Monday, July 18, 2005
asking the right questions
A few months back, I won a $100 American Express gift cheque for asking the best question at a Network World event ... they asked people to drop their candidates for "best question of the day" into a basket throughout the morning, and at the end of the day, they sorted through all of them and the final panel picked their favorite. Mine won.
I remind y'all of this (I'm sure I blogged about it at the time) today because I just came from a session at my university Web geek conference where a seasoned sales guy talked about the phenomenon of higher ed blogging while we all ate lunch. I've heard rumblings about how we should be exploiting this cutting-edge technology in bits and pockets across campus, but until just now I'd never heard of a single concrete example of what CONTENT we could podcast that would serve the greater mission of our Web site. Today, though, I got lots of good ideas.
However, that said, at the end of dude's highly exuberant presentation, I raised my hand and asked the question I'd been wanting to ask for the last half of his presentation (because of something he said, actually), and it was: "What about accessibility? Do we actually have to *transcribe* all of the podcasts we do?"
The room fell silent -- and we're talking about more than 140 Web geeks excited about the fact that we could speak geek without having to run it through our geek-to-English translator -- and after several seconds of quiet, the speaker dude just shrugged and said, "Wow. That's a REALLY good question -- I hadn't thought about it."
Ick.
In other Web geek news, just before lunch I met another Liz who's at Rice University in Houston. I lost her in the food court, but hope I'll get a chance to talk to her tonight at the "CRAB FEAST!!" (they're really excited about this crab feast thing) or tomorrow sometime.
I remind y'all of this (I'm sure I blogged about it at the time) today because I just came from a session at my university Web geek conference where a seasoned sales guy talked about the phenomenon of higher ed blogging while we all ate lunch. I've heard rumblings about how we should be exploiting this cutting-edge technology in bits and pockets across campus, but until just now I'd never heard of a single concrete example of what CONTENT we could podcast that would serve the greater mission of our Web site. Today, though, I got lots of good ideas.
However, that said, at the end of dude's highly exuberant presentation, I raised my hand and asked the question I'd been wanting to ask for the last half of his presentation (because of something he said, actually), and it was: "What about accessibility? Do we actually have to *transcribe* all of the podcasts we do?"
The room fell silent -- and we're talking about more than 140 Web geeks excited about the fact that we could speak geek without having to run it through our geek-to-English translator -- and after several seconds of quiet, the speaker dude just shrugged and said, "Wow. That's a REALLY good question -- I hadn't thought about it."
Ick.
In other Web geek news, just before lunch I met another Liz who's at Rice University in Houston. I lost her in the food court, but hope I'll get a chance to talk to her tonight at the "CRAB FEAST!!" (they're really excited about this crab feast thing) or tomorrow sometime.
// posted by Liz @ 10:38 AM 
