Eduweb

This article over at AdAge (registration or Bug-me-not required) estimates that U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. The most interesting factiod is that one in four employees visit blogs and spend 9% of the work week on them.

Is it really a waste? I spent about that much time at work on blogs, but they were all industry related — marketing, Web, higher ed blogs (like Karine’s and Dan’s) kept me in touch with what’s going on outside the cloistered world of U.C. I was the only one working in Web in my entire building, so why shouldn’t I look outside for peers?

I’ve been in Montreal for the past few days, and extremely busy since I . . . LEFT MY POSITION AT UC.

Is this goodbye Eduweb?

Stay tuned…

I have a lot of ideas for viral marketing campaigns for schools. However, I’ve always been leery of viral marketing because it’s so damn hard to quantify. . . until I found Viral Chart’s Web site. The only bad thing is that they only track people who pay them, so there’s no real way to guage the true top virals.

Over at ClickZ: “Casual bloggers find therapy in online journaling; many are not so interested in posting news, political discussion or gossip.”

Thank goodness my self-therapy is posting news, political discussion, and gossip.

Found at Coolhunting:

For those of us that still enjoy and find the time to read actual books in this day and age, What Should I Read Next? is a little gift from the Database Gods that encourages literacy and for me to give my poor eyes a rest from my alternate life as an RSS crawler. It’s fairly simple. You go to the website, enter a book you like, and based on other people’s book lists, it spits out a list of other books you may enjoy. From there, you can create your own book list by entering your email address, which will stop the database from recommending books that you’ve already read as well as increase the pool of books in the database. This project is owned by Thoughtplay, a creative agency based in the UK, and was programmed by 3aims.

Visit What Should I Read Next? (Of course, half the authors I like aren’t listed.)

My friend, Elaine, was featured over at Karine’s site. Elaine is one of the hottest IA designers working in higher ed or otherwise. She takes a very holistic approach to IA (and she needs to get a blog to share this with the world).

Elaine’s interview is very brief, however if you REALLY want to get into her head, check out her work on the Plainlanguage.gov redesign.

Someone once told me my taste in music was eclectic, and that eclectic was French (I know, I know, it’s not!) for having no taste.

Finally, science proves I’m not the only one mixing Rachmaninoff with the Ramones.

I actually was addicted to an adaptive movie review site (powered by LikeMinds) in 2000. Some of the recommendations it made seemed off-the-wall, yet were almost all movies I liked.

Imagine adapting this to teaching or better yet, a site that recommends a university / college to you based on the curricular and extra-curricular stuff you like to do.

UPDATE: turns out I’m not the only one missing Movie Critic. Try out this non-profit (registration required — how else can it adapt?) movie site.

DVDs it recommended to me:
4.5 star(s) Sin City (2005)
4.5 star(s) Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003)
4.5 star(s) Inside Deep Throat (2005)
4.5 star(s) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (2005)
4.5 star(s) Happy Gilmore (1996)
4.5 star(s) Steamboy (2004)
4.5 star(s) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
4.5 star(s) Rock School (2005)
4.5 star(s) Angel at My Table, An (1990)
4.5 star(s) Follow the Fleet (1936)

Yes, I’m a card carrying member of the GTD cult . . . and you can be too! Here’s a great mp3 and PowerPoint on time management.

Found at Advertising/Design Goodness.

And we wonder why students are confused? (I think this goes hand in hand with all the Mindset stuff running around the higher ed internets.)

I caught this PDF off Design Observer. There are multiple parts, but part one is a really great explanation of redesigning a real world object (Carnegie’s library) based on information architecture techniques.

I loved the marked up screenshots and photographs. This will be a definite must read for my Web production class.