The New Cornell Blogs
You’ve probably noticed that Cornell’s now hosting student blogging projects. They’re running (for the technically inclined) an out-of-date version of Wordpress 2.0.3, using some minor customization, and without mod_rewrite turned on. It’s a bit sad that they’re trying to reinvent and rebrand the services that Wordpress.com already offers, but for a CU hosted blogging project, it’s probably a good start.
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.
| This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 6:02 pm and is tagged with cornell university student, cornell tradition, migration program, jennifer lin, applicant pool, collegetown, mundane details, life writing, flow of life, online journals, daily sun, myspace, bromberg, private lives, spokesmen, undergraduate admissions, close friends, xanga, rewrite, customization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
4 Responses to “The New Cornell Blogs”
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Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning…
Remeber those Cornell admissions-sponsored blogs I wrote about a few days ago? The Cornell Student Blogs are crashing and burning in public opinion, and there are a fair share of people who are more than happy to start roasting marshmallows and dance…
[...] Elliott Back: 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. … 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. [...]
Elliott,
I’m not sure if I’m just reading this wrong, but are you even looking at our blogs? I’m not saying this in a “there must be some mistake, our blogs are fabulous” kind of way, but when you mentioned “of all the posts I encountered, there was only one I approved of in any way…” you linked to an entry that wasn’t written by any one of the 6 of us. Maybe you meant to, I dunno. Also, you mentioned reading through 40 entries. When this was posted we’d only written 3 or 4 entries each.
agreed, my love