Damien Mulley has the scoop about the latest development at University College Cork. All students will be given blogs!
While that’s great news for blogging in Ireland, I’m disappointed that they didn’t choose WordPress Mu. I had a quick look around a few blogs and noticed a few things:
- They do have permanent links, but links to articles are only in the sidebar “Recent Posts” block. The title of each post is not linked, and neither is the timestamp.
- Permanent links aren’t very descriptive being of the form “/blogs/Username/item_x.htm” where x is a number.
- It looks like trackbacks and pings aren’t supported so it will be just a little harder for blog owners to participate in blog conversations with others.
- What will happen when a student finishes college? Will they be able to export their work? On another level, who owns the work? Student or College?
I have to disagree with Bernie’s comment about what value for money colleges get from hosting blogs. Bebo and MySpace are only two of the many companies offering their own proprietary website platforms. A college weblog has an unbreakable link to that institution. Colleges are places for learning which is quite different from the profit motive of any and every commercial company out there. The more exposure students get to blogging the better they will be at dealing with this phenomenon in the future. Not to mention the older students who are not in the demographic targeted by commercial interests.
That’s what you get on a “full featured blog server” like Surgeblog?
I think the worth of online communication and discussion is worth a lot more than they would pay (especially if they used WP-MU)
dcu students can get free blogs http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/
Umm, they could have saved lots of money and added lots of functionality if they used WordPress Mu or WordPress 2.0…
While Mu and 2.0 are absolutely free.
Sugeblog looks like crap.
thats cool that school are giving blogs to students. makes for more interesting reads other then the occasional feed about new themes and such (no offense)!
But what were the politics behind the decision to purchase software. Sometimes you have someone on a comittee somewhere who had a bad experience with something and so must use this software package because of it. Or maybe thats just how it works at the university i work at.