I can add a new thing to my higher ed career list – taking a TV commercial from inception through editing and into production and onto the air.

The spot was written by our marketing team here at John Carroll University and shot and edited by my long-time friends at Route1a. It aired on cable and broadcast TV in a few midwest cities.

An awesome experience from start to finish.

They’re using Geolocation and GeoIP services to customize content based on where I’m coming from. When I loaded the page, I was greeted with content specifically geared towards Ohio, where I’m located. It looks like this. You can click on it for a larger version.

Using a few web proxies, I got a message and graphic for a few other states, such as the great state of Delaware.

What up, Delaware?

So far, OKC is just using this to show a graphic and a message telling me they love my state, which to be honest I don’t know if I even do yet, but it does present an interesting opportunity.

It would be easy to display content directly related to my state, such as the admission counselor assigned to my region, if they’re going to be in my area for interviews or college fairs, or some current students and alumni from my state.

Something to keep in mind with this type of customization is that it’s not always easy to tell where the user is from. As Steven Bell, who developed this for OKC noted, testing for this type of content is tough. Often, you’re the best guess of where the IP is located, and if you’re near a state or country border, you may get the wrong results.

Despite the challenges, it’s a pretty neat implementation of geolocation.

Wufoo is very full featured, with a robust API, a myriad of reporting options an several embedding options. We’ve been using it quite a bit as part of recruitment communications to customize and personalize forms as well as emails back to a user when they complete a form, which is really handy.

When we’ve had a support question or issue, it’s been answered and addressed quickly, which is nice.

So I’m 100% down with Wufoo, but I find myself wanting a few things that would take it to the next level.

1. Let me bring my own storage

At the level we’re at (the carpe diem plan at $69 a month), giving us only 3GB of storage is pretty silly. That amount of storage costs less than a dollar at any of the cloud storage services. Please, Wufoo, let me connect easily with my Amazon S3 account, where I could store as many files as possible and worry about the cost myself. I can think of a few forms where we’re asking people to upload a hi-res photo, and if a few hundred people fill out that form at a time, we could potentially get close to the limit. This should be a trivial fix.

2. Pagination

For surveys and other longer forms, it’d be really swell to break a form up across several pages. We have some applications and surveys that are so long I fear users see how long they have to scroll until they reach the end and they give up and go away. But a break in there would be nice.

3. Conditional Questions

The ability to ask a follow-up question only if a user selected a certain option in a checkbox or radio field would be nice. We’re getting this question quite a bit from people on campus.

4. A level between “Carpe Diem” and “Ad Infinitum”

It feels like there really should be one more level between their Carpe Diem plan (20 users, 3GB, 15,000 entries a month, $69.95/mo) and their Ad Infinitium plan (60 users, 10GB, 100,000 entries, $199.95/mo). We need about 40 users to cover everyone across campus. It’d be nice if there was a $99 or $129 plan where I could get 40 users, 6GB and 50,000 entries.

Wufoo, keep on keeping on. We’re huge fans of your service and so are our campus users.

Update from Wufoo::

To celebrate, they’re lowering the price on incoming file transfers from $0.10/GB to $0.03/GB, so now’s a good time to try it out and upload some huge files.

From the Amazon Web Services blog:

We owe the success of the service to you, and on the 3rd anniversary of Amazon S3, we’ve decided to say “thank you” with a few more “3s.” We’ll be offering “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 for only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for the next 3 months, April through June. As always, data transfer between Amazon S3 and EC2 within regions remains free, and all other pricing dimensions are unchanged. At the beginning of July, prices will return to normal, so if you’ve been thinking about moving a new project into Amazon S3, now might be the time.

I started it to both fill what I saw as a need in the higher ed blogosphere as well as for selfish reasons. I wanted to learn WordPress and I wanted a place I could flesh out some ideas and explore topics that interest me. I think I’ve accomplished that thus far. I celebrated the anniverary this week by re-skinning the site and adding in some new features.

Here are the 5 most popular topics from the first year of this site:
1. Season Your Passwords With Salt
2. Have you made your FriendFace profile yet?
3. Do you have an iPhone icon for your school?
4. QR Codes: Is it time?
5. YouTube Goes Widescreen and HD

Thank you for reading this siteand for leaving great, though-provoking comments. Thank you for subscribing to the RSS feed. Thanks for following me on Twitter. Thanks to Brad and Matt for including this site in BlogHighEd.org. Thanks to Karine for including it several times in her weekly newsletter.

Here’s to a successful year two. I’ll try to bring you great content and hope to meet as many of you as I can at conferences and presentations around the world over the next year.

I’ll leave you with a song from one of my favorite albums.

Sweet Avenue – Jets to Brazil

Here’s a quick snip about the program:

The curriculum is targeted at early-stage leaders: recently appointed or aspiring IT managers or supervisors. The program focuses on the practical knowledge and skills needed to succeed in management and leadership in higher education. Topics to be covered in the first series include: interpersonal communication skills; budget and finance; managing time and priorities; project management; managing up; and performance management.

I attended the program and learned a great deal. I’d highly recommend it. If you’re in the New England region, it’s a quick trip.

I hope they create a follow-up series for the cohort I was in last fall. Perhaps the next logical step is the Educause Management Institute, which I’m going to try to get into the next time it’s offered. I missed out on the February session registration.

Here’s the page.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in their cards thus far.

I’m putting the finishing touches on ours as we speak. Please post a link in the comments and I’ll build a list.

Thanks, and happy holidays!

One of the game-changing things in this release is that they’ve made it (finally) auto-upgrading. This is huge. The automatic upgrade plugin was nice, but having this built into WordPress will make life easier for a lot of folks, from regular bloggers who maybe don’t have a ton of technical knowledge to the systems admin who is responsible for a number of WordPress installations. Now, a single click will ensure your system is up-to-date and secure. Script kiddies = stunned.

Before you run and upgrade, you’ll want to do a few things first.

1. Back up your database. If you’re using the automatic upgrade plugin, it will do this, but if you’re doing it manually through your web host or by yourself, backup your databases and other files as a precaution. You never know what might happen.

2. Check your plugins. Some of your plugins may not be compatible with the newer codebase. If you’re running the 2.6 version of WordPress, you can see the plugins tab may have a number above it, that means there are updates for your plugins.

3. Check your templates as well. Some templates may be wonky after the upgrade. Check with your template designer if you are using one to ensure your template is ready to go with 2.7.

Good luck with your upgrade. I’m off to do mine now for this site.

Introducing Vimeo Plus! from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.

To recap, Plus users get priority upload and encoding, 2GB a week of uploads, no ads, and maybe most importantly, the ability to embed HD videos¹ anywhere you choose. All of this is available for $59 a year.

We’ve signed up – and the process was smooth and easy. I’ve definitely noticed the increased speed in processing our videos as well. You can see the videos we’ve posted there here.

1 – With the plus account, you get 1,000 HD embeds. After that, you can purchase more as you need them.