realize that there is some debate about the effectiveness of blogs in the educational process (and this was the subject of many a discussion at the conference), but is there really any debate about the effectiveness of blogs as communication tools on the Internet?

There was free wireless at the conference and in two hotels where most attendees stayed. There were laptops everywhere. But, despite what one observer suggests, the laptops almost certaintly weren’t being used for blogging - at least not blogging about the conference. At most, four or five bloggers posted about the conference, and very little in the way of non-blog web pages have been indexed by Google and Yahoo so far. Am I using the wrong search engines?

Compare this to the output from the recent Syndicate Conference (May, 2005, NYC), for which Yahoo today turns up “about 14,600 results.” My guess is that approximately 300-400 attended this event. (I was among them.)

Promotional Ideas

This gives me an idea for an inexpensive way to promote the conference next year - if the conference occurs (the conference founder and organizer, Shelley Wetzel, is leaving Salisbury University). How about beginning the conference with a mini-workshop on setting up a blog? Using one of the free online blogging tools (e.g. Blogger), a facilitator will walk the audience through the process of setting up a blog and creating their first post. Those with laptops will be welcome create their own blog. In turn, they can use the blog they’ve created as a place to publish their notes about the conference.

I can think of several benefits to doing this. First of all, it’s important for university webmasters and marketers to know how to use blogging software. Second, this will almost guarantee that next year’s conference will dwarf this year’s in terms of online output.

Aside: Come to think of it, Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogger seems particularly well suited to conference blogging.

In the process preparing for this conference, I learned that RSS can be a very useful thing for promoting material that’s yet to be published. Before the conference began, I created a podcast feed and a simple “Welcome” podcast and registered it with iTunes. Conference attendees were able to subscribe to the feed through iTunes during the conference (and I watched several of them do it), before the audio of the sessions had even been posted. By now, the audio has made its way to the machines of those subscribers, without them having to take any further action. So, an additional promotional idea would be to set up an official audio RSS feed for the conference, and maybe even a video RSS feed, and give people who record audio and video from the conference a way to add their material to the feed. Attendees, and anyone from the public, can simply subscribe to one or two feeds, and they will automatically get all of the material that’s posted into that feed.

Last week I gave a talk entitled “A Plain-English Introduction to RSS for Marketing” at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. Links to the slides and audio are provided below. In this presentation, I introduced web syndication and talked about how marketers outside .edu are taking advantate of RSS to promote more than just news headlines.

A Plain-English Introduction to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for Marketing

Slides: .zip 2M, 48 .jpg’s | .pdf 4.3M

Audio: mp3 19M, 58 minutes

Last week I gave a talk entitled “The Importance of RSS to a University” at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. Links to the slides and audio are provided below. In this presentation, I describe in-depth the state of public syndicated feeds from college and university websites. I also present three mini case studies about the use of RSS– two from .edu and one from Thomson Peterson’s.

The Importance of RSS to a University

Slides: .zip 3M, 66 .jpg’s | .pdf 7.5M

Audio: mp3 19M, 58 minutes

Below is a link to slides from my afternoon presentation The Importance of RSS to a University on 7/19/2005 at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. As with the first presentation, we had a super group of people and some lively interaction.

The Importance of RSS to a University (.zip 2.8M, 66 .jpg’s)

I will be posting the podcast of this presentation shortly; meanwhile, take a listen to some other sessions from the same conference.

If you have any questions about this presentation, please feel free to drop me a comment.

What does podcasting have to do with RSS? This is one of the questions that came up in several sessions earlier this week at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference. It seems fairly common for people to use the term “RSS” in reference to text feeds (i.e. feeds without enclosures), and they don’t automatically connect RSS with podcasting.

So I thought it would be helpful to provide an extended explanation of why, when I talk about the importance of RSS, I talk about podcasting. Some of the reasons were provided at the conference; others go beyond what we had time to cover.

1. A key appeal of RSS 2.0 is the enclosure element, which supports podcasting. Previous versions of RSS did not offer this feature.

2. A podcast isn’t a podcast unless there is an accompanying RSS 2.0 (or Atom) feed. Anything else is just a file (mp3, etc.) sitting on a server.

3. The experience of locating and managing enclosureless RSS 2.0 feeds is similar to that of locating and managing feeds with enclosures. It just happens that most of us use different tools for each.

4. As aggregators converge into a single hybrid type that allows you to manage any kind of feed (iPodderX is one such tool), feeds will no longer need to be distinguished as “text” or “audio” or “video.” Publishers of feeds (feed pubs) will be able to offer feeds that contain a mixture of, say, text and audio. (There’s nothing in the RSS spec that precludes this.) A user will be able to tell the aggregator whether or not to download enclosures that happen to appear in the feed, probably on a feed-by-feed basis. If there’s an enclosure in the feed, the aggregator will know what to do with it. It will be simpler for me, the feed consumer, because I won’t need to go to the effort to subscribe to podcast feeds and text feeds separately.

5. In the future, it will be simpler, and perhaps more effective in some cases, for feed pubs to provide a feed that contains a mix of media types, where one complements the other. Think of the way you blog. If you are including audio in your blog, why be forced to feed it out-of-line as a separate feed from the feed that contains your text posts? We are in a mode where text feeds and audio feeds are kept separate, but this mode coming to an end. I can see reasons why a feed pub might want to keep text and audio feeds separate, but I think this will be the exception.

6. A syndication strategy should consider the variety of syndication options available (text, links, audio, video, etc.) rather than limiting itself to one or another.

Below is a link to slides from my morning presentation today at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. We had an interested and engaged group. In my opinion, this is what rescued the session from being dry and boring. Thanks, everyone, for the great questions and participation!

Introduction to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for Marketing (.zip 2M, 48 .jpg’s)

I will be posting the podcast of this presentation, as well as the slides and podcast from my second presentation, shortly.

If you have any questions about this presentation, please feel free to drop me a comment.

Today at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference, we’re announcing the coming launch of the College and University Feed directory, a free resource to help colleges and universities promote their sydnicated feeds.

I’m here at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference at Salisbury University, in Salisbury Maryland. The first day was packed with great sessions. Blogs, wikis, RSS, and podcasting are really getting people excited, and it seems like there aren’t enough sessions on these topics to keep people satisfied.

Rob Pongsajapan did an excellent session on using blogging as an admissions tool (check out the wiki for his presentation). Rob had some helpful suggestions about the stakeholders and expectations that you might want to consider before jumping in. Watch here for the mp3 of his presentation by the end of the week.

I will be giving two presentations today — one at 11:30 (Intro to RSS for Marketing) and one at 3:15 (Importance of RSS to a University). Given the level of interest in RSS, podcasting, blogging, etc., I’m really looking forward to spending some time talking with people about RSS–how they’re using it in their universities, how they’re planning to use it, their concerns about using RSS, etc.

Here are some links to mentions of next week’s Web Communications and Stratgies Conference at Salisbury University.

1. Collegewebeditor.com: A glimpse into the conference from organizer Shelley Wetzel.

2. Eduweb Blog: Postings from a presenter on evaluating web traffic.

3. Rob Pongsajapan: Wiki about his presentation on blogs.

4. A Technorati watchlist (in HTML/RSS) for the latest blog posts about the conference.

Many thanks to all of you who have provided information about how your university is using RSS. I will be presenting much of it as part of my talk at next week’s Web Communications and Stratgies Conference at Salisbury University. I am hoping that it’s the start of a long conversation about universities and RSS. And, of course, many thanks to Dave Winer for planting the idea for this presentation two years ago by pointing to a couple of universities that were publishing RSS feeds at that time.

At next week’s conference, I will also be describing Peterson’s experience with RSS in the college-bound space. Have you wondered whether the college-bound market is ready for RSS? The evidence may surprise you.

If you are planning to attend my Tuesday afternoon presentation on “The Importance of RSS to a University,” and you’re new to RSS, you might want to consider coming to my presentation earlier that day entitled “A Plain-English Introduction to Really Simple Syndication for Marketing.” In this presentation, I will introduce terms and concepts that marketers might want to know.

The other talk will be fast-moving and full of really cool examples, covering the latest developments in RSS and content syndication, with case stories from universities and Peterson’s mixed in. If you can’t make the introductory presentation, don’t worry; I’ll provide a quick introduction to RSS.

The presentations are still evolving, so if you have ideas about what you would like included, please drop me a comment.