I received the following comment on my blog a couple weeks ago:

“Yeah blogging is really a great way to help people. Great job. I salute you for doing such a great job. ”

The comment felt like it was spam. The post that was commented on was almost a year old and the comment seemed like it was just a way for the commenter to get their link on a blog post on blogging and academic advising.

As most of you know, I am an avid web statistics aficionado. The same day that the spammy comment was submitted (I moderate all new comments) I noticed two inbound referral links from a couple of Google Docs spreadsheets. My concerns that the comment was from a spammer were confirmed. In fact, I had stumbled upon two link spam documents that had been left open for anyone to see. A SEO company known as “Virtual Assistant” (link is to the Better Business Bureau listing…I love the irony!) was waging a concerted link spam campaign and my site had been “selected” for one of their spam comments.

I quickly saved copies of the link spam documents.

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My blog has been nominated to be included in the BlogHighEd network. This higher ed blogging network is jam packed with a lot of webmasters, marketers, counselors, vendors, and consultants.

It would be wonderful if you could take a couple seconds and vote for my higher education blog posts at:

http://www.bloghighed.org/vote/

My higher education posts can be found at:
http://ericstoller.com/blog/tag/higher-education/

If my site gets enough votes, it will be the only BlogHighEd blog that is authored by an Academic Advisor. Many thanks to all those that have already voted. I really appreciate it.

Cheers!
~Eric

I am an avid web statistics viewer. Recently, an inbound link to my post on Line Rider Badminton caught my eye.

A teacher at Lisgar Collegiate Institute had linked to my Line Rider blog post on a wikispaces.com site for an advanced function math course. My post is listed as a resource for determining where the Line Rider .sol file is located. What a nifty way of teaching math. Create your own Line Rider track.

Here’s a snapshot of the Line Rider assignment for Mr. Tang’s math class:

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I love it when an individual commenter attempts to comment with multiple identities. Silly comment trolls. I can see your IP address. Moderated, first-time comments go into the moderation queue. When commenter “A” responds to a comment that “B” just left and both comments are in the queue, klaxons go off in my inner-thought-o-sphere. How could “A” know what “B” just said when “B’s” comment is still hidden from public viewing.

Silly comment trolls. Keep trying to comment with as many false names as you want. You will not be fed.

Advisor Creates Blog About Flood

Damage from this summer’s flooding in Iowa extended all the way to Oregon State.

Eric Stoller, an academic advisor at OSU, is from Columbus Junction, Iowa; a town of about 2,000 people that was besieged by water in June when the Iowa and Cedar Rivers overran their banks.

“The only way I could do something to help was to put information up on my blog,” Stoller said.

The transplanted Iowan is quite tech savvy. In a previous job, he worked as a Web consultant and he also built the OSU Admissions department’s blog. He started his personal blog in 2004, mostly as a way to publish his academic work and social justice views. In June, Stoller began posting flood photos and links to Southeast Iowa flooding news stories.

LIFE@OSU is the official newsletter for faculty, staff, graduate teaching assistants and other employees of Oregon State University. Produced in print every other week throughout the regular academic year and monthly during summer sessions, LIFE@OSU seeks to tell the stories of the people and programs of Oregon State with color and style, using all the tools of print and digital media to do so.

LIFE@OSU is intended to promote a civil discourse on campus and to foster a greater sense of community among the OSU work force.

Student Affairs Technology: To Boldly Go

“They should have explained the basic concepts at the beginning (e.g.: podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc.).”

“Helping me to boldly go where I’ve never been before.”

One of these statements is not like the other two. I’m sure you can guess which one gives me hope as a student affairs techie that we as a profession have not lost our willingness to learn, to explore and to stay positive about new technologies. This article represents a call to action for student affairs practitioners. The microblogging site, Twitter, has a feature that lets you “nudge” someone that you are following. This is me providing a gentle nudge to my fellow higher education administrators. I hope that you nudge me back. Let’s push the envelope. Let’s shift our professional paradigms. Let’s make technology (and learning about new technologies) a part of our daily practices.

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I’ve had numerous friends and family members who have unsubscribed or even flat out refused to read my blog. The reason given was usually that they didn’t agree with me. Some folks have even told me that they are afraid that if they read my blog that our friendship will cease to function/exist. My posts were too radical. Too many posts on social justice, higher education and technology.

I was thinking about how my blog is, not always, but sometimes, an insightful window into who I am. My writing lets you know who I am. By saying to me that you don’t want to read my blog because of what I write about, are you also saying that you don’t really want to know who I am? The complete me is something that you resist knowing? I am okay if you don’t want to read because you think my blog isn’t very good or that you disagree with my thoughts. I think most bloggers are okay with that.

I remember when my mom and my brother unsubscribed from my blog’s automatic email function. I was okay with them not agreeing with my posts, but I was concerned that they stopped reading. My brother might be reading via RSS. However, I am fairly certain that my mom just stopped reading. It felt like they didn’t want to know who I am. They wanted an incomplete me. A more palatable me.

I place who I am on this blog. If you refuse to read my blog, it feels like you really don’t want to know me. Who I am. Please don’t read if you don’t want to, but don’t tell me that you don’t read in order to maintain some sort of false sense of me.

One of the bitter ironies anti-racists face when working to end white-supremacist thinking and action is that the folks who most perpetuate it are the individuals who are usually the least willing to acknowledge that race matters. (bell hooks, Teaching Community, 2003, p. 28)

You may be wondering what 7 astronauts have to do with a quote about anti-racism work from bell hooks. I too would be curious. Well, let me attempt to fill in several bits of context and hopefully you’re wonder will be satiated.

Last week, while checking out a NASA-related post from one of my favorite blogs, the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture Blog,” I happened to observe that none of the 7 astronauts for NASA’s latest space shuttle mission were people of color.

There were already 15 comments on the post. Most of the comments praised the ingenuity of NASA or extolled the fantastically big pictures on the post/site. I decided to post a seemingly innocent question regarding the racial makeup of the 7 astronauts in picture #23:

The pool of astronauts isn’t the most diverse is it?
7 white people. 6 guys and only 1 woman. Where are the astronauts of color??? ~Eric Stoller

I had no idea that my comment would generate a shower of racist rhetoric and inflammatory comments.

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I returned from yurting to see that ORblogs is going to be shut down.
I then read in my rss reader that ORblogs might be resurrected.

Thank you for reading and contributing to the site. ORblogs has stopped gathering post excerpts from Oregon blogs, though the current weblog directory will be available for another 30 days.

When I started ORblogs in March 2003, there weren’t many good ways to find bloggers living in a particular area. And because I had recently moved to Corvallis, I wanted to learn what I could from people living near me. The site personally put me in touch with bloggers across the state, taught me a lot about Oregon and its cities (including Corvallis), and I hope the site did the same for others. I feel ORblogs served an important role for Oregon blogging by gathering independent voices across all spectrums into one place where everyone shared a common geography.

I’m shutting ORblogs down now because the site continues to grow and the job of maintaining the site at the level I feel is necessary to keep it valuable has grown with it, putting it out of the bounds of a hobby. I wasn’t able to make ORblogs self-sustaining financially (let alone turn it into a job), and I can no longer devote the time to the site that it needs to grow. Blogging has changed significantly in five years, and blogging is no longer a hobby for many—it’s a job. Commercial blogging isn’t as interesting to me as the personal web and that factored into my decision as well.

Thanks again for making ORblogs what it has been over the years. Please take a last look through the directory, find your favorite Oregon blogs, and subscribe to them in your newsreader if you haven’t already. There are some spectacular voices in Oregon blogging that I will now have to read another way. I still believe it’s important to read locally while I read globally, and I hope you agree and continue to make the effort.

— Paul Bausch (9/4/2008)

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