Alumni magazines serve many purposes. They highlight the news and research at their institutions, and serve as prettied-up fund-raising vehicles. But their main appeal — as dormitory common rooms for grown-ups — has increasingly been usurped by Facebook and similar Web sites.

“Over all, universities have been reluctant to embrace social media as a communications channel because they fear a lack of control,” said Sam Huleatt, a Johns Hopkins alumnus. “Most schools now understand that they must establish some presence if they wish to remain relevant in the lives of their graduates.”

Johns Hopkins recently adopted InCircle, a Facebook-like application only open to students and alumni, Mr. Huleatt said.

The details that people include in class notes has evolved over the years, perhaps reflecting a younger generation’s tendency to share more. While some alumni magazines cling to the milestones of marriages, moves, births and deaths, others let people vent about personal issues, often in a way that is well-suited to online conversations.

“They’re talking about everything from their latest career move and how they’re managing it, to raising children with disabilities, taking care of elderly parents,” said John MacMillan, editor of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

The management of class notes is an important issue, since fund-raising efforts hinge on making graduates feel connected to their schools.

Excerpt…

Although cultural differences and personal prejudices about The Way Things Should Be have challenged us at FlickrHQ, we never mediate group dynamics: our members must be left to their own devices. Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.

Steady, careful growth

Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.” It simply must happen gradually. It must be cared for, and hosted; it takes time and people with great communication skills to set the tone and tend the conversation.

When Flickr was born, Caterina Fake and I spent many hours greeting new members personally. We opened up chat windows with each new visitor to say “Hi! I work here, and I’d love to help you get started, if you have any questions.” We also provided public forums where staff were present and interactive. Those decisions proved crucial, because apart from creating points where we could inject a certain culture, it was all so personal.

If you want to stir your audience on a rapidly growing community site, take advantage of what we learned—hire a community manager. Or two. You’ll need a clever communicator with a lot of experience being online to help welcome people and provide ongoing support as your community grows. Show your personality and be available. Flickr’s tone is not necessarily suitable for every community, but the point is, the tone is evident everywhere you look.

Personal voice, unobtrusive design

I adore it when people tell me that Flickr makes them feel a certain way. From the outset, I worked hard to make the site seem as if there was a person behind the screen talking to you. As we churned out pages to piece the site together, I obsessed about copy all over the place to make Flickr sound human. From the labels on submit buttons—“Get in there!” to log in, to the copy that shows up if something goes wrong—“Forgotten your password? Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us,” or “An empty comment box? That won’t work!” Exclamations like Yay! Woo! Bonk! Rock! Yee har! make people feel like they’re progressing and doing things well.

We consciously chose to make the site design appear plain and simple, despite its deep complexity. A white background, blue links, sans-serif font, and largely gray palette all present the site as a straightforward place. The look of the place must never overwhelm the photos themselves. We also tried to create an egalitarian playing field. At a glance, visitors can’t differentiate a professional photographer with an enormous lens from an enthusiast just getting started in photography. There is no indication of “quality” apart from the content itself. That also means that it’s up to the viewer to decide for themselves which photos they like to look at and explore without prejudice.

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It’s Presidents day, two weeks before the Texas primary, and Adam Ukman has come to the small city of San Marcos to train precinct captains for Barack Obama. A soft-spoken native of Houston, Ukman has served on the campaign’s front lines in Iowa and Utah, organizing grass-roots supporters to secure decisive victories in both states. This evening, more than eighty residents of San Marcos have crammed into a yellow clapboard recreation center on a street dotted with shacks that date from the Jim Crow era. “Our job is not to run in here to tell you how it’s going to be,” Ukman tells them. “This is your campaign. Not our campaign.”

Something is happening. We’ve seen glimpses of it in the past - we’ve heard whispers about it - we’ve seen glimmers of it before - but we’ve never actually seen it grow and coalesce like this - in real-time.

What I’m talking about is the Long Tail of Politics and how technology is driving its growth.

For those of you not familiar with Long Tail theory, in 2004, Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson asserted that the internet enables companies to capture and monetize the attention of thousands and millions of users, instead of monetizing the attention of a few large users.

For example, Amazon is able to profitably sell a large variety of books (representing The Long Tail) versus just selling a few bestsellers (representing The Head). Thus, the “tail” is quantifiably larger than the “head.”

The Long Tail and its business merits have already been debated heavily on the web with some arguing that The Long Tail only applies to certain models and others arguing that The Long Tail is a Sisyphean Myth - that it is impossible to achieve or maintain profitability leveraging The Long Tail alone. In other words, they argue that The Long Tail is the gravy of one’s business while The Head is the meat and potatoes.

Only in retrospect are we able to judge the success or failure of Long Tail business models. Examples of Long Tail success include Amazon, Netflix, Google; while examples of failure include Tower Records and Blockbuster.

Which is why Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics is such an historic event. We are witnessing the birth and evolution of The Long Tail effect right before our eyes.

Read the whole thing.

Over the past few months, we’ve gotten tantalizing hints of the level of integration of online and offline organizing that the Obama campaign has achieved. For instance, of the $32 million that his campaign raised last month, $28 million came in online, and though the vast majority of donations were small, this also tells us that the Obama people must have pushed almost ALL of their fundraising online, even for the people who would normally send a large check.

He writes…

Take my friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who moderates the sprawling, delightful message-boards on Making Light, a group-blog where the message boards run the gamut from the war in Iraq to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction, and where they discussion is almost always civil.

Teresa is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll’s message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole.

Teresa calls it “having an ear for text” and she is full of maddeningly unquantifiable tips for spotting the right rod to twiddle to keep the reactor firing happily without sparking a meltdown.

…

If you want to fight trolling, don’t make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won’t discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

Troll whisperers aren’t necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there’s always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling — removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly — so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian’s observed needs.

But there aren’t enough Teresas to go around: how do we keep all the other message-boards troll-free? Again, the secret is in observing the troll whisperer in the field, looking for techniques that can be encapsulated in tutorials and code. There is a wealth of troll whisperer lore that isn’t pure intuition and good sense, techniques that can be turned into tools for the rest of us to use.

Read the whole thing…

This should help make professional collaboration in the higher ed Web-centric world a bit easier.

Here are two different but equally interesting interviews (thanks to MyDD)…

From an interview with YouTube…

And from PoliticsTV…

Like Zack Exley in the political world, she writes about exactly the kinds of things I’m interested in — using the power of technology to create new relationships between institutions and their supporters. To move beyond the top-down vs. bottom-up arguments to create a new kind of synthesis that works to the benefit of both.

Like her recent series, How to Build a User Community (Part One and Part Two), she offers fantastic ideas on how to do this.

So, it was very disturbing to learn of the truly weird attacks being waged against her.

And it is causing a very profound ripple effect on the many thought leaders of this whole movement — as it exposes the darkness of human nature which clearly exists in both the real and the virtual.

The BBC has more…

Keep the faith, Kathy.

From educator, Carl Fisch on his blog, the Fischbowl…