Interesting, D’Arcy points to Carl Berger blogging at the Apple Digital Campus Exchange Leadership Institute Blog (phew).
Particularly interesting as they’re using WordPress and even more so in that they seem to be using it in the most bizarre form ever… they call it a ‘community blog’.
Sorry Stephen but I don’t see this lasting beyond a few first posts, some follow-ups, one person doing most of the running and then it falling by the wayside… so “he will now experience first-hand what we have been talking about all along, which could only mean good things” isn’t what I think’ll happen… wrong environment & tools for job = not so good :o(
What they really should be doing, of course, is running a real community application like Drupal or even better thinking a little about centered communication and employing WPMU and maybe WP Aggregator. Then they might get it a little more.
In a way I reckon that no blogging is a lot better than badly executed blogging (and I know what I’m talking about when it comes to badly executing ;o)
Oh, and has anyone read the utterly horrific terms of use on this blog. Around 3,500 word long (8 pages copied into Word)… Apple are actually a bit evil aren’t they:
“…Stay on topic. The Site is here to help Educators to exchange ideas for more effective teaching and the use of Apple products and technologies to achieve that goal. Unless otherwise noted, don’t add Submissions about other topics, including things like:
• That Apple rumour you saw on another website.
• Discussions of Apple policies or procedures that don’t have a bearing on the Site’s appropriate subject matter.
• Speculations/rumours about unannounced products….”
My advice would be that they first figure out what a blog is and how to use it and then take their enormous BigCo ‘terms and conditions’ arse and haul it right back to graphic design, please… what’s with the URL to this site as well: http://edmarketing.apple.com/adcinstitute/
Calm now, back to holiday…
Apparently nobody from the Tiger Server team sent a memo to ed marketing telling them that Blojsom is going to be integrated into the next OS X server release.
Not sure why I feel like I need to defend Apple here … when the charter members of the ADC decided to create a community space, we (the schools) wanted Apple to use a real community toolset (drupal to be exact) … Apple jumped on board with this so late in the cycle that they hacked together a WP solution that seems odd at best. At the outset, they were going to give every attendee their own install!
With that said, the idea is that this is an interim step towards a larger, more long term solution. I know it sounds crazy, but they are already building this new community and they are planning to migrate a lot of the content from this space over.
As far as the terms of service goes … not the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. As a matter of fact, we (attendees/bloggers) had to actually sign the thing here last night at U of Missouri. That whole decision is what led me to post this the other day … and I got sort of flamed for it. My bottom line? I agree with most of what you are saying — wrong tool, strange TOS, and a short sighted solution. Good news is that this is a step in the right direction for Apple and it is an interim step at that. Keep an eye on the space the next couple of days, there will be some good things posted there.
Thanks for the comments guys.
I had the same thought as you tom ;o)
& I s’pose that the spirit is certainly in the right direction but all the same good ideas badly done tend to stuff up all concerned…
All that Apple would have had to do to get a heapload of feedback / ideas / expertise on how to do this well would’ve been to blog about it!
That they’re ignoring the schools in developing the community for them isn’t a good first step!
> If you want an earlier critique to figure out exactly how much Apple pay attention then have a look at my whining in April about the Apple digital campus blog.
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