Refresh your web content management skills today!

Are you afraid of GX? Do you have issues in publishing news items? Do you feel uncomfortable when you think about updating your department website?

For those of you who's answer is YES you have now the opportunity to refresh your skills and get rid of your fears. Check out the proposed dates and contact me via email:

• 31 January
• 13 March
• 24 April

All take place in room GL 17; 1.229 (1e Floor Front office UB inner city library).

Writing for the Web - Course Material

This time No time Just an update:

- Language, Dates and other Guidelines(UK)
- Spelling and Writing Guidelines (NL)
- Style Guide for editors at UM

this weeks summary

information is not knowledge

knowledge is not wisdom

wisdom is not truth

truth is not beauty

beauty is not love

love is not music

music is everything

Frank Zappa's response to T.S Eliots reference to Poe's sailor reminds me of what I go through every day of the week as web coordinator of SBE. Altough refreshing, much of my week had to do with real persons. But I got some things finished. The Introduction Day website is up and running and so are changes made to the SBE intranet. Some minor changes here and there but no time for the departments with the exception of two new webeditors trained and ready to conquer yet undiscovered online worlds. ASP is not everyones taste and is hard to maintain. While ACO wants to get rid of Frontpage and BPRC is not offering a alternative at the moment. Marthas request for change was done unconventionaly and implemented immediately. And voila.... there is todays job done with yesterdays tools.
Another request for change protocoll was discovered at the meeting with all web coordinators. And guess who has to read and apply it? The old issue of a feedback mechanism for the entire UM website. Basically its a link in the footer of each page that says something like "found a bug? Tell us". After clicking on it the attentive visitor tells what problem he found or what is unclear to him. This information is send via email to the person responsible for this part of the UM website including the page iD and timecode. That's basically it. Would it help me as webcoordinator? Well, yes I think so. But here we go. Other questions on the agenda which will be discussed in smaller working groups concern the topics "dynamic navigation" and "the programme pages". Also a university wide intranet option was discussed but at the end I will say more to that.
You don't sell your product, you sell yourself. And when it comes to UM's products, then it's the programmes we are talking about. MSc, BSc, PhD, MBA, and executive programmes (post graduate education) are the major categories around which an organizational setup is infiltrated by the latest technology. This was also discussed with one programme director who wants to see her programme page different than it is now. A link to LinkedIN, a weblog maintained by the department and some thoughts about how to use them to connect to students and other interested parties. Nothing concret but a start.
I also revieved a compliment for an image I used for METEOR and BUSINESS RELATION. Annemarie likes it very much. I hope she will tell Meredith about it. Her requests for change examplified the differences in perception. While all her remarks concerned the text or the structure - to some extend justified by common sense (meaning by myself) - while nothing whatsoever was wrong with the image. The image is intended to play the "background music" while the text is what food is for the digestion system. While the stomache tells nothing about the taste of whatever one puts down his throat, so was Annemaries awareness unaware of the sublime effect of the image. Because it was the image that she found "cool" not the text.
The intranet debate is far from beeing over. In fact, it just started. At SBE there are websites available to special user groups. And they do the job. The downside is that there are many people who have only read access and few who have write access. So there is an asymetry of supply and demand which is artificial meaning its constraint by the environment, not by the emergent property contained in it. The next step would be a community solution examplified by NING or similar Social Networking Platforms which allow everybody to be consumer and producer at the same time. Having written this a host of questions fall like rain from the heavens as it does every day here in hell. In fact it must be a watery place. Look at Gilgamesh: Hell was a watery place. In the hebrew bible (the old testament) it was Sheol where later the Greek shades wander in a dark and misty underworld. Like Narcissus who fel in love with his image in the water. For him, the watery mirror was death. And it is interesting to note that one of the most popular Iphone apps which turns your device into a mirror.

Great ha...

by the way, I also meet the woman who is responsible for the Creative Writing course, she is very nice and everybody should do it...and I will do too.

week 50 - How to successfully resist innovation

Nobody suffered from high fever when the room was not ready and all participants enjoyed the third and last training in basic webmanagement for this year. Marie-Louise gave  here best in organizing in the last minute a room at the library and I tested out a seemingly harmless pretext to get free coffee: budgetcuts. It worked out fine and so did the whole week.

Starting with Monday I had a interesting meeting with Manon. Former information architect and early explorer in the unfolding 'cyberspace' of the 90s she is now in charge of the "webproject". Back than Maastricht University was known as University of Limburg for which Manon created the first website. In our talk about my impression and her experience it became clear that the problem faced by today is not significantly different from the one she faced. But the means have changed drastically in the last decade. Spending the rest of the day on stupid copy paste work I found some time to engage in a discussion on facebook about wikileaks. This is the 18th day since the media storm surrounding a platform and its founder has swirreld around the global media-echo-chamber.

Thuesday was Department website day and it is going fine. Little input from departments ensure that I have enough freedom to move around things at will. The major hurdles are overcome but new appeared on the horizon. F.e. I created a page with the intention to share its content with participants. But unfortunately the content managment system is configured as to deny access from outsite MaasNet. A surprise but nothing that cannot be detested. The machine easily masters the grim. Another aspect was to edit the interview with Youp van ‘t Hek. The video isn't online yet but SSF allowed me to announce it when refering to their youtube channel. It was a fun exercise in nostalgia.

Wednesday was a day in GX and I remembered that I shoud write more about my experience with this CMS. Another talk with the people behind the maastrichtstudents.nl blogging plattform. This would take another post.

... Yes and the Santa was at the office!

Training #2 impressions

Befuddled by the observations from the two meetings I had to participate after today's training session I learned a new word. It intends to mean a person who is not "computer literate". You know that the European Commission made computer literacy a priority and puts it in the same row as "reading, writing and maths". The Commission considers media literacy (which is just another term for a converging technology meme) as an important factor for active citizenship in today's information society. The word I learnd sounded like "Digibet" and is mash up of digital and illiterate.

I don't know how I could drift of the subject of today's training but here I am. More news about the Classification structure of the Media Repository and the Social Media Strategy will be up next week.

The technical training #2 fix

The dates for the second training are now fix. See the page to your right (Information/Registration Training) for more information about time and location. All participants will receive later today a confirmation.

First Training is Set

The first training will take place next week and the second one with 99% chance one week later - same time same station.

This week I spend most of my time talking with people about their expectations about their department websites. The rest of my time was filled with GX. I created the basic website structure as discussed below for every department. I also created the Profile Page Templates. Now the basic structure is in place for everybody and the migration of parts of the content can begin.
Yesterday I had time to work on my guide for the web community managers. Here is the first draft. It is basically a starting guide for the people in the departments on how to go about this adventure.
Well, have a nice weekend!

Training Update

Since more and more people want a attend the technical training I need to plan a second one. Unfortunately this means for some people that their training will NOT take place 14th of October. What counts is the time of registration. This means that for the following people the training will take place at the announced day:

Fleur Keune-Roemers
Hannes Datta
Yolanda Paulissen
Cecile Luijten
Adela Buttolo
Nicole Hulsman
Claudia van Oppen


For everybody else who registered I will announce a new date and location for the training the next days.

I am still waiting for some more input regarding the web site structure? Any new ideas?

Resolved issues regarding the training

More people than expected signed up last minute and the student assistant who does the booking is not in the house. But the library also has facilities we can utilize for our purposes. This got just confirmed and so the training will be in Room 0.204 at the MU library.

Today I created the basic page structure for every department. And once webicians went through the training they find a clean structure waiting to be filled with their content. I recently discussed with a professor issues of program visibility and ways to improve the websites google ranking. As a side note she recalled that "nobody had thought in the 80s that we will communicate exclusively via email one day". This remark echoed today when talking about metaversen and augmented reality. All of these 'technologies' became possible around the same time as email did. But while email was the killer application on the internet (and not the WWW) SL (second life) and AR paused for two decades. A good overview of the history When the "cyberspace" of the 80s gave way to the "Information Super Highway" and the "Web" of the 90s, the new millennium retrieved SL and AR as a "ritual environment" email was still the most used online service. Some things come and go others stay and in between there are doors.

The Alumni Event is over and here is the video that was edited not by the student editor: