Who Owns the Web II
I want to be as clear as possible that what follows is neither complaint or criticism; I’m simply noticing how things work, and how hard it is to maintain any semblance of control-or-command in a web enabled world:
A colleague suggested that I could find out how to ‘get something on the SU Home page’ by going to http://www.syracuse.edu/aboutSite.html a logical idea, and indeed under the ‘SU Website Contacts’ heading there is a link to a ‘feedback form’. My guess is that this works something like the ‘letters to the editor’ protocol in old fashioned print journalism; that is if your idea is good enough it just might make it far enough up the food chain to get implementation. Of course it still doesn’t tell us who the editor or editorial board might be, or where the buck might stop.
Another interesting discovery is that if you select the link under Resources for SU Webmasters* you’ll be taken to ‘Syracuse University Web Guide’ and what you’ll notice is that this page doesn’t look any thing like the previous page. A bit of exploration and you will discover that much the advice and admonition refers to the old Website design, and more to the point that the new SU site doesn’t seem to follow the old rules. The moral being: “Billy, it’s alive! It’s about aesthetics, design, and, please God, common-sense, not rules or even ‘best practices’.”
