Field Notes from the Digital Prairie :: a blog by Aaron Rester

Bright Lights, Pink City (Part V)

2012-01-16T08:57:00.000-06:00

Last year, a young family friend left for India for the first time. In talking with him prior to his departure, I was inspired to dig up the emails I sent to friends and family while studying Hindi in India back in the summer of 2004. Blogging had just started to catch on at the time and it didn't occur to me to start one then, but I thought it might be entertaining to post these now. Excerpts are mostly unedited, except to remove boring pleasantries and preserve the privacy of those involved; also, links to relevant sites have been inserted for your enjoyment/edification/distraction.

(Continued from Part IV)

Date: July 19, 2004
Subject: "Videshi Aaron's Indian Story Hour"

Ladies and gentlemen, it's tiome once again to gather around the wireless for Videshi Aaron's Indian Story Hour, sponsored by 'Mango Nut Crunch': (please note: the following is a verbatim transcription of an actual Indian cereal box; any similarity to actual food is purely coincendental)

Most Delicious and World Popular Mingle clustered with Raisins, Almonds, Mango and various other entergetic fruits and foods.

Mango Nut Crunch

It's origin has been from Switzerland and other western countries, which proved magnificent results on mind, mood, physique, stamina, tummy, digestive system, tolerance, longitivity and general health. Hence the Mango Nut Crunch has much been appreciated and motivated the liking and love of maximum personalities of various spheres of live in the world.

Benefits

Mango Nut Cruch avoids dowdy or slacking and keeps one alert, smart, attractive, young, impressive, dominating and longitivity. Being a most be-fitting low-fat-diet keeps a persons ever-ready to take up any task successfully any time of day or night and provide outstanding results.

Taste and Consumption

Mango Nut Crunch goes up as soon as it is started for its delicious taste, health-giving incredients, life-long benefits and facilitates fast food.

Fibre Edible grains

Regular use of Mango Nut Crunch boosts appetite an orderly healthy routine, maintain smart physique, stamina and sexual urge.

Let me know how many boxes to put you all down for...

Unfortunately, Mango Nut Crunch is pretty much the most exciting thing that's happened to me all week, though I did go with several friends on Friday night to a "Battle of the DJs" at Steam, the nightclub in the Rambagh Palace Hotel (formerly the Maharaja of Jaipur's palace, now a five-star hotel -- you can stay for a year for just $2 million!). Having been abandoned for the weekend by many of our compatriots in favor of the relative cosmopolitanaeity (is that a word? if not, it should be) of Delhi, we decided that we would show them a thing or two and go out and paint the town red -- or at least give it some sort of pinkish tinge. Unfortunately the Brits beat us to it by about a hundred years, but koi bat nahin...

Anyway, there's nothing quite like driving up to a palace in a rickshaw past people sprawled out sleeping on the sidewalk, and paying more money for a cover charge (400 rupees -- about 8 bucks -- for a couple) then they spend on food in a week to make you feel like a bourgeois neo-colonialist capitalist running dog. Luckily, the 400 rupees was reimbursable in drink once we got inside, which allowed us to dull our consciences nicely. A Corona cost about the same as it would in the States, but since I hadn't had a real beer since I got here, I allowed myself the luxury and then moved on to the 75 rupee pints of Golden Peacock -- at least they're honest about what it tastes like.

The most remarkable thing about this club was that it was completely unremarkable. It was the kind of club you'd find in any provinicial capitol (say, Albany?) where the city's best and not-very-brightest go to drink, smoke, look cool, and pretend that they're in a real city, while dancing spasmodically to such international dance hits as a remix of Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" (no, that's not a joke). It was fun though, and it was a nice reminder that Jaipur is not as completely conservative and tradition-bound as it sometimes seems.

Saturday the Institute took us on a little trip to a small town just outside of Jaipur named Sanganeer, which is apparently world-reknowned for the production of screen-printed and block-printed cloth and a special kind of pottery. It sounds like an elementary school outing, but I'm actually really glad I went. We saw a dyeing operation run by a huge extended family, in which family members waded around with yards and yards of cloth in giant pools of dye. The cloth is then hung from huge scaffoldings to dry, and when you walk into this forest of billowing reds and blues and oranges and yellows, this deep silence descends upon you and all of the noise of the second-most populous nation in the world simply disappears... And we watched the laborious process of screen-printing these long pieces of cloth (a succession of metal screens with designs punched in them is placed over the cloth, then dye is swooshed over it with a different screen used for each color) and the even more laborious process of using carved blocks to create these amazingly intricate designs. I really had no idea how much work went into creating these things.

Well, that's about it from this side of the pond. I hope you all are well, and you may now commence taking shots.

- A

(to be continued...)

My 2011 Mixtape

2011-12-18T13:42:00.003-06:00

It's the most magical time of year. Yes, I'm speaking of the time of year when every armchair music critic, myself included, starts reeling off their "best of" lists. Since with last year's list I finally gave up pretending that I ever listen to full albums anymore, here is a mix of the songs from 2011 that captured my attention. If you're on Spotify, you can listen to the whole thing there.

"A Candle's Fire" by Beirut from The Rip Tide
"Born Alone" by Wilco from The Whole Love
"Tree By The River" by Iron & Wine from Kiss Each Other Clean
"Gangsta" by Tune-Yards from WHOKILL
"Barton Hollow" by The Civil Wars from Barton Hollow
"Get Lost" by Tom Waits from Bad As Me
"Two Against One (feat. Jack White)" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi from Rome
"Mustache Man" by Cake from Showroom Of Compassion
"Screws Get Loose" by Those Darlins from Screws Get Loose
"Fixin' To Die" by G-Love from Fixin' To Die
"White Port" by Old 97's from The Grand Theatre Vol. 2
"Calamity Song" by The Decemberists from The King Is Dead
"Hanging from a Hit" by Okkervil River from I Am Very Far

Notes from HighEdWeb 2011

2011-11-14T19:52:00.002-06:00

I am finally, after 2+ weeks, forcing myself to sit down and reflect on what I learned at my first HighEdWeb conference. The bloggers from Link did a much better job than I could ever hope to do of summing up each of the presentations I attended (the title of each talk below is linked to a summary), so I'll simply provide my primary takeaway from each session.

Carrying the Banner: Reinventing News on Your University Web Site by Georgy Cohen (slides) - We need to look for ways to be more immediate in our news coverage; for example, quick video responses to items happening today.

What Colleges Can Learn From The Insane Clown Posse by Karlyn Borysenko (neé Morissette) (podcast | slides) - Colleges and universities need to know who they are and who their people are, and not apologize for it.

The Politics of Doing IA for HighEd by Aaron Baker (podcast | slides) - Information architecture is like planning a kitchen, where everyone has to be able to find the tools they need.

What Content Strategy Really Means for Higher Ed by Kate Johnson - Determine a process for producing and maintaining content, *especially* after its launched.

I’d Buy That For a Dollar: What Robocop Can Teach us about Alumni Engagement by Jeff Stevens - Three prime directives for alumni engagement: make it compelling; make it collaborative; make it competitive.

Engaging Your Global Audience with Real-Time Campus Event Coverage by Seth Odell - One camera, one laptop, one person is all it takes to do the most basic of live streaming.

Politics or treason: Toeing the line or begging forgiveness in site adaptation by Anne Petersen (slides | podcast) - Always be testing, even if it's just bringing an iPad into the student lounge.

Multimedia and Social Storytelling: Capitalize on Content by Donna Talarico (slides) - There are many ways to tell a story on the web: POV, narratives, photos, videos, infographics, audio

Making a CSS Framework that Works for You by Dan Sagisser (slides) - Doesn't really apply to UChicagoLaw at the moment, but I can see how a CSS framework might be useful to us for, say, a series of minisites.

Swingin’ with Sinatra: Small Apps Fast by Sven Aas (slides) - Not being a programmer, I didn't understand most of this, but did learn a very important lesson about being prepared for hardware failures while in the midst of a presentation.

Shawn Henry Keynote: Accessibility - Links to some great pages on the W3C site for thinking about and working with accessibility issues.

For me, though, much of the value of any of conferences like this (and of this one especially) comes less from the presentations and more from the experience of the conference itself -- of meeting amazing people in person whom I had previously known only via Facebook and Twitter, of networking, commiserating, and bonding with my peers, of spending half a week helping to build a real, live community of web professionals.

And lest I forget, there was also my own contribution to the conference: a series of Johnny Cash tunes rewritten for and performed by higher ed web geeks. You've been warned.

Web Design Project: Niehaus LLP

2011-11-09T07:41:00.001-06:00

Earlier this year I launched a redesigned website for Niehaus LLP. The brief from the client, a boutique law firm in Manhattan, was to create a more elegant site that exuded both the legal sophistication expected from a larger firm as well as the personal touch that clients can expect from a small firm. To that end, I designed a logo, reworked the site's information architecture, and hand-built a new, standards-compliant site.

Before:

After:

Bright Lights, Pink City (Part IV)

2011-10-10T10:44:00.004-05:00

Earlier this year, a young family friend left for India for the first time. In talking with him prior to his departure, I was inspired to dig up the emails I sent to friends and family while studying Hindi in India back in the summer of 2004. Blogging had just started to catch on at the time and it didn't occur to me to start one then, but I thought it might be entertaining to post these now. Excerpts are mostly unedited, except to remove boring pleasantries and preserve the privacy of those involved; also, links to relevant sites have been inserted for your enjoyment/edification/distraction.

(Continued from Part III)

Date: July 12, 2004
Subject: "the corner of Bollywood and Grime"

Last time I promised details of the previous week's trip to Bombay (or Mumbai as it is now officially known). I hope you have some time, 'cause this is gonna be a long one...

First of all, I learned an important lesson: some things are worth paying extra for, such as air conditioning on an 18-hour train through the Rajasthani desert in June. Unfortunately, we could not get three seats in the 3rd class A/C on the way there. I was traveling with my friends S. and E., both of whom assured me that 3rd class non A/C sleeper was the way to get the true Indian train experience (in reality of course, the most authentic way to go is to sit in the baggage car. No, really, you can do
this). Naturally, the engine broke down several hours from Bombay and we sat in the sweltering heat for four hours before they could get it repaired, and we rolled into Bombay a full 23 hours after we left Jaipur. My favorite part of the trip was the graffiti spray-painted in the Bombay railyards by some anti-
globalization/naxalite/anarchist/what-have-you group called the Bombay Revolution or something like that that said "No Pepsi / No Coke / We Want Lassi"... written, of course, in English.

Anyway, the wretched train journey was absolutely worth it, because Bombay is a great city. Once we peeled ourselves off of our sweat soaked berths (another traveler in our compartment, an Israeli, described our state rather accurately as "smelling like a yeti's ass"), we headed down to our hotel in Colaba to wash off the filth, and then out to see some sights. S. lived in Bombay for 6 months a few years back, working in one of the much-maligned call centers which are getting so much attention these days, so she knows the city quite well and was able to show us around. Colaba is the tourist center of Bombay, so it's rather unpleasant -- touts and scam artists everywhere, and those are just the tourists -- but once we got out of there, it was amazing. Suddenly, for the first time in a month, no one gave a damn that we existed. You have to understand, that in Jaipur, we are constantly a spectacle. In the old city, where all the tourists go, we are marks, dollar signs with legs (and even more so now that there are hardly any tourists here); out in the burbs, where we live and go to school, we are just bizarre. People stop and stare at us, little kids follow us around, men driving large vehicles nearly snap their own necks turning to gawk, crowds gather while we haggle with shopkeepers -- I half expect to see someone walk through a plate glass window like in a Buster Keaton movie before I leave. But in Bombay -- blissful anonymity. I've never been so happy to be ignored.

Anyway, we walked over to the Gateway of India (being repaired after a terrorist bomb attack last year), went to the oldest British building in the city (a church with lots of colonial memorials saying things like "loved by all, especially by the natives whom he forever sought to uplift" etc.) and then over to Marine Drive (Bombay's answer to Lake Shore Drive) and up to Chowpatty Beach for some kulfi (a kind of ice cream made with condensed milk - much better than it sounds), then pizza for dinner (we took full advantage of the fact that non-Indian food was readily available).

Amazingly, Bombay has actual taxis, with actual meters, that actually work... in Jaipur we have the option of cycle rickshaws or auto rickshaws (basically three-wheelers), both of which require haggling down to a price that only narrowly evades definition as extortion. But in Bombay we could take real taxis for LESS money than a comparable drive in a rickshaw would have cost in Jaipur.

Anyway, on Thursday (day 2) we decided to head to the ancient Shiva-temple complex on Elephanta Island. Unfortunately for E. and S.'s stomachs, this required an hour-long boat ride on choppy surf... and apparently five or six of these boats go under every year. I'm glad I didn't know this until after we had made it back through the giant storm that overtook us fifteen minutes after leaving the island. That evening we went to a place called Tea Center for a light dinner; this place had some of the weirdest tea drinks I have ever heard of. I wrote some of 'em down in case you'd like to try them at home:

The Lady Marmalade: Tea liqour, orange marmalade, brown sugar, lemon juice, orange juice (presumably you can also spread it on toast)
Hot Buttered Apple Tea: Tea liquor, brown sugar, lemon rind, apple juice, honey, nutmeg (sounds pretty good so far, right?)... and a pat of BUTTER.
The Fire N Tea: Darjeeling Tea Liquor, orange lemon and pineapple juice, ginger juice, green chiles and (gulp) Worcestershire sauce

That night we hit a club called "Not Just Jazz By The Bay" on Marine Drive to hear some live music... instead what we got was a "band" called Ringo Star Romantic, which consisted of three rather hip looking young Bombayites essentially doing karaoke over keyboard beats to the likes of Wille Nelson and John Denver ("West Virginia country roads take me home," indeed). It was weird. But I see a niche here -- Indian country music. If you want to get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a growth industry -- an Indian country-singer named Bobby Cash is already on the Australian charts -- just let me know...

On Friday we went up to Malabar Hill (now that's a name that needs to be in a country song). We couldn't see the Towers of Silence (where Bombay's large Parsi Zoroastrian community leaves its dead to be eaten by vultures, in order to avoid polluting the earth or fire) but we went to the so-called hanging garden, which features topiaries in the shapes of animals (my favorite was the one of Hanuman the monkey-god) and, even, more bizarrely, dozens of trashcans SHAPED LIKE GIANT PENGUINS. Now, I don't know where they got these things (zoo clearance sale?) but when I think "Bombay," penguins are not the first animal that comes to mind... E. described it as similar to having trashcans shaped like grizzly bears at Sea World. But really, the truly weird part was the sheer number of trashcans. You can go days, weeks, in a major city in India without seeing a trashcan, and in this park there was one every ten feet. Literally. It was like some kind of Elysian Field of trash disposal opportunities. If only I'd had some garbage to feed the penguins...

Anyway, after that we walked down the hill to a place called Banganga tank, which is kind of a holy swimming pool surrounded by temples (this is supposedly where Ram stopped to build a lingam of sand to worship Shiva on his way to Lanka to rescue Sita), where people bathe and wash their clothes in water that probably could give the East River a run for its money. But it was very peaceful, and hard to believe we were still in a major metropolis. We were accompanied to the tank by a nice old man whom I have come to think of as the Indian Obi-Wan -- when crossing busy intersections, he would simply give a wave of the hand, as if to say "These aren't the droids you're looking for," and the normally bat-out-of-hell Indian drivers would stop (or at least slow down) and allow us to pass. I've tried this Jedi mind trick myself, but as of yet to no avail.

That evening we took a local train out to Juhu Beach, one of the more glamourous suburbs. We took in a play, and made a special trip to see Shah Rukh Khan (the biggest star in Bollywood at the moment)'s house. Unfortunately, I was unable to work any Bollywood magic and finagle a tour of Film City studios (the PR director, whose number I got from a fellow student, told me I needed a letter from my embassy). We were approached on the street in Colaba and asked if we wanted to be extras in some sort of production (not an uncommon occurrence, as we fair-skinned folk are always in demand as extras for commercials, tv serials, etc.) but we were leaving the next day, so our dreams of Bollywood stardom were destroyed... while by herself at one point, S. also got asked to provide "entertainment" -- "just eat, drink, mingle" -- at a "very rich Indian man's party." She declined, though I can't imagine why...

Finally, after having to fight off the advances of not one but three ear cleaners on the street (they use these giant sharp metal rods to dig all the wax -- and, I'm guessing, some gray matter -- out of your ears) it was time to leave. The trip home was far more pleasant than the one there; in the a/c section they actually give you sheets, pillows, and blankets! And naturally, this trip went off without a hitch.

Arriving in Jaipur, it was back to business as normal -- a pack of rickshaw-wallas descended upon us like a pack of starving dingoes the moment we stepped out of the station. One of them asked me in barely-accented English, "You are from the States?" When I replied affirmatively, he smiled grimly and said, "Welcome to the Hotel California." This song, by the way, has been following me everywhere. I swear that they put it on specifically for me every time I walk into one of the coffee shops here. So apparently I can check out, but I guess I can never leave.

Anyway, lets' see, what else has been going on... apparently last week was a festival called Samppujana, which means "cobra worship." And in fact, they brought two snake-charmers to the institute along with two not-very-happy cobras, to perform for us and explain the point of the festival, which as far as I can tell is to scare the crap out of pansy foreigners. So yes, they really do have snake-charmers in India -- if only there had been scantily-clad nautch girls and an effeminate yet rapacious maharaja, all of our Orientalist dreams could have been fulfilled in one fell swoop.

On a completely different subject, yesterday, after a field trip to a local temple complex called Galta (which is home to, oh, I don't know, seven million monkeys), I made my first pilgrimage to that great American Temple of the Golden Arch. Except for the fries and the milkshakes, you wouldn't recognize much of the menu. There are about seven or eight vegetarian things on the menu, and the rest is chicken or Filet-a-Fish (I'm not sure whether or not most Indians realize that McDonalds makes the vast bulk of its money from the slaughter of their favorite animal). I had the Pizza McPuff, which S. recommended... it was like a samosa made from McDonalds apple pie crust filled with peas and carrots, and tomato sauce that was essentially ketchup. Next up will be the McAloo Tikka, which I think is basically a potato-burger. Ah, the joys of exotic cuisine...

Anyway, sorry for being "a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by my own verbosity," and I will let you go back to your bustling American productivity.

(to be continued...)

The Mark of a Good Designer

2011-09-30T16:59:00.000-05:00

While listening to Debbie Millman interview Michael Arad, the designer of the World Trade Center memorial, I was impressed by his ability to adapt to his original vision for the project so many requests and requirements that would seemingly conflict with that vision. Designers are constantly complaining about clients who get in the way of designers' ability to create good work for them; but while listening to Arad I was struck by this aphorism:

"The mark of a good designer is the ability to create good work for clients who ask you to do bad work."

What do you think? True or no?

Redesign: TweetChicago

2011-09-20T10:29:00.002-05:00

I've blogged before about a project at the University of Chicago Law School that we call TweetChicago; it's a page that aggregates a number of student and faculty tweeters in a single place, to provide the viewer with a snapshot of life at Chicago Law.

After nearly three years of service, it was time for the page to get a facelift. We ditched the HTML/Javascript widget that we had been using to import our Tweeters' feeds and went with Twitter's new standard widget, which, unlike the previous version, will actually display retweets, and updated the look a bit.

Before

After

Law School Project: Mobile Site

2011-08-22T14:53:00.003-05:00

(A version of this post is cross-posted at the University of Chicago Law School's Electronic Projects Blog.)

Today I officially unveiled the Law School's new mobile-optimized website. Users accessing the Law School's website from a mobile device (with the exception of iPads) will now be automatically redirected to a version of our website that is specifically designed with mobile users in mind.

It features:

A re-imagined information architecture, making it easy to find the information that, according to our research, is what our mobile users are usually looking for.
Fewer images and other bells-and-whistles, so pages load more quickly (and with less drain on your data plan).
Quick and easy means to find your way to and from the Law School, or to get contact information for faculty and staff.

When developing an institution's mobile presence, there are many options. You can, for example, build native apps for iPhone, Android, etc., as the University has done; and certainly, there are advantages to that approach. However, given the limited staff for this project and the increasing proliferation of new mobile devices, we wanted to create a mobile presence that would be platform-independent (i.e., viewable on all devices, from iPhones to Droids to Blackberries, etc.). Luckily, the content management system we use for the Law School's website, Drupal, is flexible, robust, and supported by an incredible community of contributors. By plugging in the Mobile Tools module and a modified version of the Mobile Garland theme, I was able to easily create a mobile site that serves up the same data as our standard site, repackaged in a mobile-friendly fashion.

Protecting Your Online Reputation

2011-08-18T14:44:00.000-05:00

Each year I give a presentation to incoming students at the Law School that introduces them to some of the School's online resources, and also aims to aid them in their future careers by helping them take control of their online reputations. I thought the latter part of this presentation might be of interest to others as well, so I've produced a slightly modified version of the presentation below.

It is almost impossible in today's knowledge economy to avoid having an online presence. Many times that presence is helpful -- we can reconnect with old friends, discover books and music that we never would have otherwise known existed, and impress potential employers with our resumes and portfolios. But if not properly curated, that online presence can also damage our chances of, say, being able to actually land that new job that we're applying for. And unfortunately, most damage done to online reputations is self-inflicted, whether through ignorance or carelessness.

Here are four things to consider when posting anything online to avoid shooting yourself in the digital foot:

Your employer WILL Google you. According to a study done in 2009 (and discussed in this Concurring Opinions blog post), 89% of human resources professionals thought it was appropriate to take an applicant's online life into account in hiring decisions, and 70% had rejected an applicant because of something they had found online.
Nothing you put on the internet is ever truly anonymous. "Well," you might think, "if my employer is going to Google me, I'll just make sure that anything questionable I post won't be associated with my name." Good luck with that. Many websites log the IP address of all computers that access them, and even if you're accessing a site from a public computer or have IP masking software, chances are there are other ways to discover who left that "anonymous" comment on the company blog. According to a study by Know Privacy, 88.4% of websites have SOME sort of "web bug" that collects data about users usually without their awareness.
Once you put it online, it could very well be there forever. My favorite example of this is the young woman in Britain who was fired from her job after calling her boss a "pervy wanker" on Facebook... having forgotten, it seems, that her boss was her Facebook friend. Aside from the cautionary tale of remembering who you've friended, what's amazing to me about this is the idea that this screenshot -- obviously taken by one of the poster's friends -- will now live on indeterminately on the internet. The young woman should be grateful that whoever did so had the courtesy to scrub out her name, otherwise she might very well have been haunted by this boneheaded move for the rest of her professional career.
Email counts too. I would be willing to bet that people do more damage to their professional prospects through email than through any other electronic means. It's far too easy to accidentally hit "reply all" for your scathing comebacks intended only for one of many people on a mailing list, or for a disgruntled coworker to forward a "private" email to your entire company. If you are in school, remember that email interactions with administrators are professional communications and should be treated as such. While you don't have to be quite so formal with your classmates, remember that these are people that you may very well be working with -- or for -- one day. In the hiring process, you don't want to be the person who gets remembered for drunkenly spamming the class mailing list every weekend. And of course, there's the worst-case scenario in which a questionable email is forwarded far and wide with your name prominently attached to it.

How to protect yourself:

A rule of thumb. At the Law School, we encourage our student tweeters to consider one rule of thumb before every tweet: "Do I care whether my grandmother, my dean, or my future employer will ever see this post?" The potential readers in your rule of thumb may be different depending on your situation and online comfort level, but if the answer to your question is "yes," back slowly away from the keyboard and go get a sandwich.
Check your privacy settings. Do you know who can see what on your Facebook page? If you're not sure, spend some time learning how Facebook (or whatever social networks you happen to be on) deals with privacy issues (Facebook's FAQ's are here). Personally, I make sure that only my friends can see anything I post; it doesn't reduce the risk that something might escape my newsfeed and get into the wild, but it does reduce the risk.
Control your brand: post more. It might be tempting, given the dangers I outline above, to throw up your hands, delete your Facebook account, and take a vow of digital silence. After all, what you don't type can't hurt you, right. Wrong. If you have no online presence that you control, then you are leaving a vacuum that can be easily filled with the negative comments of others (or of others pretending to be you). Instead, take control of your personal brand by producing high-quality content -- whether on a blog, your LinkedIn page or something else -- that will be associated with your name and will highlight your skills and abilities.
Monitor your data shadow. If anyone is writing nasty things (or, for that matter, good things) about you online, you want to know as soon as possible so that you can take steps to nip disaster in the bud. Google Alerts is a great tool for this; it will send you an email every time Google's search engine encounters the phrase of your choosing.

So that's a brief primer in protecting your professional reputation online. If you have any additional tips, I'd love to hear them.

Is a Niche Social Network Right for Your School?

2011-07-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

My article, "Is a Niche Social Network Right for Your School?" has been published over at Link: The Journal of Higher Education Web Professionals. The article lays out a number of questions to consider before signing your school up for a niche social network (smaller and less well-known sites targeted to certain populations) using our experience with Goodreads at UChicagoLaw as an example.

Bright Lights, Pink City (Part III)

2011-06-13T08:00:00.003-05:00

Did the movie have subtitles? What happened in it?

Nope, no subtitles, which means that I only understand about a tenth of the dialogue, but Hindi films aren't exactly "My Dinner With Andre" so I generally know what's going on. There's also a fair amount of English sprinkled in which helps. The film I mentioned in the last post, "Hum Tum," ("Me and You") was a pretty typical romantic comedy about NRIs (non-resident Indians) set in New York, Amsterdam, Paris... but since then I saw one called "Main Hoon Na" (basically, "I'm Here" which I am now recommending as the ultimate Bollywood film. It's got everything a Bollywood blockbuster needs: a plot that combines the ancient Indian epic The Ramayana with the theme of current Indo-Pakistani relations, a policeman who has to go under cover by going back to college (which sets up -- what else? -- a Prom Night scene), terrorist attacks, two love stories, the reuniting of a long-separated family, and self-conscious allusions to more movies than I could possibly list (from "Sholay" to "The Matrix" to "Raising Arizona." If you can find it in the states, go. It is absolutely hysterical.

Is Anju a slave? Isn't that illegal? Or just in the US?

No, Anju is not a slave... she is paid for her work (though I can't imagine that her wages are worth the hours she puts in -- she's awake before me and after I go to bed) and if she's unsatisfied with her situation she can take her labor elsewhere without much trouble. Capitalism at it's purest, really... and while I am kind of getting used to being waited on hand and foot, it's still a shock to see the little things they ask her to do -- turn up the television when she's in the middle of cooking dinner, etc.

Are you going to be talking completely in Hindi when you get home???

I wish. I'll probably still be saying the two phrases that I say the most here, which are "Tik hai" (OK) and "Accha" (good). These are very useful phrases because with them and a well placed head-bobble I can pretend that I understand what the hell is going on.

CUCUMBERS AND KETCHUP??????? eek.

Agreed.

Is the milk pasturized?

Nope, which means that it has to be boiled in tea (which we drink constantly), so it leaves this weird skin on the top of your cup. Kinda gross actually.

Are lesbians common there or just crappy english speakers?

I suspect that the women who yelled "Hello Sexy" at my friend were just imitating something they had seen either in a movie or saw some men do. There's actually a fair amount of controversy and protests right now over a Hindi film called "Girlfriends" which features a lesbian romance and which by all accounts is a terrible movie -- it's probably the only thing that American LGTB advocacy groups, Hindi film critics, and the fascist Shiv Sena party all agree on. (There was a similar fuss over Deepa Mehta's [much better] film "Fire" a few years back, aslo headed by the Shiv Sena). At any rate, homosexuality, at least as we know it in the states, seems to be relatively rare here...but the borders of gender are drawn somewhat differently. For instance, it's not at all unusual for men who are good friends to walk down the street holding hands. Then of course there are the hijras, a word usually translated as "eunuch" (though there is some debate over whether they need be actually castrated, and some contestation between groups of hijras that are or are not, ahem, intact. Each city has its own community of hijras, who dress like traditional Indian women in sarees, and show up at all major functions (a birth, a wedding, etc.) to sing and dance and demand money/food/drink in order to give their blessings; and most everyone plays along. A couple of days before I left for Bombay, some hijras had come to the house next door for a birth, and I recorded some of their songs... we also got accosted by some while in a rickshaw in Bombay, and after praising the whiteness of my skin, one of them tried to tickle me. They are an interesting lot, to say the least...

Have you milked a cow? Does the family own a cow?

Nope and nope. Nobody really owns cows in Jaipur, they just wander around and eat garbage on the street.

And finally, to answer the question of my cousin Ed (age 32):

No, I have not seen any Indian porn. As far as I know it is still technically illegal here, though you can buy tons of old Playboys in the book stalls in Bombay -- along with more copies of "Mein Kampf" than you could toss in a bonfire (I think the Shiv Sena have something to do with that). I also had a guy on the street in Bombay offer me "sex movies," but I'm afraid I declined, Ed -- sorry.

Well, I hope you all enjoy the festivities and your "chilled can of Budwesier" today. Be well, and keep in touch...

(to be continued...)

An Alt.Country Critique

2011-05-14T00:08:00.001-05:00

I have recently been reading Old Roots, New Routes, a collection of academic essays about the cultural politics of the musical genre known as alt.country. While I have read dozens (maybe hundreds) of such studies of (sub)cultures from Bombay's Zoroastrians to Wicker Park's hipsters, this is the first such work I've read that turned the critical eye on a cultural community with which I feel a close affinity.

The party line among alt.country fans and (slightly less so, I think) musicians is that they are hearkening back to, as Jay Farrar puts it, a "a truer sound," an authentic country music free of the corrupting market influences of the Nashville industry, though necessarily performed with a knowing wink of irony. The essays in Old Roots New Routes, while ranging in focus (and, alas, coherence) rightly point out that country music has always been market-driven, and they question alt.country's notions of authenticity, suggesting that a music based originally in working-class life, performed by over-educated, liberal, urbanites not raised on country music smacks of appropriation and minstrelsy. I would argue that the authors largely fail to interrogate the notion of what "working-class" means (does being working-class require undertaking manual labor? Is it a matter of income, or education? After all, many of those over-educated urbanites hold decidedly working-class day jobs in the food industry while pursuing musical careers), but overall the book is a refreshing reminder of the value of critically examining any and all cultural assumptions -- particularly those we hold dear.

As I mentioned, I feel a close affinity to alt.country. While I would not consider myself a full-on scenester, it is the genre of music within which I tend to write and perform, and it makes up a large portion of the music that I purchase and to which I listen. Understandably, then, reading these essays has led me to interrogate my own involvement and investment in this cultural community. I grew up in a rural area, though in the Northeast, rather than the South or Appalachia. The rented house where I grew up had no running water in the winter, but I went to excellent schools, including a private high school (on scholarship), a well-regarded liberal arts college and a world-class graduate school. My mother worked at auto parts stores when I was little, then became a landscape gardener (is that a working-class job? I have no idea) and a partner in a landscaping business, while my stepfather worked for much of my childhood as a freelance illustrator (perhaps the working-class job of the art world, but unlikely to be counted as such by most observers), and later in advertising and higher education. Both had only briefly attended college, and though neither earned degrees until my stepfather did so many years later, books were everywhere in our house. My father, who held the undeniably "working-class" jobs of machinist and truck driver, and whom I visited in the summers, had actually come from a well-off family (my grandfather was an engineer and the son of a doctor).

I did not grow up listening to country music, though my father did own a lot of what are now considered precursors to alt.country, such as 1960s and 70s country-rock and outlaw country (I much preferred to listen to his Huey Lewis tapes), and my mother and stepfather were avid listeners to Prairie Home Companion (I loved the stories, hated the music). It wasn't until I moved to a large metropolitan area that happened to be home to one of alt.country's premier record labels that I started paying any attention to country music, whether alt or otherwise, and looking back I see the roots of my interest in it being a logical extension of previous musical interests, namely delta and '50s Chicago blues and traditional Irish music (country, of course, is in many ways the offspring of African-American blues and Scottish/Irish balladry).

Where would all of that leave me in the eyes of Old Roots, New Routes' critics? I'm not sure. Even mentioning the above facts sounds like an embarrassing bid for a type of working-class identity that I would never consider claiming, as I far more closely identify as an over-educated liberal urbanite. But when I ask myself what drew me to this music, my answer has very little to do with a longing for an idealized rural past in which men were men, singers were always sincere, and people made everything they owned with their own two hands; hell, I hate manual labor. Rather, what I see in alt.country is a commitment to narrative songcraft and lyrical wordplay that is today really only matched in one other genre of American popular music, namely hip-hop (and one can imagine the cultural negotiation that would have been involved in my becoming a hip-hop artist). It's a genre where words matter, and words were what got me hooked on music in the first place. Perhaps the critics' points might be taken closer to heart by the people who need to hear them if they were put in a song.

ACLU Postcard Design

2011-04-27T07:35:00.008-05:00

Last month, I was approached by the ACLU of Illinois to design a save-the-date postcard for their annual gala. The only requirement was that it be tied into their boxing-themed 2010 Annual Report, designed by Elaine Fong and Thomas Richie. The final product is below. I am especially proud of the fact that, despite the copy provided, I managed to NOT hide a Charlie Sheen face somewhere in the design.

Bright Lights, Pink City (Part II)

2011-03-31T19:49:00.007-05:00

Recently, a young family friend left for India for the first time. In talking with him prior to his departure, I was inspired to dig up the emails I sent to friends and family while studying Hindi in India back in the summer of 2004. Blogging had just started to catch on at the time and it didn't occur to me to start one then, but I thought it might be entertaining to post these now. Excerpts are mostly unedited, except to remove boring pleasantries and preserve the privacy of those involved; also, links to relevant sites have been inserted for your enjoyment/edification/distraction.

(Continued from Part I)

Date: June 24, 2004
Subject: "Update from the subcontinent: sights, tastes, and... uh.. smells"

It's been a bit over a week since I last wrote, and I'm starting to settle into my routine here: classes from 9 until early afternoon, then do some exploring or shopping or web-surfing or all of the above until I head home for dinner and homework at about 8:30. Every Saturday we have a field trip (either locally to a market or temple or something, or once we wil go to Agra [home of the Taj Mahal] overnight) and Tuesdays we watch a Hindi film at school.

The other day I went to my first film in the theater (for those of you who don't know, the Hindi film industry is one of the largest in the world -- Indians' obsession with movies puts Americans' to shame -- and is one of the focuses of my studies), and I have to say, it was kind of disappointing. Indian movie theaters are generally (according to my friends who have been to them before) really rowdy places where the riff-raff in the low-class seats (in India, even the theaters have castes) sing along to the songs, yell dialogue at the top of their lungs, and illustrate things on the screen to each other with laser pointers. This theater (Entertainment Paradise) was basically a suburban theater, without even a balcony (the more expensive seats are slightly raised at the back of the theater) and nothing but well-behaved middle-class families. I'll have to try my luck at the Raj Mandir, the huge 1920's Art Deco cinema here that is famous throughout India...

As predicted, I am pretty much sick of Indian food by now. Anju (my host-family's servant) is a very good cook, but I can only eat daal so many days in a row, and in such quantities, no less. Before I got here, I figured I would probably lose weight while I'm here, but I neglected to take into account the Indian penchant for shoving food down the throats of guests, and being offended if you turn it down. The Institute gives prospective host families a crib sheet on how Americans are different than Indians, which includes the statement that "no means no" when it comes to wanting food, but this doesn't seem to have stuck (other highlights include: "sometimes americans enjoy being by themselves - if they go into their room and close the door, you shouldn't be ofended, they are just 'being alone'"). So, for example, the other day for breakfast, I ate an omelette, 2 parathas (round fried bread about the size of a dinner plate, usually stuffed with potato, a cucumber sandwich (on white bread with mayo, dipped in "sauce" [aka ketchup] -- testimony to the horrors ofcolonialism), a sweet lassi, and tea with milk and sugar. And they tried to get me to eat another sandwich and another paratha, but I got out of it. Then I walked to my friends' house around the corner, so we could head to school together, and their family insisted I have an idli (south indian bread-like substance) with daal and a banana shake. And my host-mother is still worried that I'm "not eating enough" and keeps making sure I'm taking vitamins. Baap-re-baap!

Anyway, I know I must be sick of Indian food because I was really happy to go to Pizza Hut the other night. Now, I used to work at Pizza Hut, and I know what their kitchens are like in the US, let alone in India... but I didn't care, it was just great to have cheese that was not paneer, with no lentils in sight. Also, I got to watch my host-brother put ketchup on his pizza.

The Hindi learning is coming along slowly, though there is no shortage of teachers. People here are usually happy to talk to us on the street and are often amazed when a ghora-ghora speaks even a word of Hindi. The other day on the way to the old city I got into a discussion with a young chai-walla who wanted to practice his English. A big crowd (20 people or so) gathered around to watch the white guy speak mangled Hindi and the Indian guy speak much better English. When we started talking about American foreign and immigration policy, I got a little nervous about being surrounded by a crowd people of unknown political affiliation, but koi bat nahin tha (it was no problem)... Everyone is generally friendly, calling out "hello" as soon as they see us; though it is hard for my female friends to separate the friendly hellos from that of the "Eve-teasers" (Jaipur has a big problem with sexual harassment, and foreigners are particularly susceptible as they are percieved as a) unprotected by the local community and b) oversexed & slutty; one of my friends has even had "hello, sexy" yelled at her by women passing on a scooter!).

I'm finally getting a sense of the city, having spent a fair amount of time ghumte-ghumte (just wandering around). The rains haven't come quite yet, and the air quality is horrible: after walking I feel like I have a scum of filth coating my throat. I think if I don't want to lose 10 years off my life, I should start breathing only through my nose. Of course, if I do that, I might not want to live very long. Before I get too used to it to notice, here is an inventory of what Jaipur smells like, in no particular order:

exhaust, auto
feces - bovine, human, porcine, canine, etc.
urine, both well-aged and fresh
water, stagnant
dust, desert
fruit, ripe, on the carts of street vendors
garbage, burning
desperation, smoldering
late capitalism, raging
colonialism, corpse of, rotting

Let me know if you want me to bring back a bottle of air for you...

(to be continued...)

How to Do Social Media Right (and Wrong)

2011-03-12T11:44:00.000-06:00

(You might notice that this post looks a bit a different than usual -- it was prepared with a new online tool called Storify, that makes it easy to stitch together narratives using the atomic elements of social media: tweets, Facebook status updates, and so on. They're still in beta, but you can learn more or sign up for an invite here; it only took a couple of weeks for me to receive mine.)

Bright Lights, Pink City (Part I)

2011-02-22T17:00:00.012-06:00

Earlier this month, a young family friend left for India for the first time. In talking with him prior to his departure, I was inspired to dig up the emails I sent to friends and family while studying Hindi in India back in the summer of 2004. Blogging had just started to catch on at the time and it didn't occur to me to start one then, but I thought it might be entertaining to post these now. Excerpts are mostly unedited, except to remove boring pleasantries and preserve the privacy of those involved; also, links to relevant sites have been inserted for your enjoyment/edification/distraction.

Date: June 15, 2004
Subject: "of rickshaws, camels, and iced mochas"
...
It has been almost a week now since I arrived in India, and it has been interesting to say the least. I and another student were met at the airport by someone from the institute where I'll be studying this summer, and taken to a guest house in Gurgaon, which is a booming suburb of Delhi... it's the epitome of the India Shining that brought down the BJP government in the latest elections: huge futuristic glass corporate buildings (Citibank, etc) with shantytowns huddled in their shadows. The trip to the guest house was my first taste of the Indian national pastime, namely, attempting to seriously injure people with motor vehicles. I had heard plenty of stories about how crazy the roads in India are, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality. Think New York's congestion with Boston's speed and disregard for human life, then throw a few cows into the middle of the street for fun. All of the trucks have beautiful paintings in on the back adorning the words "Blow Horn" (apparently the rearview mirror has yet to catch on here, so at least you are looking at something nice when you drive into it at forty miles an hour). They should make a video game out of this -- "Delhi Death Rally," maybe. It occurred to me that this must be why people find India to be such a spiritual place -- when you are in a rickshaw driven by a fifteen year-old, there is little else you can do besides pray.

Anyway, we had an orientation for a day in Gurgaon (complete with a 20-minute revisionist eulogy for Ronald Reagan's "humanity and compassion" from a low-level American diplomat -- something I had hoped to avoid by being halfway across the world, to no avail), then took the four-hour Shatabdi Express train to Jaipur. We spent one night in a hotel here, then moved in with our host families on Sunday.

I managed to wind up with the most luxurious of all of the homes, a full on middle-class flat complete with microwave (which seems to be used mainly for storing dry goods) and a servant -- this will definitely take some getting used to. I have a nice, fairly cool room (no a/c, but a "cooler" and ceiling fan... it's been hot, around 110 F, but it doesn't bother me that much, and the monsoon is coming at the end of the month) with its own large bathroom and (thank god!) a western-style toilet. The family I'm staying with is very nice and have welcomed me into their family. The father's Hindi is hard for me to understand, but the mother and son (he's 26) both speak very good English, so they can explain something if I don't understand their Hindi. They also have a daughter around my age who is working out of town, but luckily I don't think they will try to marry her off to me...

Our house, and the institute where I'll be studying are in the southeast of the city, in a neighborhood called Raja Park. Besides the cows, there are tons of wild pigs roaming around, and also lots of camel carts hauling goods. Some friends and I went into the old part of the city today to soak up some local
flavor in the bazaars, and I got to see my first monkeys -- I was very pleased with that. Then we went to the Barista coffee shop for iced mochas -- one of the great benefits of globalization, in my opinion. Tomorrow classes will start, and things will get very hectic -- 4-5 hours of class a day, and a couple of hours of homework. We will also be doing some field trips in and around Jaipur, which should be fun.
...
- Aaron

(to be continued...)

t-Y-p-E

2011-01-04T12:43:00.000-06:00

Earlier this year, while visiting some friends in Greensboro, NC, my wife and I happened across a really nice antique store that was selling old printing press equipment, from type slugs to the cabinets in which they had been stored.

I picked up a few slugs as gifts for designers I know, as well as some for myself, with the idea of doing some sort of project with them (a poster? t-shirts?). So far I've just been toying around in Photoshop and Illustrator:

Any brilliant ideas about what to do with these? I'm all ears.

My 2010 Mixtape

2010-12-20T16:37:00.000-06:00

It's time to stop living a lie.

Over the last few years I've indulged in the annual ritual of posting a list of my top albums of the year. But the truth is, in this age of internet-induced ADD, of shuffling iPhones and thousands of tracks at my fingertips, I rarely listen to a given album all the way through more than once, and it has gotten harder and harder for me to say a given album is better than another. The atomic unit of music has once again, as in days of yore, become the song rather than the album. While I don't disagree that a set of songs can become more than the sum of its parts, as a songwriter my fundamental appreciation for my beloved medium rests at this very basic level -- does this song, standing on its own, result in head-nods, pulse-throbs, or eye-sobs?

To that end I've put aside the pretensions of a top albums list and gone back to my roots: the mixtape. You can take a listen to a sample of each of my favorite songs of 2010 in the playlist below, and if you are so inclined, purchase each track individually (I should mention that doing so will also send a small pittance in the direction of your humble author).

Alternatively, if you value speed over supporting your friendly neighborhood blogger, and don't mind spending $18.03 to feed the Apple monster, you can buy all 17 tunes with one click on iTunes.

Memo to the Missionaries

2010-12-12T10:38:00.004-06:00

Our neighborhood has, for some reason, recently become the target of a group from a Baptist church in Hammond, Indiana who seem to be looking to drum up some new church members. I'm considering printing up some copies of the following to keep near the door and share with anyone looking to proselytize at our doorstep.

Hello, and thank you for your interest in converting me to (insert your religion here). I appreciate the effort you are making on behalf of my eternal soul, and -- having spent four years as an undergraduate Comparative Mythology major and five years at one of the nation's most respected divinity schools -- I do enjoy a good conversation about the ultimate concerns of humanity. However, to avoid wasting your time, I have compiled this handy list of the tasks you will need to complete in order to convince me to attend your church/temple/drum circle/what-have-you.

1) Convince me of the existence of a transcendent being beyond the sphere of the human and natural realms. (I'll give you this one for free, since a truly transcendent being would be by definition beyond the grasp of our limited human cognitive faculties; as a result, we would be neither able to prove nor disprove the existence of such a being.)

2) Convince me that not only is said being capable of comprehension by limited human faculties, but that it is a "person"-al being with the attendant desires, goals, and aims.

3) Convince me that the desires of such a transcendent being would somehow be concerned with what I as an individual believe, whom I decide to marry, what I do with my personal wealth, what I eat, etc.

4) Convince me that of the thousands of religious traditions that have claimed exclusive access to knowledge about this being's wants and desires, yours is in fact the one that actually does have that access.

5) If, for some reason, you are not fluent in the language(s) in which your religious tradition was originally transmitted, convince me that each of the translators who passed that tradition down to you was in fact guided by that transcendant being.

6) Finally, you must complete each of these tasks without reference to your individual tradition's scriptures or other religious documents, since accepting the authority of such scripture can obviously only occur after all of the previous conditions have been met.

If, having read this list, you feel that you can complete these tasks, please begin. If not, thank you for your time, and please get off my stoop.

Law School Project: Faculty Reading 2010

2010-12-10T16:37:00.001-06:00

Each year since 2008, the Law School has compiled a list of reading recommendations from its faculty members as a sort of holiday gift for alumni. And each year, I design a new one-page site to house those recommendations. I think this year's incarnation came out pretty well, as it's a rather unusual way of navigating what is essentially just a *very* long list. Even better, we were able to tie this year's edition into our recently launched Goodreads presence by making it easy for users to quickly friend us and become fans of our faculty members; accordingly our friend numbers on Goodreads increased by 50% within just a couple of days, and many of our new friends seem to have joined specifically for the chance to connect with us, an indicator of significant engagement.

Schubas on Sunday

2010-12-07T07:02:00.001-06:00

Just a quick note that my Lost Cartographers collaborator, singer Gabrielle Schafer, and I will be playing a duo set this Sunday (Dec. 12) at Chicago's most lovely small music room, Schubas. We'll be opening for the forlornly beautiful sounds of Jill Andrews, formerly of The Everybodyfields. Luluc will also play. The show starts at 8, and tickets are just $10 -- get 'em now on the Schubas website.And if you're planning on coming, let us know on Facebook!

Write What You (Don't) Know

2010-11-16T19:38:00.002-06:00

In July, I played a duo show with one of my Lost Cartographers collaborators (singer Gabrielle Schafer) at the venerable Chicago club Schuba's. The show went really well, but our melancholy, often-dark alt.country was perhaps not the best complement to the earnest pop of singer-songwriter Katie Todd, the headliner for the night. After the show, one of Katie's fans was chatting with Gabrielle and asked something along the lines of, "What's up with that guy and all the depressing songs he writes?" Gabrielle fumbled out something about how she thought maybe I had written most of those songs before I had gotten married, and that's why they were so sad. "Well," replied the stranger, "maybe he just needs to get laid."

I smile every time I think of this story, because it holds up to the light one of the assumptions that we often make about the relationship between artists and their art, namely that art is a direct reflection of the thoughts and emotions of the person who creates it. This is particularly true in the often overly-confessional genre of singer-songwriter fare, but I'm sure the same is true in other musical genres as well as in other art forms.

The advice to "write what you know," of course, is famously imparted to every Creative Writing 101 class, and is quickly internalized by most fledgling writers. As in most clichés, there is plenty of truth to be found in this advice -- the surest way to create "authentic" art is of course to explore the characters, settings, and situations that surround you every day. There is just one glaring problem with this practice.

Writing what you know is, after awhile, deadly boring.

Yes, some of those sad songs I write *were* written from personal experience, and deeply-felt emotions. But generally, as a happily married thirty-something with a good job and a life marred by very little personal trauma, I really don't have much to be sad about. I suppose I could write songs about the joys of a blessed life, but I suspect I would not be alone in finding such songs utterly tedious.

I'm reminded of a discussion I once saw on the Sound Opinions message boards, where someone had posted about how they found Tom Waits (incidentally, one of my favorite artists) to be annoying, because it seemed to them that people just listened to Waits so they could "feel like barflies." My immediate reaction to this was incredulity; even if that were why people listened to Waits, why wouldn't that be a good reason? If you only listen to music that reflects your own personal experience, you might as well sit around listening to the recorded hum of your kitchen appliances.

We consume art, I believe, to travel to places we've never been, experience things we've never seen, felt, or heard, and the best art transports us to another being, without our even noticing -- and that is why I, at least, also create art. To conjure -- from the flotsam and jetsam of everything I've ever read, everyone I've ever spoken with, and all the other songs I've heard -- the mind of a character whose story is very different than mine is a fascinating and satisfying alchemical enterprise.

Certainly there are dangers to this approach; when I write a song from the perspective of, for example, a spurned woman or the engineer of a doomed train, I do not know what it is actually like to be a woman or a train engineer, and I risk misrepresenting those experiences. But good art, I think, can -- and should -- accept those challenges. If Homer or Shakespeare or Bob Dylan had only written about what they knew, would anybody care about the work they produced? I certainly wouldn't put my three-chord ditties on par with the masters, but hell -- I'm the one who has to live with them for the rest of my life, so they better at least be interesting to me.

P.S. If you're interested, Gabrielle and I will be back at Schubas on December 12 (tickets on sale now!), opening for Jill Andrews.

Tracking the Law School's Social Media

2010-10-26T08:40:00.005-05:00

(cross-posted at The University of Chicago Law School's Electronic Projects Blog)

I recently spent some time immersed in Google Analytics, trying to track the effectiveness of some of the Law School's social media efforts. As these results may be of interest to colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, I thought I'd share the results here.

Goals
The goals of the Law School’s social media presence are:

to increase engagement between the Law School with both current students and alumni, thereby strengthening their bond with the school;
to increase engagement with prospective students, thereby increasing the chances that those students will choose to attend Chicago over one of our peer schools;
and to increase awareness in the general public about the achievements of the Law School’s faculty, students, and alumni.

The primary method for achieving these goals is to distribute content from the Law School’s website through a highly dispersed network of “followers” and “fans,” and to allow those followers to not only consume our content but to spread it to their own friends/followers.

Tracking Method
My measurement for tracking the effectiveness of this method is to trace the amount of traffic driven to our website by these social media channels, as a means of indicating consumption of the content contained therein. I did this by creating segments based on referring URLs and examining the content consumed by the different segments. Of course, visits and pageviews are not perfect indicators of content consumption, but they are the best option that I could figure out how to measure using Google Analytics. It should be noted that the numbers below are based on sampled data rather than absolute numbers.

Facebook

The Law School currently has just over 2,000 fans on its Facebook page, an average of 450 of which are active on the page in a given month.
Between 10/1/09 and 10/01/10, Facebook sent nearly 8500 visitors to the Law School website (this does not include the number that it sent to the Faculty Blog [just over 350] or the Becker-Posner Blog [just over 4,000]).
Other than search engines and the University’s site, only Wikipedia and Leiter’s Law School Reports sent more visitors during that period.
27% of visitors from Facebook had never before visited the Law School’s site. This means two things:
- 1) over 2200 people who had never visited the Law School’s site before were brought there by Facebook, and
- 2) the remaining 6300 visits were from people who engage with the Law School repeatedly.
18,728 pageviews resulted from Facebook
- 17% were views of the home page
- 16% were views of “student” pages
- 7% were views of “news” pages
- 7% were views of “prospective” pages
- 3% were views of “alumni” pages
- 2% were views of audio/video pages

Twitter

During the same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, Twitter.com sent nearly 5,000 visitors to the Law School’s website; however, because of the many different ways people can access Twitter (third-party applications, etc.), it is likely that the actual minimum number sent from the Twitter platform is closer to 6,000, and the total could be as high as 10,000.
The Law School currently has over 3,500 followers on its primary account.
19,013 pageviews resulted from Twitter.com
- 22% were views of the homepage
- 8% were views of “student” pages
- 4% were views of “news” pages
- 33% were views of “prospective” pages
- 2% were views of “alumni” pages
- 1% were views of audio/video pages

LinkedIn

During that same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, while only 492 visitors came from our LinkedIn group, 40% of those were new visitors. This is important because we know that the vast majority of our interactions with LinkedIn users tend to be with alumni, so this stat potentially indicates that alumni who are not otherwise visiting the Law School’s site are engaging with the Law School there.
There are currently just over 1,300 members of our LinkedIn group.
1,552 pageviews resulted from LinkedIn
- 18% were views of the homepage
- 6% were views of “student” pages
- 18% were views of “news” pages
- 4% were views of “prospective” pages
- 4% were views of “alumni” pages
- 4% were views of audio/video pages

The biggest surprise for me out of all of these results was the large percentage of "prospective" pageviews generated by Twitter; I really had no idea whether our Twitter feed was reaching prospective students or not, but it appears that they are indeed our largest and/or most engaged audience on Twitter.

So, what do you make of these numbers, and how do they compare to your own? Suggestions for ways to improve both the accuracy of these results and the effectiveness of our social media efforts are, of course, more than welcome.

Update: One stat that I forgot to mention: all of those pageviews generated by our social media were equal to just 1% of our total pageviews for that time period, which seemed surprisingly low to me. However, visitors referred by social media spent approximately 33% more time per page than the average time per page, which indicates that while social media may not be driving massive amounts of traffic, it is driving people who are more likely to actually engage with our content.

Can a Hashtag Get You Sued?

2010-09-10T18:14:00.001-05:00

Alternative title to this post: "How Not to Use Twitter as a Business Tool, Vol. 842"

A colleague of mine recently expressed, via his personal Twitter feed, dissatisfaction with a product that he is required to work with as part of his job. The tweet included a hashtag inferring that the product in question was, in effect, utter garbage. Since my colleague has expressed a desire not to bring further attention to the situation, I won't mention the name of the product or the company that produces it, but suffice it to say that this is a company that goes out of its way to cultivate customers in the higher ed world, sponsoring networking and social events -- and, indeed, social networks -- specifically for the higher ed web community.

Now, everyone knows that good social media tactics include monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of your brand or product, and responding to those mentions. The companies that do it best take criticism on Twitter (Twittercism?) as an opportunity to apologize to a frustrated user and get feedback about how their product or service might be improved.

So how did this company respond?

With an email and multiple phone calls at his work number, threatening legal action if the offending tweet was not removed or retracted.

This "strategy," if you can call it that, is really nothing short of insane. The backlash that could result from such bully tactics could very quickly destroy the goodwill that this company has spent a lot of time and money trying to build in the higher ed web community. Let's hope they come to their senses.

New Website! Or, I Am My Worst Client

2010-08-26T16:27:00.002-05:00

Today I officially announce the launch of my new-and-improved, new-look-same-great-taste, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back personal website. There are a few more things to do (updating my email signature and Twitter avatar, perhaps business cards) to make the rest of my online presence consistent with the new site, but I feel comfortable enough with it to release it into the wild (comments and feedback are, as always, welcome and appreciated).

Before

The old site, which launched in late 2007, was showing its age, and badly, with some of the web 2.0 cliches of its era (I'm looking at you, orange.) The new one cleans up the information architecture and rolls out a new look that I think fits better with my "personal brand" (or, as they used to call it, my "personality"). In some ways, the new look harkens back to my very first freelance website from 10 years ago... but no Papyrus on this one, thank you very much.

I had actually been working on this relaunch for quite some time. It's a common lament among designers that creating one's own identity pieces is surprisingly hard; after all, how do you visually communicate your ability to create visual communications? And while they say you are your own worst critic, I've decided that I am also my own worst client. Consider the following list of sins that every designer dreads encountering in a client:

I changed my mind on designs that I had already signed off on, for reasons that were largely arbitrary.
I ignored deadlines that I had set for myself.
I flaked out and abandoned the project for months at a time.

I'm sure that if I had been charging myself, I probably would have been late with payment, as well. But this self-branding exercise is helpful for all designers to go through. The skill at the core of good design, I believe, is empathy -- the ability to put oneself in the shoes of, say, a website's users or a customer's clients. I think we've all had clients where we just don't understand why it's so damn hard for them to make a decision, or to provide content they promised by the date they themselves suggested, or whatever. Being our own client, however, reminds us that these things are not always as easy as we might think.