Thu 25 Jan 2007
Official Wiliams Blogs
Posted by David under Administration at 8:39 pm
For years I have been urging the College to start blogging. We need a blog from the Admissions Office (like the University of Chicago), a blog from Financial Aid (like MIT) and blogs which would serve as the focal points of EphCOI. Well, it looks like some of this is finally happening.
Lately I’ve been busy trying to get a blogging system up and running at Williams. The three main alternative were: send people to other hosting sites and just maintain a jump page, install (or let people install on their own) blogging software into peoples home directories, or set up our own multi-blog hosting system. The middle we dismissed after the very short thought experiment of trying to support 200+ users each with their own particular tweaks. The first option was appealing in many ways, but we’d lose out on the college brand (on a couple of levels – not only would we lose the williams.edu in the URL, we’d demonstrate that we weren’t willing (or perhaps able) to support such technical work ourselves). If it had been only one or two people interested we still might have gone for it, but we’re looking at probably 10s to start with scaling up into 100s before too long. So, that left us with finding (or writing, as a last resort), installing, and supporting some multi-blogging software. This job fell to me.
Sounds about right. Chris Warren then provides all sorts of interesting technical details. His instinct to go with open source software is exactly correct. But what are the opinions of the larger Eph community of technologists? What advice would DeWitt Clinton ‘98 or Stephen O’Grady ‘97 or Todd Gamblin ‘02 or Evan Miller ‘06 (who built WSO blogs?) or Eric Smith ‘99 or Ethan Zuckerman ‘93 give the College as it wrestles with bringing scores of blogs under one roof? Suggestions, please.
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9 Responses to “Official Wiliams Blogs”
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stephen o'grady says:
WordPress Multiuser (WPMU) is probably where I’d start. It’s designed for just such a use case, and is the same code running wordpress.com. I believe a few newspapers – the NY Times included – are using it as well.
January 25th, 2007 at 9:00 pmDavid says:
Chris started, I think, with WPMU but then went with Lyceum.
Note that the Lyceum architect, John Bachir, has already commented on Chris’s post. A good sign!
January 25th, 2007 at 9:32 pmSam Jackson says:
I see merit in both WPMU and Lyceum (they were my two suggestions!) but my question would be which has the most active dev. community. I can’t answer that myself, it’s just something I’d be thinking about.
January 25th, 2007 at 10:43 pmGuy Creese '75 says:
As an antidote to the techie talk here, one issue that will start rearing its head in discussions about blogs for the Williams community is the generation spread of Williams alumni. Recent graduates embrace blogs, Baby Boomers are suspicious of them (“Aren’t blogs sort of like that MySpace thing?”), and 50s era alums don’t even know what they are.
As former head of the Technology Committee for the Alumni Fund Vice Chairs, this was an area we started studying several years ago, and there’s no easy answer to solving this. An interface that is easy to use for older alumni is ugly and too simplistic for young alumni.
You may think I’m exaggerating here, but in my day job (Analyst, Collaboration and Content Strategies, Burton Group [IT analyst firm]), I spend time advising large enterprises on how they should incorporate blogs and wikis into the business. They tell me they’re starting to struggle with this generation gap problem. Furthermore, I’ve talked to a large financial services firm that has a sophisticated human factors lab and they’ve seen users in their 50s and 60s spend over a minute hovering over a button on a test web site, trying to figure out whether to press it. (Designing web sites and user interfaces for older people is extremely important in this case, as the financial services industry figures aging Baby Boomers starting to retire are a growth market).
Ephblog itself reflects this generational bias, where most of the authors/commenters are alumni from ‘90 on (with Frank Uible being a notable exception). There are two authors listed from classes in the 70s (me and Stewart Menking ‘79) and none from earlier classes.
So before we get too enthused about debating the techie merits of WordPress vs. Lyceum, let’s not forget that one requirement is make COI blogs friendly to all alumni, not just to those that graduated in the past fifteen years. Otherwise, you’re shutting the door on a lot of great wisdom, camaraderie, and stories.
January 27th, 2007 at 9:45 amDavid says:
I appreciate Guy’s expertise on this matter. People like Chris Warren and John Noble should certainly reach out to him.
That said, the issue of usage by older Ephs is one reason why I think that blogs (with no passwords or logins) are the best way to start. If you can surf the web, you can read a blog. If you can send an e-mail, then you can comment on a blog. Moreover, if you can’t do those things (Fred Rudolph ‘39 has no computer and no plans to get one), then there is no technological solution that will work for you.
Now, of course, we should try to include non-technology Ephs within EphCOI as much as possible. I communicate with Fred via phone and snail mail. But there is no reason to hold up efforts on blog-based EphCOI because some alumni won’t participate as much. We should just press on.
Also, the more successful EphCOI are, the more likely we are to pull in the less-technological. For example, imagine that there was a Williams History EphCOI. (This would be run by the alumni office rather than OCC.) Such a group would bring together people like Guy and me and all the other Ephs with a passion for our history. The more we interacted and discussed, the more likely we are to reach out to Fred and involve him, even if he never sees a computer screen himself.
Williams will, eventually, have something like EphCOI. The sooner, the better.
January 27th, 2007 at 10:24 amKen Thomas '93 says:
[WARNING to the reader: Blatantly "exploratory" writing follows; ---]
Guy,
I’ve been pondering what would be a meaningful reply to this for a week now — a week in which I decided to take on technical direction for a major portal project, crammed information about and from every content management system (CMS) I could, and wound up choosing Drupal for my client.
It is still interesting and important to me to point out that most of my experience of the Internet was prior to the phenomenon of the Web– though I doubt my grumbling often expresses much content– and that my class year (‘93) was one in which Berners-Lee was still rewriting and rethinking the basics of html on a NeXTCube (at the same time I was programming a GUI to PARC’s conferencing systems on the ‘Cube in Jesup).
At the time, Peter Lewis has just given me his TCP/IP stacks for the Mac– MacTCP wouldn’t be available for half a year– in short, very few if any ‘personal’ computers had a mechanism to connect and route packet data to the “Internet.”
Debugging Peter’s stacks while (text) chatting with him in Perth was my teething in both serious development, and in a unique type of experience.
Today my cell phone and computer give unique audio and tactile alerts when Vanessa comes online in France, and I hear (on NPR) that teenagers are immersed in the worlds of ‘chat.’ I’m not sure the experiences are the same– if not separate paths.
Today almost every personal computer and cell phone, and a wide range of other devices, and the NeXTCube’s vision has been reincarnated in OS X and the Mac Cube…
I don’t particularly like the current revisions of X; darn unintuitive to me. Neither do I particularly like (or participate in) blogs. Generally the forms and possibilities of discussion are too limited– Movable Type (ephBlog’s ‘platform’), like many blog, discussion and BB platforms, simply doesn’t provide much in informational organization or architecture, much to help the “user,” the content maker, the knowledge seeker.
When I look over the shoulders of people who use ‘chat rooms’– at least on Yahoo and such– the general activity seems to me inane. What exactly is the point of talking– more often ‘flaming’– a series of anonymous ‘personas’ with no temporal persistence (I mean, which don’t “stick around?”)
Web design tends to ignore motivational factors– as do a number of professors– and it is also interesting to me, to compare your observations on generational differences, to those geographical areas where internet adoption and use is highest among seniors.
For someone who is in front of or connected to a computer most waking hours– I’ve probably averaged above six hours ‘online’ since ‘93– I am remarkably unconversant with most of the ‘Web.’ MySpace? “Why bother with a fad?,” or to put it more significantly, why bother to learn the interfacing conventions of a system that doesn’t offer me much of value?
Rural Kentuckians learn the internet because it offers them specific values that outweigh the (always perceived) difficulties of the learning curve. The various ‘White Papers’ focus on critical examples– medical services, socialization and knowledge, products not easily available locally (or to the home-bound). While that is not a ‘fine-grained’ analysis, much of it is true.
I suspect– I may be wrong– that much of the user base to which you refer makes very different decisions, and does not receive proportionate real and perceived value from learning the interface (and other) conventions of current systems. I entirely sympathize– very few people who know my constant connection to computing devices, realize how much I hate such devices, or more specifically, most of their current incarnation.
The dominance of windowing environments– “Windows” in every sense, (poor) descendants of the Parc User Interfaces (PUIs)– dismays me. I’m constantly faced with a trade-off: is the potential functionality offered me, worth the price of the learning curve? When every ’site’ uses a different (if similar) set of conventions and rules, the answer for me is often “no”– and I am generally far (far) more determined and patient with systems than the typical user.
Why can’t a simple contacts list be a series of ‘data objects’ easily transfered between the various systems I use, between web sites and PCs and cell phones etc.? “Lack of standards,” indeed– and lack of something like what Ted Nelson called “backwards linking.”
A good part of my day today– several hours– was spent debugging an installation of Apache, PHP, MySQL and Drupal. In each system, pieces of code had snuck in with syntaxical errors (a trailing forward slash in one instance, which worked with previous distributions of Apache but not the current one…); looking around the internet, I found hundreds of other individuals who had clearly spent thousands of hours debugging the same errors in the code.
Precision: we should not simply be “cut & paste”-ing pieces of code, but treating them as data objects with lines of descent. A discovered error should be traced back to the source, corrected and redistributed…
This links back to the main theme– the difficulty of learning diverse and difficult systems– but I can’t delineate an exact trail. The general point is that systems are too difficult– too filled with stumbling blocks and potential errors– and this is a result of approach.
The syntaxical error I mention just above was replicated in an IBM whitepaper– and the same series of papers made the point, never blame or condescend to the user. Jef Raskin makes a very similar point in The Humane Interface– for instance, in designing aircraft controls, there is little to no room for “blaming the user” for an interface that leads to error– because any error is likely to be catastrophic.
(The distribution of the error in syntax above, a misplaced “/” which passes one test but then breaks thousands of systems and dreams, is a sort of tragi-comedy.)
In short, the concept of “user error” is unacceptable in contexts such as aircraft design; it is unfortunately still all too prevalent in the the information sciences. Your example of users spending minutes deciding whether to press a button is equally tragi-comic. If the user has gotten there– if its not clear what to do– we should be speaking of “interface error.”
What’s Jef’s quote– something about the choice needing to be clear in a matter of ten seconds or less?
That itself is a hard task. One of ephBlog’s current problems is that any success is failure– any increase in authors’ activities (posts and comments) means that information/content passes away at a faster pace– the main articles scroll own the page and into oblivion, (which happens even faster for comments)– … — and Movable Type provides no easy navigation paths to discover this information once it “passes away.”
Not even a “more comments…” link under the “Recent Comments” block in the right sidebar. This is a lack of convention, a simple “interface(ing) error.” From the point of the view of the ‘user’ — the potential contributor, community member and author– this UI error decreases the value (reward) of learning and participating in the system– one’s own contributions disappear (move out of view) in proportion to the activity of the community, and the contributions of others (the value and knowledge which the community may provide) become equally difficult to access.
Each time I do not tag (or otherwise index) your or others comments, it takes me an inordinate amount of time– for instance, to find and quote your Christmas blog wish for a client took me several minutes, while finding each of related articles and specific content I wanted in Business Week took under 30 seconds (yes, I timed the tasks). Each should take under 10 seconds; and I should be reusing– actively linking, syndicating, backwards linking, however you want to put it– the content, not cutting and pasting. The original author (and everyone else) should have a path to my re-use.
I’ve wandered off a bit here, (which I like to do occasionally), but the point is that the cost (or “frictionality”) of learning and using the interface is often much higher than the estimated value. I am a relative information expert– though my tools could be better– and I certainly know how to find something on ephBlog or Business Week (online) if I choose to do so. But I’d be faster with print materials in Sawyer– and I only chose to make the searches above, to put the time in to find your specific comments and the BW portions– because I was preparing a draft for a client with the potential of a valuable, multi-year relationship.
Of course everything varies: many researchers have lots of time on their hands, either to learn obscure systems and conventions, or to spend in mundane tasks. Others are more “time-pressed.”
Neither Jef nor Jakob Nielsen nor Johann seemed particular impressed by the interface prototypes I/we created some time ago– an universe of zoomable, inverted ‘hyperspheres’– and the primary issue was adoption. Sure I like to think my radical departure would have been better– but they quite rightly pointed out that it had to be simple, “learnable”– and making such an interface meant understanding the cognitive processes and choices to be made by users. It’s gratifying to see Jef working on “Zoomable” User Interfaces; {as it is getting late, I’ll skip trying to say something about ‘Scaleable Fabrics,’ and their relation to the history of languages, the SmallTalk-82 IDE and Ruby… and integrating that with what a CMS like Drupal or ez Publish tries to achieve).
But certainly what I really need for ephBlog is a personal Scalable Fabric: where the comments section highlights (makes larger, or pulsing in red and yellow) posts that are responses to me, or (semantically) part of my interests… and makes others smaller (in type/space)… while of course “zoomable,” explorable, with some simple and natural gesture.
I love the User Interface Principle that any piece of information on a website should be reachable within three ‘clicks’– though the click is hardly a ‘natural gesture’ for me– and that the path should always be clear.
Not that I could name a single site of any complexity of which that is true: but some (not Williams’) certainly come closer.
Moving on:
The persistent lesson of the Internet, for me, personally, has been its life-transforming power, its incontrovertable ability to open new possibilities, to offer value in the concrete form of new ways of interacting with the world and others.
Abhay Bhushan frequently described to me– and reworked– the experience of pressing the key that sent the first email, and what that sudden connection across distances meant. I won’t continue with my whole personal history– but it still a source of amazement to me, that my interactions today span a project centered in a workgroup and project next to Vanderbilt– and which extends to smaller groups in twelve US cities– while I remained ‘virtually’ connected to communities and individuals in Mexico City and France, and have the option of moving between those places with only relative shifts in communications…
That’s a poor picture; but what I discovered when I moved to Berkeley, was that the information tools (“the Internet”) kept me in contact with many of the people I knew at Williams– I was still “there,” in some sense. And during my first summer in France, the same– still connected, in daily contact, to part of both Berkeley and Williams and Boston…
Still a poor picture: but what I’m trying to trace is that without these tools– without my personal “communities of interest”– my current life, my most significant commitments and friendships and involvements, simply would not exist. The possibilities– the ability to take part in (once) distant communities and lives and events– never would have presented themselves.
To be a little more concrete– without Peter Lewis chatting to me from Perth, I would have never reconnected to Williamstown the year after leaving; never made myself a part of various projects– from Berkeley’s first “Home IP” dial-up internet, to Ricochet’s (equally first) wireless pilot– that kept me in touch, and a part of Williams and the people there. Without this, — it’s impossible to image, because almost all of my current life would fall away.
Without a little box flashing in the corner of my screen for the past half-decade, offering the voice of one very particular significant other, and the possibility of contributing, day-to-day, in “far-away” projects…
Well, it is late, and I still have to move into a new apartment in a new city, where I wouldn’t be without all these things; and without all these things, I’d still think that Paris and Mexico City were far-away places, instead of six-hour hops on my commute, “next door” places where…
Well back to Williams COIs. Certainly there’s a lot to be thought about how users must and may interact with the “interface,” and what’s “simple” and “intuitive” and effective– and I think we can do that. But the value that we’re missing– not yet producing– is continuing people’s interactions and connections, their ability to explore each other and what they can do and create together– in this suddenly ‘global’ world.
After all, ephBlogs’ map of IP logins from readers is a reasonable approximation of the current and coming geographical distribution of Williams’ students– and one way of stating the challenge, might be to ask what it takes (in hard technology and in human technology) to give them the same connections, the same base of resources and experience, as when a quarter of the student body came from New York and much more than half of the alumni settled within the narrow band of the northeast quarter.
For another lesson of moving to Berkeley– despite the wonderful means of connection I trace above– was that Ephs were far and few between in the Bay, and that I had a community of friends and support in Boston, who opened up far more possibilities. And that means something.
So, to reformulate the challenge of online community and ephCOI, around Bob Jackall’s image of cross-generational community– the challenge is to deliver the connection, the understanding and perspective, that Williams has historically and traditionally nourished and engendered– in a very different and global era, when and wherein its students and alumni become far more geographically distributed.
Enabled by, and as a result of, those very technologies; and a transition from a regional institution, to a global one.
As New York (I hear) transforms from a global financial center, to a regional one, and Dubai and Shanghai etc become global centers.
As economies such as Mexico and Indonesia and the Russian Republics teeter, each in their own way, between collapse and the possibility of entering the global economy.
And as the European Union aligns itself– dangerously and perhaps quite naively– with blocks of nations in Middle East, Asia and Latin America against the United States (see Foreign Policy), in what may indeed be very long and dark times for all of us, far beyond the current conflict in Iraq.
It is getting late, but I am remembering a UN representative in Brussels in December, repeating that the institutions of our democracies were cracking from their foundations to their ceilings (quoting a 1974 internal report from the UK).
We have a lot of history to come to terms with, and Williams, I suspect, would be a far better place to start, than UCLA or Berkeley.
February 3rd, 2007 at 2:35 amfrank uible says:
Should Williams’ Admissions Office reestablish (I believe it had it once) geographical diversity as a goal? Now it would probably be global geographic diversity rather than merely U.S. Of course a vigorous and broad based pursuit of that goal would make Williams a very different place – among more important things – goodbye American football – perhaps goodbye intercollegiate sports altogether. Ssshhh – don’t mention the concept to the alums – they would have a cow. Nonetheless it is suggested in the spirit of David’s glasnost that the goal (along with a fair projection of the outcome) be mentioned contemporaneously with each solicitation of alum contribution.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:28 amKen Thomas '93 says:
Frank:
It’s late again, I still have a hour of moving to accomplish, and the multiple errors in the above are smarting a little.
So I’ll respond to you by the quotation convention common in discussion lists:
My answer is an obvious “yes,” both in terms of the US and the globe. We have to embrace the coming change– and we have to start thinking about what that change is. (I got a very good if brief look at the nature of European Union in December, and the fact that many of its institutions have begun such a project… without trying to express that, my assertion is that the US has to think in global terms, and its institutions have to reformulate their projects and goals in such a perspective.
To switch perspectives: hwc replied to my concern about US recruiting some time ago by saying that Williams was following a logical yield management and admissions strategy. I don’t mean to respond to hwc personally– but I’ve had the advantage of some “birds on the wall” in Williams admissions since then, and gotten the opposite impression– for what might be called reason of “institutional psychology and organization,” my impression is that even internal members of admissions aren’t (and haven’t been for some while) following the paths they’d like to explore.
There are also some technology choices involved in that– the tools available to admissions– but citing specifics without being able to detail the implications would risk being unfruitfully political (and/or reveal my sources).
To return to my assertion re: the US– Williams simply does not have the profile it should in the US (much less internationally). On the West Coast as in the South, Williams has a relatively poor perception (for multiple reasons), and changing that would both be simple and increase Willaims’ diversity and yield while meeting financial goals.
To speak of internationalism anecdotally: I certainly enjoyed the moment when Vanessa told me she wished she had gone to Williams– because, among everything else, it had clearly given me more international connections that she formed at Williams and Mary– and followed that with the fact that she and Rogelio had simply not known about Williams.
I can say roughly the same for the families of now-senior members of Parliament in Belgium, ditto Germany and France. If we focus on the elites– groups with international financial, political and other forms of power– Williams is clearly not drawing from them, and it could.
This might be a good place to mention Kissenger’s plan for connecting such international elites some time ago, his feeling that the US never understood the terms of the Vietnam conflict, and his (little publicized) opposition to Nixon’s course there. I think we’re replaying all those issues, and the stakes may have become much higher. (Wish I had a bird on the wall of Kissinger’s current discussions).
I was greatly surprised in October, to find that my brother-in-law’s company may move him to Dubai in a year, and take my mother with him and my sister. (Vanessa’s mom lives there too). I wouldn’t have imagined such a possibility two years ago.
Surely we can preserve the athletic traditions with a student body that is 30 or 40 percent international; and surely we’re shortchanging the students of the future if we don’t get some grip on preparing them for a world in which they are going to be called to live and work globally– and in which their preparation for the challenges (which are far more than simply ‘workplace’ challenges, but range to the nature of our society and its political and economic future) will be critical to their success.
I like to think such a (very tenuously and poorly formulated) course is more relevant and compelling than Marx’s at Amherst, and while I don’t know the details of how Amherst is presenting its change to its constituents, I fully believe that such a project necessitates the open and full involvement of the alumni community.
February 4th, 2007 at 3:53 amfrank uible says:
Ken: Your respected view of things to the contrary not withstanding, football at Williams will be gone within 50 years for one cause or another. However I will predecease it – small comfort to me.
February 4th, 2007 at 8:49 am