The Technical Advisory Group met in October and in light of the feedback here, the following is our approach…for now.

• A proposal for expanded storage will be submitted to Allocations Committee
• We will extend the pilot project for blogs, letting it grow naturally.
• Coordinate blog policy with emerging effort in OPR to refine internal and external communication strategies
• Sell idea as option for faculty, but refrain from broader campus promotion
• Be clear that a blog today does not entitle blogger to blog perpetuity on PSU server
• See where we are at in 6 months, one year and later.

Thanks to all for your input.

No way can I consider this an invasion of my privacy. I surrender far more information, and more sensitive information, every time I buy a book from Amazon or pay a check online. Anyone who considers the above too much information to share probably shouldn’t be online.

Regarding the cost of blogging hardware, Dwight says it MIGHT cost $7000-$8000 in hardware plus an unspecified amount of ITS worker hours. Zach says there will be no need for additional hardware, and the number of worker hours will be low. I have no way of knowing who is right in this dispute, but since Dwight is the CIO, I am inclined to favor his side of the argument. Perhaps Dwight could settle this dispute by providing us with firmer numbers.

Right now I am leaning pretty toward camp two. The factor most likely to sway my decision toward the other camp is the argument that Matt Batchelder makes: “Time costs money…but the benefits of Google rank (read: free marketing) may very well outweigh those costs.” I don’t like to throw money around, but I’m not against investing it in a good cause, and boosting PSU’s Google rank seems like a very good one to me. Before we go to the expense of investing money and time in this cause, however, we need to know whether there is enough interest in blogging on campus to decide whether the investment would be worthwhile. Therefore, I am going to side with Stacey Curdie for the time being: let’s encourage faculty and students to use off-campus blogging sites for the time being. If, after a year or two, there are a whole lot of PSU bloggers on these sites, then we will know that setting up our own blogging site will be a good investment.

No way can I consider this an invasion of my privacy. I surrender far more information, and more sensitive information, every time I buy a book from Amazon or pay a check online. Anyone who considers the above too much information to share probably shouldn’t be online.

Regarding the cost of blogging hardware, Dwight says it MIGHT cost $7000-$8000 in hardware plus an unspecified amount of ITS worker hours. Zach says there will be no need for additional hardware, and the number of worker hours will be low. I have no way of knowing who is right in this dispute, but since Dwight is the CIO, I am inclined to favor his side of the argument. Perhaps Dwight could settle this dispute by providing us with firmer numbers.

Right now I am leaning toward camp two. The factor most likely to sway my decision toward the other camp is the argument that Matt Batchelder makes: “Time costs money…but the benefits of Google rank (read: free marketing) may very well outweigh those costs.” I don’t like to throw money around, but I’m not against investing it in a good cause, and boosting PSU’s Google rank seems like a very good one to me. Before we go to the expense of investing money and time in this cause, however, we need to know whether there is enough interest in blogging on campus to decide whether the investment would be worthwhile. This being the case, I agree with Stacey Curdie: let’s encourage faculty and students to use off-campus blogging sites for the time being. If, after a year or two, there are a whole lot of PSU bloggers on these sites, then we will know that setting up our own PSU blogging site will be a good investment.

I just wanted to repond to your question of whether or not Plymouth should support blogs and I have to say YES with all capital letters. I have only just begun blogging this past month using an account on both Blogger.com and the psu-host blogs. Both of my blogs are for classes and have been incredibly useful to me. I think that if all students had the oppertunity to get our and play around on blogs they would find out how wonderful a tool they really are. I hope to hear more about Plymouth and blog usage in the future. Please keep me updated.

Thank You,
Nate Lord

By creating a blogging community at PSU, we would be providing an opportunity for students to learn and use this cutting edge communication tool. Considering the costs works out to be about $2 per student, I think this is worth it.

As far as the idea of having students use blogs from third party web sites, could not this same logic apply to our e-mail service? Why then, do we provide an e-mail account for every student attending the university?

By creating a PSU blog server we could create a PSU Blogging Community, where students and faculty could discuss any number of topics in a forum that is open to all.

We could, for instance, provide instant feedback on policy ideas… Kind of like we’re doing right now. This will increase the flow of information and ideas across campus, what a good thing.

By creating a blogging community at PSU, we would be providing an opportunity for students to learn and use this cutting edge communication tool. Considering the costs works out to be about $2 per student, I think this is worth it.

As far as the idea of having students use blogs from third party web sites, could not this same logic apply to our e-mail service? Why then, do we provide an e-mail account for every student attending the university?

By creating a PSU blog server we could create a PSU Blogging Community, where students and faculty could discuss any number of topics in a forum that is open to all.

We could, for instance, provide feedback on policy ideas… Kind of like we’re doing right now. Isn’t this useful? I am for it.

The initial setup was probably a 2 days. Much of this involved tying it into existing systems so only PSU people could create accounts. The actual WordPress install takes less than 15 minutes. As for maintenance long term… This is always an unknown. While the pilot has been going on, we have done very little work maintaining it. I’d estimate less than 10 hours in the 9 months we’ve had it. That number is lower than I would expect in production considering we have not done any patches or upgrades. If we quadruple that number we’re talking like 50 hours for whole year (some of which could be done by student workers). I think I’ll spend more than that amount of time still trying to convince people of this idea if it is shot down…

I could expand on a litany of reasons why blogging is a no-brainer for us. I feel very strongly that having blogs can only benefit students, especially with the modest cost. However, Dwight has told us blog evangelists in IT to be quiet for the moment, so I’ll only leave you with the facts about maintenance above.