The Imperial student bloggers were chosen through a first week of term, 600 word competition.

Home of one of the world’s most discreet top banners, the Wired Campus blog is a subsection of US-based The Chronicle of Higher Education. It looks to be regularly updated with a high standard of well-researched articles. Current front page examples include:

• Obama Web Gurus Court College Fund Raisers
• Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool
• After Police Confiscate His Computer, Boston College Student Fights Back
• How Social Networking Affects the Student Life Cycle — From Applicant to Graduate
• Twitter Film Festival Goes Live at Duke U

Another promising blog from the makers of eduStyle.net and educheckup.com, EDU Snippits provides quick links through to single well-designed elements in university websites.  (sorry to say I dislike the first snippit though).

New blog Dojo Web Strategy is a great, simple idea with great, simple advice – ‘your daily fix of higher education marketing, web and email do’s and don’ts’.

From the last week:

• Do give your student bloggers specific topics
• Don’t have a ‘Message from the Dean’
• Don’t feature pictures of buildings
• Do humanize your admissions staff

Future of Scholarship [creative commons image from Alan Levine]

Scholarships World – “a blog on the latest Scholarships, Fellowshiops, Grants, Research postitions & Postdoctoral Vacancies across the World” – allows free posting of any position.

‘Written by a crack team of university staff and graduates … to try and make your university experience as great as it can be by giving you the advice you need to help you through what can be a really stressful, uncertain and busy time of your life’

The Uni Survival contributors share a great writing style for their student audience and the advice looks spot-on and genuinely useful. A really nice approach to blog publishing as well with the About us information so prominent in the design and clear guidelines for free republishing of their material by student magazines/newsletters/websites/etc.

A tag cloud for Universities and the Web

Just discovered Tony Hirst’s excellent OUseful.Info blog, which yesterday had an exercise every site manager should try with their content. In Applying SEO to the Course Catalogue, Tony shows tag clouds comparing the text on a course description page with the search terms that are sending traffic to the site. I’d love to see the tag cloud of the search terms used by those who should have been our audience but never found us!

From the ‘About us’:

“This is an independent project that uses Google technology to explore the rankings of colleges and universities around the world. We are not Google employees and this project is not sponsored or endorsed by Google — it just uses the excellent Google search engine to shed light on the university rankings business. The site’s editor has more than ten years’ experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator, and has visited and spoken at many colleges and universities in the United States and around the world.”

Their methods produce this list of the ‘Best UK Universities‘:

1. University of Cambridge
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Birmingham
4. University of Manchester
5. University of Leeds
6. Durham University
7. University of Edinburgh
8. University of Warwick
9. University College London
10. University of Southampton