The University's marketing machine seems to be making some tentative forays into the world of Web 2.0 marketing as the start of the academic year looms. The Purple Door bods have a "Facebook flyer" (advert) on Facebook advertising their Purple Door graduate recruitment service:

Interesting stuff, and clearly they've recognising Facebook's value as a student community portal. I don't - from limited experience - recall seeing University advertising on MySpace or Bebo, for example.

Perhaps the key difference here is that Facebook lets advertisers market only to members of a specific network; in this case, people in the University of Portsmouth network (i.e. people with an @port.ac.uk e-mail address).

One tiny problem though - someone seems to have mis-typed the University's web address - clicking the flyer takes you to a non-existant web address, http://port.ac.uk:

Ahh well, mistakes happen :o) Watch this space for some UPSU Facebook flyers... ;o)

/al - eating my words a little...

Earlier this evening, a friend put me on to Tiesto's weekly trance music podcast, called "Tiesto's club life podcast - Radio 538". If you like your trance, you'll almost certainly want to hear this.

Subscribe via the iTunes store (search for Tiesto and look under "podcasts"), jump to the XML podcast feed (copy and paste the URL into iTunes or whatever generic MP3 player you use), or (if you read Dutch), find out more here.

It's, like, an hour of free trance music. Lovely stuff :o)

/al - it's about time I wrote another update, but I'm up to my eyeballs in the new NUS card issue system right now, and need some sleep... 

Too much going on at the moment to get my head around, and even more I can't begin to work on because I just don't have time...

What's happening...

• Asking every student with a passing interest in media to get involved with writing and designing for the Union this year,
  
• Looking at ways of re-organising the media teams to make it easier for the Union's strong and diverse media content to make it into the student population's consciouness - better sharing of news, better communications between the various media groups, and encouraging more - and faster - communications between students and student groups, and the Union,
• Building up - with more than a little bit of help - a large amount of training materials and opportunities for students to get a lot more from being involved with UPSU Media. Ben Norman's been working hard on some journalistic training which made for strangely compelling reading over the weekend,
• Directory 2007 - Mike Cooter and Steve Baker have been working their arses off for this, and it's coming together nicely I think,
  
• Pompey Guide - Gamel Oki (Pugwash designer extraordinaire) has been cracking the whip to get me writing for the Pompey Guide 2007, so when you come across the really boring couple of pages, you can blame me,
• New newspaper - we now need to start thinking about a name, layouts, designs, content and presentation styles, and how much space we're going to have (or not) per issue. Don't worry - I'm confident we'll squeeze it all in nicely,
• Still setting up the iMacs for UPSU Media use - no sooner do I think it's all done and ready to be unleashed when someone thinks of another program to install,
• Loads of work on the UPSU Groups and NUS Registration systems,
• Building up a long list of UoP-related Facebook groups so we can get our news out to even more students than before,
• Sabbs DJing in Lux on the 28th September, around 9pm - yehay!
• New season of Heroes coming shortly - will it be any good?
• Poking fun at abusive freshers who don't have the nous to sign out of their accounts before posting abusive comments on the website ;o)

What's not happening...

• The blogs homepage being redesigned,
• The forums template being redesigned,
• Grad Ball videos being edited down (actually, that gives me an idea...),
  
• UPSU Groups being finished, with comments, forums, photo and document uploads and many other things, err, not being done,
  
• My to-do list getting much shorter.

Tomorrow we're off for some staff bondage while climbing trees on a hovercraft... Something like that...

/Al - Meeja Whore 

• BBC News - "Copter crash near McRae property"
• Telegraph - "Colin McRae feared dead in helicopter crash"

UPSU newspaper is go - starting with 8 pages per issue, fortnightly, possibly in colour. New iMacs are still lovely (lots of cooing and stroking... Too much information?). Fraggy, Steve and Mike are making the Directory look very nice indeed. Wallplanners are still here. Freshers' Fortnight is looking great. Extreme Sports night @ UPSU, anyone? Journalists, writers and designers wanted for the newspaper - want to get involved? Call me! The Union - Use It, Keep It, Love It, hokay? Uhhm... I'll think of some more stuff later...

/al