If you hover over the “All Sports” link on ESPN and click the “College Basketball” link, you are taken to ESPN’s coverage of Men’s College Basketball.

The link to “Women’s Basketball” takes you to ESPN’s coverage of Women’s College Basketball.

ESPN is placing one gender (Men) over another (Women) by placing Men’s Basketball as the normative or neutral “College Basketball”. It’s a not so subtle difference…

Google engages in this gender-preferential activity too…a search for “Texas basketball“* lists the most recent score for the men’s Texas Longhorns basketball team. You have to search for “Women’s Texas basketball” to get information on the women’s team.

Title IX may have increased funding and the number of teams in women’s collegiate athletics. However, the above examples illustrate that men’s collegiate sports are still quite overtly at the “center” of mainstream media. “Women’s basketball” is seen as outside the norm and “basketball” as the domain of men.

It’s also important to note that gender, a fluid social construct, as Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf write, needs to be discussed at great length in the context of all sports.

*Please note that this is in no way limited to searches for Texas..unfortunately, this seems widespread for Google search queries.

Google does not always create accessible products (GoogleWave). However, sometimes they do a good job of increasing the accessibility of an existing service. I hope that Vimeo gets the message that accessibility is important.

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

[Google] combined their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

Google Wave is “totally inaccessible.” According to Web Accessibility in Mind’s (Web AIM) Jared Smith.

Smith’s list of Google Wave’s inaccessible aspects is quite disappointing:

• Alternative text is not provided for any images.
• Background images are used to convey content.
• Roles, states, and other accessibility properties are not defined.
• There is no document or heading structure or semantics. None! Not even a list!
• Form elements do not have labels or titles.
• Keyboard focus indication is hidden, making keyboard navigation nearly impossible.
• Most interactive elements are not in the tab order or do not respond to keyboard activation.
• Keyboard focus is often trapped, requiring the page or browser to be closed to resume keyboard navigation.
• The application becomes unusable and unreadable when text size is increased only slightly.

I concur with Smith’s hope that Google Wave will be made into an accessible product. It’s too bad that accessibility was not part of the initial framework of Google Wave. How many times do we have to experience something built with either brick/mortar or “1’s and 0’s” that is not accessible for all users? Ableism is so pervasive. C’mon Google…you can’t really be “great” if you’re not making great things for everyone to use.

I recently received an invite to the Google Wave beta. The day after I received my invite, I demoed Google Wave to some of the faculty at OSU. We started brainstorming ways in which we could use Google Wave. (It should be noted that the limitations of Blackboard were frequently mentioned in this conversation.) I immediately started pondering how Google Wave could be useful for Academic Advisors in academic advising.

The initial question after I showed my Google Wave account on the big screen was quite simple — what is it? The answer is very complicated. Google Wave is a new way of communicating and collaborating that uses a lot of the elements in current web tools.

Google Wave overview:

Google Wave has the potential to be an exciting new web tool for group advising, content repurposing via Wave embeds, classroom discussions, shared academic advising knowledge bases, collaborative document creation/sharing between advisors/students and distance advising.

The list of Google Wave possibilities is seemingly limited to one’s imagination and creativity.

Google has a new app called “Wave.” It’s billed as communication and collaboration tool. I would say that it’s probably going to be the tool of choice in the next 5 years for anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, WordPress, any IM Client, etc. If Google Wave catches on, Zuckerberg will wish that he’d sold Facebook when he had the chance.

Microsoft is the “new” IBM. They just don’t know it yet. Sorry Redmond.

Several higher education websites have revamped their campus maps. The map-making-mashup technology of choice seems to be the Google Maps API.

Here are a few examples of university campus maps that utilize Google Maps:

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Congratulations to Oregon State University student, Joshua Zuniga, for winning one of the 2007 Google Hispanic College Fund Scholarships.

The Google Scholarship Program offers funds to students studying computer science or computer engineering who are juniors or seniors in college or pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Selected scholars will be invited to an all-expenses paid trip to the Google Headquarters in California in January 2008.

Google has apparently modified their PageRank algorithm. My site’s PageRank has dropped from a pleasant PR of 5 to a rookie year low of 1. One interesting part of the PageRank dip is that other sections of my site still have PageRanks of 2, 3, and 4.

In other techie news, one of my clients, AACRAO Consulting, has a PageRank that has increased from a PR of 0 (the effects of being brand new) to a PR of 5 (a number that I used to be fond of…).

Feel free to see if the PageRank change-o-rama has affected your site.

Bad news via Kottke.

via the Official Google Blog:

• Web Search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.
  
• Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.
  
• Book Search: Full-text access to public-domain works.
  
• Gmail: A simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screenreaders.
  
• Gmail Mobile: A lightweight user interface that is also speech-friendly.
  
• Google Maps: Easy-to-use textual directions.
  
• Calendar: A functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.
  
• Audio Captchas: All services that use Google Accounts provide an audio alternative for the visual challenge-response tests that are used to distinguish humans from machines.
  
• Mobile Transcoder: A mobile lens for viewing the web that produces accessible views.
  
• Google Video: Allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or unfamiliar with the original language.
  
• Google Talk: IM clients inside a web browser can pose accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.
  
• Web APIs: Many Google services offer high-level web APIs that aid in authoring mashups; this provides a means for creating highly customized accessible views.
• 1-800-GOOG-411: Here’s an exception to the rule that we deliver most things through a web browser. Our experimental Voice Local Search service lets anyone who can speak into a phone search for a local business by name or category; get connected to the business free of charge; get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. (Just say “text message”.)

The folks at FeedBurner announced today that they have been purchased by Google.

I use FeedBurner to “burn” my RSS feed to all of my RSS readers. You know, all 9 of you In addition to RSS readers, the RSS feed from FeedBurner enables me to send email digests of my posts to about 50 folks.

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