Catching up on TechCrunch this morning I came across a post about Netflix and its attitudes towards its employees. Inspiring to say the least. They seem to value a culture that puts the company and the people on even footing — a place where you make decisions with the best interests of your life and the company. The slide presentation below is said to be a leaked internal presentation that was designed to shed light on the company’s policies. No matter what it is, it shows that Netflix has figured out that motivated and interested people make a huge difference. Kinda makes you...

The debate over when to build, buy, or use is one that rages in higher education information technology units all the time. I am constantly asked why we’d run that service versus just relying on someone else to host it for us. I sit in meetings where the debate over taking something off the shelf for our use is weighed against our desire to build it. It never ends and I don’t expect to ever really have a solid answer. Not too long ago, I was sitting and talking to Brad Kozlek about our choice to run our own blogging platform. I go through these massive swings about the topic —...

Last week I went to beautiful Bedford Springs, PA to speak to Superintendents from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit … it was both intimidating and exciting. I am always a little nervous speaking to K-12 educators because I always make the mistake of thinking our worlds are so different. It was exciting because I always end up finding out how similar our problems and issues really are. This was no different. I went in thinking I was out of my element and left with a new found appreciation and confidence in my understanding of our shared issues. I shared a mix of stories and statistics...

That seems to be the general reaction I get from people when I start talking Intranets. Back in the day we didn’t really think about how we worked to use the web to influence what was going on inside an organization — we were so damn busy just trying to build and launch some sort of externally facing site. I recall our first Intranet at Cogence Media back in 1996 … it was an old Apple FileServer that we discovered we could deep link into via a browser. The funny thing was that we didn’t do this deep linking via web pages, we did it from a bunch of individual Word documents...

We’ve all known it would happen sooner or later … well, it happened. This is certainly not new news, but it is a very good development — Google let the cat out of the bag for its forthcoming web-based version of PowerPoint, Google Presentations. What is exciting is that this is collaboration on the creations side — unlike tools like SlideShare. They got here by acquiring Tonic Systems and in the linked blog post they welcome to the Google team. I honestly have no idea if this can compete with PowerPoint — I know for a fact it can’t offer the slick look that...

I am sure this isn’t news to anyone, but it appears as though much of the web is in a constant state of beta. Think Gmail and its constant little reminder that this isn’t a real service … heck it could go away at any moment. I use it, my wife lives in it, and lots of people at the University forward all of their mail to it. Does anyone care it could disappear? I use Flickr for all my online photo storage and sharing … I do this even though I have a .Mac account that is not a “gamma” product like Flickr. I notice lots and lots of people spending time in...

One of the core concepts we have been working towards within ETS at PSU is the idea of creating more opportunities to engage our community. If you have spent any time here over the last year you know our community is huge. We throw around numbers like 100,000 when talking about our statewide faculty, staff, and student numbers. When you are dealing with massive scale and the geographic challenges our campus system creates you need to get creative about how you get people engaged. Clearly with a staff of 35 or so folks you can reach a lot of people, but not the kinds of numbers we hope to....

We’ve been talking about the importance of opportunity … in this case, we are interested in providing an opportunity for our group to easily create content in the form of podcasts. I am seeing how podcasting can be used to impact an organization in ways that just a few months ago hadn’t even crossed my mind. I have been listening to the Podcast Academy podcasts and although almost all of them focus on corporate podcasting, the series has shifted my perspective. When the ETS Leadership team went off site last week we spent an hour discussing strategies for encouraging the use...