You can check out the Cornell University page, which I’ve taken a snapshot of:

The service is essentially a competitor to Wikipedia (Cornell); we’ll see how it fares over time. Right now Wikipedia has better concrete information, but Unigo wins on the social side, with ratings, videos, and photos.

A recent NY Times article, The Tell-All Campus Tour, explains more about the service:

Said Adam Freelander, a Unigo managing editor: “Even the best guidebooks kind of make it seem like every college in the country is an awesome place to be, no matter who you are. And that’s not true.”

“For so long, the colleges have been able to have this stranglehold on the P.R. image of their school,” Goldman said recently in his office, decorated boy-workaholic-style with nothing but an open box of Frosted Flakes and a toy robotic dinosaur. “It’s just harder to look at them as the main source of information. If you’re a college student, you are as much of an expert on being a student at that college as anyone.”

I’m adding a link to my sidebar for this site, and hope it continues to develop and grow.

The website has valid markup and appears to render correctly in Firefox, IE 7, and Safari 3. However, there are a few things that could use improvement:

1) Too many objects

If you look at a loading time estimator or dig into their source code, you’ll see that they actually have 5 CSS files totaling 53.3 KB of data. These should be combined into a single CSS file to reduce the loading time. Additionally, some work should be done to reduce the number of images (28) on the page. The tagline-red-short, tagline-red, and stripe-type images could be replaced with CSS styling.

2) No compression

The website’s textual content, which is 63.2 kb, is uncompressed. Using my mod_deflate tutorial they could reduce their text content to 19 kb. They could probably shave another 10 kb by using the png format instead of ancient, and proprietary gif. Basically, 1/3 of the data on that page could be losslessly reduced!

3) Weird menu links

I expected the links at the top to make themselves known when I roll over them, but they just change color. Here is a more usable idea:

4) No autocomplete

When I start typing Statler, you guys should know what Statler is and present a drop-down list of things which might lead to Statler, or Stately Dinners, or Statistics in the Hotel School:

5) No RSS feeds

Um, there is no RSS feed for your news. So, how am I supposed to keep informed? You don’t *actually* expect me to come by and visit this page all the time, do you?

6) Ugly features links colors

Take a look at this, it’s like something from a bad Microsoft Publisher template:

7) Inconsistent calendar colors

The colors on the Calendar vary randomly. Perhaps that is intended to convey information I don’t understand, but it looks very weird:

Development artifacts

Things like this shouldn’t be left in your code:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/main-section-template.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->

9) A lonely footer

The footer is way too sparse for my taste:

Overall it’s a nice redesign, but it looks half-done. There’s nothing special about it, so I wonder what the hotel school really offers. This is in contrast to the homepage redesign, which makes Cornell look alive and dynamic, but light years ahead of the CS department (which 404s if you don’t use the www fake subdomain). The best Cornell redesign site, though, is Engineering, which looks awesome. Any thoughts, Christian?

If you click on said orange box, rather than being taken to a feed, you are taken to this meta-feed page with another orange box:

If you click on this orange box, identical to the last one except in indirection, you don’t get an RSS feed, because it’s not linked. You have to copy and paste the URL in the page into your browser. Then you can read Cornell University Photo News:

At once, it dawned on me that Cornell University is completely technically incompetent:

• They’re using the wrong feed icon. They should be using this industry standard feed icon
• None of their pages have the feed autodiscovery element, so none of the web will ever find their feed
• You have to click on an icon, then copy paste a URL to view the feed. The icon, dears, should LINK TO THE FEED!!!!!
• The feeds provide a link to a batch of updated content without telling you anything about what’s new

Besides fixing the usability problems of your feed links, the standard look and feel of the feed icon, and the semantic structure of the feed link element, you also need to fix the feed content. Your feed should look this:

Since the Cornell Library Resolver uses an http Location header to send user-agents from one of its pURLs to a real URL, a spammer just has to sign up with the library for an account through its unsecured interface and begin spamming away. Backlinks from a .edu site definitely help, I’ll tell you. So, what happens if you click on of these links? You get this:

Thanks, Cornell! All I want for christmas is my load of spam, my load of spam…

I haven’t written anything on Wikipedia in a while, but I still log in to check up on my watched pages, and found this pleasant surprise. Should be good PR for the school!

• Jenna Bromberg
• Ben Crovella
• Caroline Dias
• Nikki Gusz
• Jennifer Lin
• Alex Payne

The Prez is quite critical of the content of the blogs, most of which deals with verbose, mundane details of each of the official bloggers’ lives. Caroline responds and says, “If you want a little dose of what it means to be a regular old student here, I hope that my blog will fit the bill.” While there is at least dialog going on now in the online Cornell blogging community, what Cornell actually did was create a migration program for personal online journals.

Now, instead of publishing the mindless details of their private lives for the consumption of their close friends on livejournal, Cornell University has nominated them public spokesmen to share their private lives with everyone! Reading over their last forty entries, the content seems to be about on the same level of insight and quality as the median of Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Of all the posts I encountered, there was only one I approved of in any way, and only insofar as it at least included pictures to go along with the personal flow-of-life writing: Collegetown is so far away.

The Cornell Daily Sun (currently dying on the web), wrote a piece about this. In it, some editor wrote:

The applicant pool was limited only to students who already promote the Big Red on a regular basis. Only those who serve as campus tour guides, members of the Cornell Tradition or Undergraduate Admissions employees were eligible for the job.

The short of it is that the Cornell University Student Blogging Project is just a watered down PR machine written by a gang of unfocused novice bloggers.

You might think that’s not a bad idea. I’d point you towards their requirements:

• You will be expected to be intelligent about both the approach to and the crafting of your posts with regard to subject matter, language, and tone
• The media [...] do not need to know about how much beer you drank on Slope Day or the sordid details of your Friday night hookup. We ask that you approach delicate topics, well, delicately.
• But you should be fully aware of the fact that your blogs will likely be visited by members of the Senior Administration at the university; all of whom are people not known for being shy when expressing their opinions. Rest assured that you will be spoken to if you stray across the line.
• Okay. Let’s be plain, here. If you think that you would get in trouble for saying something, you probably will. That’s the line, people. You’re smart. Use those Ivy League brains.

In other words, write what you want, so long as it doesn’t offend anyone. Unfortunately, some of the best writing I’ve done is also my most offensive. Under these guidlines, writing about Matt Pearlstone’s drinking habits, or the suicide of Ash Thotambilu ‘06 would probably get me “spoken to.”

In other words, what this program boils down to is a structured attempt to recruit student labour to be a carefully monitored PR voice for Cornell University. In politics, this technique is called astroturfing:

In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals.

They already turned down one hot student blogger; you can be next! Just fill out the insanely long application form!

I am writing to request that you remove the name Cornell University from the name of your blog and website at cornell.elliottback.com. While we appreciate your hosting a forum in which Cornell news and events can be discussed, your use of the words Cornell University on the blog is confusing and can easily be misinterpreted to mean that the blog is maintained and/or sanctioned by the university. In fact, neither is the case.

Cornell University is a trademarked name and can only be used with the permission of the university. More specifically your use of the Cornell University name in this manner is unauthorized, misleading, and in violation of Section 397 of the General Business Law of the State of New York.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation. I trust you will attend to this matter quickly.

Sincerely,

Thomas W. Bruce
Vice President for University Communications
Cornell University
308 Day Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
phone: 607-255-9929
fax: 607-255-4763

Since I’m too busy right now to get into a big fight about trademark confusion, I’ve changed the Blog title to “Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University”, which can’t possibly be confused as being related to Cornell University proper. Clearly, Mr. Bruce was too lazy to read the two obvious disclaimers that disavow any connection with the University. I wonder if he knows about the two livejournals bearing the University name:

• community.livejournal.com/cornell_u/
• community.livejournal.com/cornell/

I’m also changing the name because it appears New York State has a special sheltering provision (General Business Law Sct. 397) for non-profit institutions that allow them to enforce their trademarks more forcefully:

397. Unlawful use of name or other identification of certain non-profit organizations. 1. No person, firm, association or corporation shall use, for advertising purposes or for purposes of trade, the name, symbol, device or other identification of any non-profit corporation, … without having first obtained the written consent of such non-profit corporation, association, society or organization. Any violation of this section shall be a misdemeanor.

I’d like to point out that the url alone–cornell . elliottback . com–is enough to prevent trademark confusion. The EFF seems to agree with me:

Can I use a trademark in my blog’s name or in the title of a blog post?

Yes, if it is relevant to the subject of your discussion and does not confuse people into thinking the trademark holder endorses your content. Courts have found that non-misleading use of trademarks in URLs and domain names of critical websites is fair. (Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp. v. Faber, URL www.compupix.com/ballysucks; Bosley Medical Institute v. Kremer, domain name www.bosleymedical.com).

I will email back Mr. Bruce and forward him some of these thoughts. I don’t think Cornell University can truly be called an institution of higher learning when it’s bent on shutting down an intellectual discussion-community using its name.

Update:

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes, “Elliott’s site won’t confuse anyone. It is, instead, a fan site about Cornell University, spreading goodwill about the institution. Priceless, genuine goodwill. They’ve squandered this goodwill.” I definitely appreciate the support!

This means we take a desktop widget system, like Yahoo/Konfabulator Widgets and put live views of Cornell on our desktop:

There are just three simple steps to get this working:

1) Download the Yahoo Widget Engine
2) Download the World Viewer Widget to your Widgets Directory and run it
3) Create a new file called Cornell.xml with the following contents in the World Viewer cams directory:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><cameras descJustification="right" descPositionX="301" descPositionY="250"><group name="All Cameras"><camera id="0" current="1"><url>http://128.253.30.14/-wvhttp-01-/GetStillimage</url><description> Ho Plaza </description></camera><camera id="1"><url>http://128.84.253.18/-wvhttp-01-/GetStillimage</url><description> Engineering Quad </description></camera><camera id="2"><url>http://132.236.46.39/oneshotimage.jpg</url><description>A View from Statler Hall</description></camera></group></cameras>

It’s rather irritating that you push S&D as the solution to spyware when Microsoft offers the best formerly commercial solution now free to windows users:

www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

You should AT LEAST mention it on your spyware page, as quantitative tests show it to be about three times as effective as S&D, a homebrew hack.

This is based on my tests of antispyware products, but since FlexBeta had the same results, I don’t think I’m crazy here.

Update:

Tom Young, an IT Security Deputy Director at Cornell, wrote me back:

We have been keeping an eye on the Microsoft offering and it looks good — carries forward the virtues of the Giant product that MS acquired and new definitions come in via Windows Updates. Our problem with recommending this has been that it’s *still* in beta and we don’t know under what terms the ultimate product will be available, though it will likely not be free.

That said, we’ll talk with our partners at the Contact Center to see what they’d think of formally supporting Microsoft Antispyware.

Thanks for the reminder that it is time to revisit this issue.

It’s nice that they’re thinking of it–I guess Cornell is also called the “big red tape.” Things take forever to move from idea to implementation here.

Update 2:

Alex Koch writes in with this news.com story:

Ending speculation about whether it was shifting to a paid model, Microsoft said on Tuesday that it will provide customers with its new anti-spyware software for free.

The pledge, made by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates during his keynote speech kicking off the RSA Conference 2005 here, comes after the company had been testing its AntiSpyware application–technology it acquired with its purchase of security software maker Giant Software.

Since Microsoft antispyware will always remain free, there’s no reason for CIT to not start using it.