High School Sophomores

High School Juniors

High School Seniors

What This Means

Well, clearly this data means that admissions offices shouldn’t be spending resources on social media.

Just kidding

I’ve shared this data with a few people at conferences and their first reaction has been something to the effect of “well it all depends on how they asked the question” or “what was the methodology?!?!” – in other words, absolute disbelief that these numbers could be valid.

I only know what the report tells me – that the research was conducted in the spring/summer of 2009 and was synthesized by data from more than 900 high school students in 47 states. But I’d suggest that if you immediately dismiss the research as invalid, stop and think for a moment:

1. Hobsons has been around for a while and clearly dedicated resources to producing a quality report. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re doing.
2. Even if you don’t think they know what they’re doing, how do you explain that social networking sites lag the most credible tool by 65-70 percentage points? That’s a pretty giant gap by any standard.

These results don’t surprise me at all. Here’s why:

• Teenagers have always made a really clear distinction between things they use for their social lives and things they use for “business”. Friends are for social media. Colleges are “business.”
• You’ll see lots of opinion leaders listed as more credible than social media – friends, family, high school counselors. Do you think they’re directing these kids to look at a school’s Facebook page as their primary source of information? Of course not. It’s a generational thing – there’s still a lot of skepticism out there.
• I don’t think there are many colleges out there who do social media really well. Until there’s a higher level of execution across the board, it is what it is.
• Did you really think that Facebook was going to be considered more credible than a campus visit? Or friends and family? Or college rankings?

I suspect that social media can be a huge influence at the bottom of the admissions funnel, but this data pretty clearly shows that it’s not a credible source of information for students at the top of the funnel. In the long run, I think that social media will probably gain some ground. But much to a web geek’s dismay, I don’t believe it will ever make it in the top five most credible sources for prospects at the top of the funnel.

Don’t misinterpret this data as proof that social media doesn’t work – it has its place in the process. Schools need to be in this arena, but they also need to have realistic expectations about what they will achieve through sites like Facebook and Twitter. By the way, this is not that much different than other elements – the campus visit is important for sophomores, but it’s critical for seniors.

This has sort of become my mantra lately, but you can’t get so enamored of the tools that you lose site of the big picture. Admissions is a huge game and there are so many different touchpoints on these kids during their search process. Just because you personally like social media, does not mean it’s the number one tool an admissions office can use to recruit students. Look at things objectively and then consider how you can best integrate it into your overall marketing mix in a way that plays to its strengths.

Related posts:

1. Show Me The Conversions
2. Why Social Media Comes Last – Presentation from #edSocialMedia
3. Ridiculously Backward Rules for Limiting Your Social Network

So we had two different list come out this week giving us the Who’s Who of big shots on the web. PC World gave us the The 50 Most Important People on the Web and BusinessWeek The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.  Sadly I nor anyone else in the Higher Education Web community or anyone who would spend the time of day reading this blog made the list.  Oh well there is always next year.

• Can You Still Afford to Ignore Blogs and Social Media? -What does all this mean to your business? If your customers are online, especially if they are in the 13-41 age group, they are going to be increasingly using social media tools in the future.
• Google Analytics Filters – A directory of Google Analytics Filters. Very nice handy site.
• MySpace Maintains Over 65% Market Share – MySpace.com received 67.54 percent of the market share of U.S. visits in August 2008 among a custom category of 56 of the leading social networking websites according to Hitwise.
• The Future of Widgets on Facebook: Dead -The new Facebook design is killing applications/widgets.
• For Microsoft shops, Silverlight 2.0 trumps Flash – Silverlight 2.0, which is due in the next few weeks, fixes the flaws of the initial release and gives developers a viable alternative to Flash
• Tiny Notes Net Big Gains: The Netbook Revolution – You may not know it yet, but the next computer you buy is going to be a netbook. The numbers say so.
• Smushit.com – optimizing images has just become really easy – Smushit.com allows you to upload some files or give it URL. The tool then takes the images, optimizes them and tells you how many bytes you can save. You then get a zip of all the images for download and can replace them on your site.
• Cone Finds That Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media -According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers.
• Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile -It’s really a shame that more people aren’t reading blogs at work, and we don’t just say that because we’d like the increased readership. If you’re not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be.

Now that I’m in full school, work, freelancing, and presenting mode my time surfing YouTube for funny videos is really suffering.  Here’s a classic to pull out the bag though.  Enjoy Gabe & Max’s Internet Thing!

See you crazy HighEdWeb people tomorrow…  or Sunday if you don’t arrive until then!

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week September 12th, 2008
2. Links of the Week September 26th, 2008
3. Links of the Week April 11th, 2008

There has been a lot of recent announcements and buzz lately about Data Portability with Facebook, MySpace, and Google all introducing competing API’s in the last two weeks. ReadWriteWeb has an excellent article about this, Play the News: Data Portability Future.

We also welcomed a new blog into BlogHighEd and if you don’t follow the aggregate I wanted to share GlobalHigherEd with my readers. Kris and Susan, welcome to the aggregate! From GlobalHigherEd’s about page:

The GlobalHigherEd blog is designed to highlight and then archive information about new developments (e.g., a new policy or development project), resources (e.g., reports, websites), analytical networks, and so on, so as to better track what is happening with respect to the construction of new globalized knowledge/spaces.

So if you haven’t taken a look I highly recommend heading over to GlobalHigherEd and subscribing to their feed!

And now to the TGIF Lucky 7:

• Are Spammers Moving to Social Networks? – Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006.
• Demographics now available in YouTube Insight – Google has announced that YouTube’s analytics are adding a new layer of meaning for video owners: demographic information.
• The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook – Six months ago, Facebook launched Pages as a way for “businesses, brands, and celebrities to represent themselves on Facebook.” Now that Pages have been out for six months, we thought we’d see who’s got the most fans on Facebook.
• The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances – It’s great to keep in touch with your friends and colleagues, but does the price have to be spam, zombie bites, and friend invitations from people you’ve never heard of?
• Hitwise: Google Again Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo Again New Lows – Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for April 2008.
• comScore: Yahoo! Buzz Overtakes Digg in April – Yahoo has more unique visits in April than Digg, wow. A new giant has emerged in the Social Bookmarking universe.
• Email Design Gallery – Need some Email Design ideas? The Campaign Monitor email design gallery highlights the amazing email designs being sent by our talented customers each and every day.

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week March 14th, 2008
2. Links of the Week July 3rd, 2008
3. Links of the Week June 13th, 2008

This weeks links has about 50/50 between news and how to articles. What is the feeling about the weekly link wrap-up? Do I have too many links, not enough, or just right? Do people like news or more how to information?  The weekly wrap-up is still morphing as this is the fourth or fifth installment and I’m learning and changing them as I go.

• Scientists Make First Map of Man’s Marine Footprint – The first comprehensive analysis of human impacts on marine ecosystems shows that humanity has profoundly affected nearly half of the world’s oceans, with just a few spots remaining pure.
• Page Titles – Best Practices – Title tags are vital from both usability and SEO perspectives. We use the following format for page title tags: Page Title – Department Name – University Name.
• What’s Next for YouTube (Video Editing, Recommendations, Advertiser Analytics)- Last night at an event in NYC dubbed “Videocracy,” YouTube gave marketers a sneak peak at some upcoming initiatives.
• Woman hits Best Buy with $54M suit for losing laptop – Lawsuit is meant to publicly embarrass Best Buy into changing its privacy policy and to expose its ‘disregard for customers’ personal information,’ woman says
• The University Tube – One Source for College Videos! – Found this new College Video Site
• BREAKING: MySpace Announces ‘Post to MySpace’- Our friends over at MySpace have sent over an announcement for a feature allowing you to promote your content with your MySpace profile.
• Cue Up the Acne-Fighting, 128-Meg MP3 Player- In Tokyo, acne control rocks. The 1.2-ounce MP3 player promises to improve a gal’s complexion while pumping out J-pop.
• Fifty Percent Chance Lake Mead Will Be Dry By 2021, Models Show- Lake Mead was created by the Hoover Dam’s blockage of the Colorado River. The dam, of course, was one of the prototypical mega-engineering efforts of the 20th century and a symbol of how human ingenuity could conquer any obstacle, including supplying water…
• 42 Ways To Distribute Your Content – Are You Making Your Customer More Intelligent, Or Interrupting Them? Not Sure? Try One of These…
• Internet Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Diagram – Internet marketing is not SEO. It’s not PPC. It’s not e-mail or web design, or social media. It’s the sum of many parts.
• Is the Government Pushing Ethanol Too Aggressively? – The federal government has decreed that we will use 9 billion gallons of ethanol this year, which begs the question of where it’ll come from and where we’ll buy it.
• 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design – Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach…
• 100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits – creating, maintaining, and optimizing an online presence from small businesses and non profits; how to get into search engine results, how to redesign an old site, what tools are available that are useful, inexpensive or free.
• Social Media and Social Network Starting Points – Organizations have a lot to consider once they decide they want to jump into social networks and social media. There are many opportunities to slide off the rails, or worse, to let the effort fall into disarray.
• How-To Tuesday: RSS Feeds- How-To Tuesday from SquarePeg. Each week we’re going to try and pick a topic and do a quick demo or show some neat benefits of using it. This week I’m talking about subscribing to RSS feeds.
• Best Buy To Recommend Blu-ray Hi-Def Video- The consumer electronics retailer said it will showcase Blu-ray hardware, DVD titles, and software products in its stores and online in the United States, dealing another big blow to the competing HD DVD format backed by Toshiba.
• MySpace Quietly Launches Games Site- Still number one social networking destination MySpace has entered the casual flash games market with games.myspace.com.
• Looking for the next big thing? Social gaming startups heating up- As the Facebook Platform matures (i.e. Facebook cracks down on application spam and users become more skeptical/tired of applications), entrepreneurs and investors are looking for ways to break away from the mold of the now over 15,000 applications…
• Netflix Opts for Blu-Ray High-Def DVDs- Netflix Inc., the online movie rental company, said Monday it is switching exclusively to the Blu-ray format for high-definition DVDs, following four major movie studios in selecting the Sony technology over one pushed by Toshiba Corp.
• YouTube – Link Building 101 Rap – There are no words to describe this… you just have to watch for yourself!
• 10 Insights From 11 Months Of Working At Google- What it is has been like working at Google. Interesting, fun, surprising, insightful, inspiring, impactful, and more such words. This post shares that experience.
• Studies Say Biofuels Worse Than Gasoline- When all relevant factors are accounted for, biofuels produce more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.
• Wikimedia’s 2007 Financials Posted- Wikimedia Foundation posted their audited 2007 financial statements last week. Their fiscal year actually ends June 30, so these are already almost eight months old, but they reveal some interesting information about the entity that controls Wikipedia…
• Social Networks Still Growing Strong, Engagement Leveling Off- Looking closer at the engagement metrics, it’s notable that MySpace users still spend the most time on the site versus users of other social networks.
• 6 Basic Questions to Ask When Picking an Email Marketing Solution- There are all kinds of solutions out there, but I’m primarily focusing on software solutions that streamline your email marketing efforts, companies like Constant Contact, Emma, ExactTarget, MailChimp, Bronto and Vertical Response.
• It’s Official. People Love Online Videos. Billions Of ‘Em.- It would seem people spent quite a lot of time in front of their computers in December watching online videos. According to the latest numbers from Comscore, a total of 141 million unique viewers, an increase of 2.5 million, watched 10,156,199,000 videos.
• Safari is about to get crazy fast- Apple has really run with the KHTML engine, forking it off, renaming its development version “WebKit” and making it faster and leaner than Firefox on the Mac and both Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC.
• How Many Times Can This Work? SponsorMyLoans.com – Most recently, Luke Livingston has started Sponsor My Loans in an effort to pay off his student loans — in $200 monthly increments.

Have a great weekend!

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week Jan 18th, 2008
2. Links of the Week May 16th, 2008
3. Links of the Week June 26th, 2008

Without a doubt MySpace is the largest social networking site in the world.  Most recent numbers I could find lists MySpace as having over 300 million accounts.  According to Alexa, Myspace has the sixth most traffic on the internet  It also attracts 76% of all social networking site traffic.

The History Lowdown

I’ve always heard that MySpace was started by spammers and Facebook by a Harvard alum.  Although this isn’t completely inaccurate there is a little more to the story.  As we learned last week Facebook was indeed founded by a Harvard alum, but it should still be noted that Mark Zuckerberg never graduated.

Myspace was created by company called eUniverse (which later changed their name to Intermix Media in 2004) way back in 1998.  In July 2005 MySpace was purchased by News Corp for $580 million!  Just for the record News Corp is the world’s largest media conglomerate company by market capitalization.

As for the aligations that MySpace was created by spammers…  well a lawsuit was filed by New York State in April 2005 against Intermix Media alleging that the company secretly installed spyware and pop-up advertisements and other intrusions to millions of computer users.

I first setup a personal MySpace page during the summer of 2006 and have to admit for the first few weeks it was quite addictive.  MySpace’s greatest power, similar to Facebook, is it’s ability to reconnect and stay connected with people that you normally wouldn’t be able.  This includes previous classmates, former neighbors, buisness friends that you meet at conferences, and the list goes on.  This might not be the case for everyone, but I noticed that more of my high school friends were on MySpace where I find more college friends on Facebook, although there are a lot who are on both.

Finally MySpace has recently been doing a lot to establishing Social Networking guidelines and remove the idea that they are a network that is open to sexual predators.  With this new guidelines and security MySpace has implemented some spam protection and increased functionality for their site.

Wofford’s Approach

Wofford College has a MySpace page.  We do not however actively promote or link to it like the Facebook page.  I monitor the page and have comments setup for approval to prevent spam.  The main purpose of this presence is to direct people to our other services (the videos, RSS, email sign-up, blogs, and calendar).  This page also doesn’t have the number of friends that the Facebook page does, maybe this has to do with the promotion we have done on Facebook.  I’m guessing promotion is only a minor part of this.  MySpace is more challenging to do right, because of the large freedom that it provides for designing a page.  Meaning that looks of your MySpace presence matter much more than on Facebook.

Just like with Facebook eduStyles also has a list of a few higher education’s MySpace presences.  I think most impressive off this list is Auburn’s page.  Auburn is a large school and with a popular football program in the super competitive SEC conference, but having over 10,000 friends is still very impressive!  However, I honestly I don’t like this page very much, it’s just way to busy for me, but you definitely can’t deny the effectiveness!  Another example from this list that I do think is well managed is the USC Aiken profiles.  I say profiles because they have two presences, one for general students and prospective students and the other is geared specifically towards alumni.  These pages are much cleaner and less busy.  They offer some the basic information with the most important flair.  The pages also provide links to the universities presence on other locations.

Probably even more importantly than the eduStyles list is the Colleges & Universities page on MySpace.  This page is run by Heather Mansfield, you can find more about her and this page on this post over at collegewebeditor.  The advise that she gives is excellent and I second a lot of it.  The Colleges & Universities page has over 1,100 friends and a good many are college and unversity presences on MySpace.  This site also has links to a wealth of articles about marketing on MySpace.   If you have the time I highly recommend visiting the site and learning more.

Final Thoughts

Similar to my approach with Facebook I started a thread on University Web Developers asking about what other Higher Education institutions do as far as marketing with MySpace.  The response was minimal.

I think most valuable from the thread was a comment by Matt Herzberger’s.  Matt said, ”MySpace is like the wild wild west or Las Vegas of social media, dirty and ghetto”.  I have to admit that I completely agree.  Despite this, MySpace is extremely popular among young kids.  I coach a 13-U USSSA baseball team and almost all the boys have MySpace pages and not a single one had a Facebook account.  Pulling some data from Quantcast it looks like MySpace demographic is less educated and with lower income than Facebook.  This data might not be 100% accurate, but it does agree with my personal experiences.  From this data, I think you might reason that educated people would appear to like order and cleanness (Facebook), where less educated tend to like flashy and much as they can fit on a page (MySpace).  Also important from this data is that it looks like BOTH networks seem to have more female traffic than male.  This data shows that MySpace has a large percent of people 35+ on the network.

MySpace does have the potential to expose and connect with both prospective students and alumni.  It is by far the largest social network in the world and has the widest audience range.  Marketing properly on MySpace will definitely benefit from spending a little extra time and money in the design of the page.  So much of what you see on MySpace is quite amateurish and any professionally designed page will definitely stand out above the pack.  Even if you don’t plan on marketing on MySpace you still need to have an official institution profile.  With MySpace if you don’t do it someone else will, and having one is a form of institutional protection.

Once again I highly recommend reading collegewebeditor’s interview with Heather Mansfield and checking out the Colleges & Universities page on MySpace.

Next week I plan to take a look at Digg.  To do research it would really help to gather more friends on the network.  If you have a digg account please friend me!  I’ve already got some pretty interesting findings, but plan to really immerse into Digg in the coming week.

Related posts:

1. Social Survey: Facebook
2. Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail
3. Social Survey: Digg

• Open Wireless Access Assured On 700 MHz Spectrum – An anonymous bidder exceeded the reserve price in the nationwide wireless spectrum auction Thursday. This is great news!
• Live from the Higher Ed Blogosphere: New ideas, new blogs & new projects in the higher ed design community – Lots of new things are going on in Higher Ed and instead of listing I’ll just link to CollegeWebEditor’s list.
• Which Technologies Will Shape Education in 2008? – A report that gives us a look into the future of what Technologies will shape the Education field.
• What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like? – Interesting look at the future of these two companies and their finances
• Microsoft Makes $45 Billion Bid To Buy Yahoo – This is the BIG news of the week, hands down!
• Sociable WordPress plugin take-over – WordPress – Finally a new update for sociable has been released!
• Laptop Stolen With Personal Data On 300,000 Health Insurance Clients – Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey is offering its members free credit monitoring for one year as a result of the security breach.
• Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar. – Good jobs are on the horizon for Computer Science graduates!
• A Marketer in Need Deserves a Student Indeed – Great advice about getting to know your students. Besides being one of the most enjoyable parts of my jobs working with students can teach you a lot!
• The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook Customer Base – A really LARGE collection of tools.
• Our Tech President Endorsements: Barack Obama and John McCain – Political opinion from the tech front.
• dotCMS: An Introduction – Writeup of dotCMS and it’s value as an enterprise CMS solution.
• Best & Worst Online Companies: The Results – Apple is big on both lists. The findings are interesting but make sense.
• Bill Gates For Senate – Somehow this prediction doesn’t seem that far off.
• Interactive Media for Higher Education: Leverage the Reach of Many Video Sites from One Page – If you post videos to multiple sites here are some tools to greatly simplify your life.
• When’s the Best Time to Send Email to Target Consumers at Work? Test Results – SUMMARY: Don’t take every fact and figure you read as gospel. Marketers need to rely on their own tests to determine important email elements, including when’s the best time to send your blast. An eretailer wondered how much of a difference they could
• Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective) – Great look at choosing an CMS, if you are still looking for one.
• Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile is game changing, does Flash – Skyfire is legit for mobile web browsing according to this article, but online if your phone runs Windows Mobile…
• Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move – The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.
• Free (legal) P2P Music Downloads? Told You So. – Free music downloads IS the future
• Top 30 Wordpress Plugins that are actually useful – Nice list of WordPress plugins
• MySpace Private Profiles Aren’t That Private – Recently Ashyley of CyberNet News wrote about how someone else can view a MySpace profile’s picture even if the profile was set to private. Apparently, MySpace has fixed this issue.
• How 20 Words Generate a 220 Percent Lift in Response – Case in point: in a recent test I did with a client, we added a Johnson Box to its e-mail control. It generated a 220 percent lift in response rate! Here’s a brief overview of the results, along with some tips for making a Johnson Box work for you.
• How Search Engines Work – Whiteboard Friday – A nice ten minute video explaining how search engines work. A great video to introduce the beginner to this.
• Wikipedia Joins Academe to Evaluate Itself – Wikipedia is famous for its philosophy that ordinary people, not just scholars, have expertise to offer the public. But when it comes to evaluating the online encyclopedia itself, Wikipedia officials have apparently concluded that academe is best suited…
• Terabyte Memory Chips Expected From Microsoft-Backed Firm In 2010 – The chips from Nanochip Inc., which is also backed by Intel, will combine a DRAM-like interface with internals that function like a multi-head hard drive.

Hopefully the reading above will keep you entertained while I finish up my MySpace survey this weekend! Have a great weekend!

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week Jan 18th, 2008
2. Links of the Week May 16th, 2008
3. Links of the Week March 7th, 2008

Hopefully you have seen at least a little of the varied and creative ways that the presidential candidates have been using the internet to engage potential voters?  Over the last three months I’ve really enjoyed reading the many reports about different various uses of online technology used by candidates and ways to track the campaign  Also many internet marketing and analytic experts have been chiming in with web analysis on the campaigns.

Track the Election Online

Google maps has been helping us visualize the primares and how candidates are performing on a live basis, take a look at this map of the New Hampshire Primary.  You can visit Map the Candidates to see where they have campaigned!  Yahoo has a Political Dashboard that you can visit and track the candidates in a nice flash layout.  MSN chimes in with an Elections ‘08 Leaderboard and a Candidates and Issues Matrix.  If that’s not enough check out the Super Tuesday ‘08 Channel on YouTube.

Social Networking

I also went to the homepages of seven candidates.  McCain was the only one who didn’t have links to MySpace, Facebook, and other sites like YouTube on his homepage.  He did have an online community called McCainSpace on his site.  McCain is by no means the only candidate to create their own social network though.  Obama also has created a social network, my.BarackObama.

I followed the links from each candidates official sites to their MySpace and Facebook profiles.  Here are the friend counts (rounded down to the nearest thousand) as of Jan 26.

Myspace

• Barack Obama 234,000 friends
• Hillary Clinton 169,000 friends
• John Edwards 52,000 friends
• Ron Paul 119,000 friends
• Mitt Romney 34,000 friends
• Mike Huckabee 31,000 friends
• John McCain 42,000 friends
• Rudy Giuliani 10,000 friends

Facebook

• Barack Obama 271,000 friends
• Hillary Clinton 81,000 friends
• John Edwards 37,000 friends
• Ron Paul 77,000 friends
• Mitt Romney 33,000 friends
• Mike Huckabee 45,000 friends
• John McCain 30,000 friends
• Rudy Giuliani 17,000 friends

Barack Obama has an enormous lead in both networks, his Facebook support is not that much smaller than the support of every other candidate combined.  Also of note on Facebook is a group called “Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)“.  This group currently has 729,000 members!

Web Experts Take on the Election

One of Google’s most addicted new tools is Google Trends and it’s been absolutely fascinating to follow the Obama vs Clinton battle on their tracker.  Note: If you would like to learn more about how to use Google Trends this is a good video for starters.

They have slacked off a bit in the last few weeks, but Compete.com has run many excellent stories analyzing the Presidential Candidates Online data.  Their most recent election post, Candidate FaceTime in December, was a great post to check out.

The guys at HubSpot have written a few very interesting posts looking into the Presedential campaign and their marketing habits, but I have to say the Internet Marketing Report on Presidential Campaign Websites was their best piece of work.  Also while I’m plugging these guys if you have never used their Website Grader tool then I highly recommend running your site through a 10 minute test, it’s free!

TechCrunch, a blog devoted to discussing breaking tech news, as been running their own primaries.  As they put it:

TechCrunch wants to provide a voice for digital policy and technology issues in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, and so we’ve decided to hold our own political primaries online. Voting will be open from Tuesday, December 18 through noon pst Monday, January 28. TechCrunch will endorse one candidate from each the Democratic and Republican party as the pro-tech candidate based on the popular results of reader voting and blog input from our community of technology leaders and entrepreneurs.

Just yesterday they gave their endorsements choosing Obama and McCain.

Tools to assist in making an Educated Decision

I would like to close by encouraging everyone to go out and vote.  Being from South Carolina I’ve already cast my vote and hope that you will do the same.  I’m not in the business of telling you who to vote for, or even push my opinion upon you, but please be responsible and do the research to make your own educated choice.  Besides checking all the candidates sites here are a few tools that I’ll suggest that ask questions to tell you how candidates align with your beliefs.

• Select a Candidate put together by Minnesota Public Radio
• 2008 Presidential Candidate Selector by SelectSmart.com

Related posts:

1. Comparing the Obama and McCain Emails
2. The Top 10 Posts of 2008
3. Links of the Week June 6th, 2008

• 2007 Global Website Stats – VisiStat – Interesting good reference point as you look at your analytical data
• Online Video: 2007 Year In Review - Statistics about online video useage
• OpenID Gaining Critical Mass, Yahoo Announces Support - Could OpenID be the answer of data portability
• China’s Internet population tops 200 million - China could surpass U.S. in internet market in just a few months
• Online, Children Are Our Future - interesting read about internet use of children
• Myspace Has Lions Share of Market, But Facebook Growing - Facebook might be the darling, but MySpace still commands an unfair percentage of Social Networking activity
• College Kingdom Educational Search Shows Desperate Need to Clean Up EDU Sites - Ouch!  I hope they aren’t talking about Wofford’s site.  Must read for any Higher Education webmaster.
• Bye Bye Joost – Here Comes Open Source Miro - Who needs Cable or Satellite TV?  Just give me an internet connection!
• YouTorrent: Torrent Meta Search Engine - New Torrent Search Engine… enough said.
• 12,500 sign ‘Save XP’ petition - Interesting resistance to Vista article
• I’m not ranking in Live Search, what can I do? - I think the title just about says it all…
• 3 New Wordpress Security Tops I Learnt from Matt Cutts - If Matt Cutts is suggesting something we should probably at least see what he has to say.  Besides all WordPress users should want to protect their blog from getting hacked right!?

I’ve read that there are over 50 social bookmarking sites, so starting next Friday I’m going to do a weekly post studying a specific site and discuss my findings.  First up is going to be Facebook (yes it counts because you can share social bookmarks on your Facebook page).  I’m starting there because I know a lot about Facebook already.  Also it’s a place that Wofford does do a little marketing through and I’ll be sharing a little of that.  If you want, feel free to friend me on Facebook.  All I ask is that you let me know that you found me through my blog, I’m a little hesitant of befriending just anyone.

 I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week April 18th, 2008
2. Links of the Week March 21th, 2008
3. Links of the Week September 12th, 2008