Slashdot Mirror
Campus Pipeline: Schools Selling Students' Eyes
magnanamous_cow_herd writes: "This semester i returned to the university to finally finish off my degree,
and after going to the computer center to re-activate my e-mail account, the
helpdesk guy started telling me about this fabulous new service called Campus
Pipeline
I looked into it a bit and found out that there are over 400 universities who
signed up with this company to provide them with a shiny new "free" advertising-supported
student intranet in exchange for many many eyeballs.
They claim they are positioned to become the fifth largest portal on the Internet.
I'd like to know what the Slashdotters think about this. Here is the only article
I found on this "service" that was even questioning it."
A) You're assuming that Shasta and Pepsi are otherwise the same product, so that the only reason there is a difference in sales is advertising. Coca-Cola decided to put that theory to the acid test when they introduced "New Coke", reasoning that if they had a product that tasted just like Pepsi, they could slaughter them with advertising dollars. Didn't work so well, did it?
B) You're assuming that banner ads are just as effective as all other forms of advertising. That's hotly disputed.
C) As far as Double-Click making money--Double-Click is selling ads, not products. It's irrelevant whether Double-Click ads really work as long as they can get enough suckers who think that they work. And the dot-com economy proves there's no shortage of suckers willing to throw money at e-commerce.
Here's a pop-quiz for you: Name an e-commerce company that's making money selling to consumers (no infrastructure companies like Cisco). Now, if you've come up with one, describe one of their banner ads.
This university just started Campus Pipeline this semester. All of the services it encompasses were a part of the university already, their program just provides easy access to all, with only one login. I have used it and it is great, but I still use the normal methods for everything from checking mail to changing courses. They have a great idea and this is perfect for novice computer users, and the great thing is, the advanced users by no means have to use the service. VT did the right thing by leaving the option open and not forcing students to use Campus Pipeline. They should be patted on the back for not screwing that up at least. Go Hokies!
I don't know what you're whining about. This is America at it's finest. If we didn't have advertisements, how would we know what to buy? Geez.
Universities seem to be treating their students as just another asset these days to squeeze out more money. First they let the credit card people in, now this. What's next?
Universities should be protecting their students from this crap, not encouraging it. So many students get into big trouble, even being forced to go into bankruptcy, because of the shady credit card companies. Students don't have this much money to spend!
Most student don't yet know how to manage their own assets, however small, and these businesses will take advantage of them. The universities know students are living on a tight budget, given the outrageous tuition and fees these days, yet they seem to conveniently forget this fact when it comes to these questionable business deals, as long as money is involved.
I don't see the big deal.
A) It's free. No tuition hike for you.
B) So its ads. Whine all you want. You think the coke machine in the student union isn't an ad for coca-cola? I'm sure the Levis t-shirts you wear aren't ads for the jean company, they're an expression of your individuality. Really.
Every time advertising hits the internet in some other new fashion, /. picks it up as if its
something newsworthy. Get over it folks. Ads are
everywhere. The average person in America sees 2000 per day. You just don't realize they're ads.
To think that the internet, and now intranets
and other faces of your wired life are somehow immune, better, different, whatever, is naive.
The universities CHARGE for everything. What the hell are they doing this for?! I can understand the ads--maybe. But the profiling and money-cut from purchases is terrible.
The universities should all chip in a small annual fee to create an organization that would write this type of service themselves. They could even have volunteer work from their C/S department to help write some code for it. All that talent... wasted on Napster. When I was getting my CS degree, I didn't touch the comptuer club with a 10 foot pole, since they weren't doing anything interesting. But this type of work could have had promise.
Check out what my local college did this year (Ball State University , if you were curious) They oversold the Freshman Parking lot by 500! And to make up for this, they ticketed the freshman that had to park on the grass, and are now "correcting" the problem by giving them tickets to a different parking lot... but it's one where the shuttle bus doesn't go too... so 1 mile walk for you!
Rader
The point is, the advertising is going to be there. Whether it is the big Starbucks sign in the cafeteria, the Coke logo on the scoreboard, or a banner ad on the intranet.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Corporate influence in the schools has been covered here on slashdot before and this is a good example of the crap that is going on.
.com model that has been failing pretty badly as a whole. I would never invest in such companies.
A lot of the problem is with bloated Universities who have no financial feedback mechanism (much like the government) so while the school might be making good money, the budget is streched thin anyway with uneeded high level management types, etc. Not that mass privatising is a good solution (I would never recommend it myself).
These days it's easier to get funding for new prisons than it is for education. I think California is a good example. I beleive they are now putting more money into law enforcement than education. Not a good sign, and not a good way to improve the world.
Years ago I think programs like this would have been rejected out of hand. In today's world colleges and universities are run more as corporations. By this I'm not referring to the increasing corporate control, but as in being bottom line money driven. Therefore money saving schemes like this often look attractive to college administrators at the expense of their students.
This companies business model is also suspect, it's the typical
It's happening. Portals are all the buzz (well, they were all the buzz a few years ago, but it takes a while to catch up). As users become more net/web savvy, and expect to be able to access their information from remote devices and places, universities have to cope with that. One solution is to use the web interface that almost every freshman is familiar with by the time they get to college. Also, that way one can stuff a lot of mini-apps (like slashboxes) in one customized portal for the student, so they don't have to obtain and run different clients to do different things.
So, that's all nice and fine. The problem comes in when the universities don't have the money or expertise to create a portal like this from the ground up...which leads them right into application service provider territory. In fact, at Cornell, if I understand correctly, there have been offers to host a portal in exchange for advertising, but I believe those have all been declined, and there is work underway in a cross-university consortium, to come up with a generic portal that each university can tailor to their needs.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Somebody needs to write a service that reads and forwards Pipeline mailboxes. It would be great if SpamCop offered this. They poll POP mailboxes every 10 minutes, deal with the spam, and forward the rest, charging $0.50/megabyte of mail. All they need is another poller that talks to Pipeline instead of a POP.
Between all the credit card companies hawking free stuff and ads being plastered to every blank surface that can be found on campus, my school's beginning to feel more like a "good consumer training center" and less like an institution where I'm supposed to be learning things that include critical thinking. They just installed tv's in the dining halls, which pump out crappy music videos (they're all rap and r&b videos since my school is in the middle of what would be called an "urban" demographic). I wouldn't put it past my school to try this either. Whatever happened to the Internet being an educational resource? The only thing I ever see it being used for is an easier way to sell crap to people that don't need it. Pretty soon banner ads are going to be a neccesary component of all internet protocols.
...for the universities to cash in on their captive audience.
BlackNova Traders
For shame, for shame, bringing commercialism into the sacred grove of academe.
Thankfully, there was nothing like this when I matriculated, and I was able to fully enjoy watching the Penn State Nittany Lions beat the Miami Hurricanes in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl while sipping my Budweiser under the alluring glance of my Free Bud-Girls poster.
I noticed this quote in the University Business article which was linked to from the orig. posting...
"According to a study of on-line teens released this spring by Northstar Interactive, 93 percent between the ages of 13 and 18 had used the Web, and 97 percent had sent and received e-mail"
Well...duh. If you're conducting a study of ON-LINE teens, wouldn't you guess that most of them had used the web and/or email? That would be like saying that 97 of teens exiting a voting booth had voted. The only suprise is that the percentage is so LOW. Don't you love statistics? It's a good article otherwise though. :-)
And as for the online teens who hadn't used the web or email... just what the hell were they doing online exactly? There's plenty of things to do online besides the web and email, but it's kind of hard to imagine being online WITHOUT using one of the two...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
No, where I come from we shoot people like that. It has a wonderful effect on the intelligence of our discourse... ;-)
I remember logging in once long after I signed up (out of curiosity, of course) to check my new, hip CollegeClub e-mail address. It had seven messages, all of which went like this:
The good news: CollegeClub went out of business this year. The bad news: they were taken over by Student Advantage, who also pays college students to shill for their crappy discount card. (Wow, 5% off at Joe's Pretzel Shop! Fifty cents off at Starbucks when you buy five lattes! This rules!)
For more information, click here.
A while back I read a really interesting article in Linux Journal about "Mediated Reality" (using eyeglasses whose display can filter out things you don't want to see in the real world -- like advertisements). The article was fascinating in itself, but it really put a point to why I dislike most of advertising.
It mentioned (animated) web banners which portray a moving mouse pointer and explain that it is an obvious attempt to capture the users' attention. In the end, this is what all advertising is attempting to do. They don't care about eyeballs, they want you to give your attention, your precious time, to their marketroid message.
It's also like a company which I've seen here in Atlanta, GA, USA called "Promove" which has brick-and-mortars set up to connect apartment hunters with vacant apartments. The buildings and signs are painted bright yellow. Why? Because they know that it is a psychological fact that yellow is the most eye-grabbing color. People are just naturally drawn to look at it. In the end, just another scheme to steal peoples' attention.
And that's what all advertising is: A scheme to steal peoples' attention. This is why I hate most advertising. It is the attempt of companies to use psychological tricks to take my attention and my time which is rightfully mine, and which companies have no right to.
I agree that advertising on television is acceptable, for it delivers a free service to the viewers. The viewers pay with their attention. I think that magazines and newspapers which charge a subscription fee are immoral. Why would I pay to have my attention diverted towards someone else's financial gain? I pay to look at what I want to look at, not what Frito-Lay wants me to look at! I think that advertising billboards should be illegal: the advertiser gets the viewer's attention and the viewer gets ... nothing (plus it's unsafe, people are trying to drive for God's sake!). And I think that T-Shirts which say "Tommy Hilfiger" boldly on the front is a testament to how stupid many of us have become.
And to those people who say, "It's just a few more ads, get over it, we're already inundated with ads, stop whining!" I reply: your time and your attention may be worthless to you, but to me they are my most precious resource, and I reserve the right to whine, bitch, and complain about their loss as much as I so please.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I'm not talking about a proff lifting a single finger. I'm talking about the comp sci program having enough money that it could afford infrastructure items. A dozen IT staff, wiring contractor, and a dozen racks of computers.
As far as the prof is concerned I'm sure there are plenty of good ones out there. But for every one of them, there are five guys teaching ADA.
An all too common problem in trying to predict future trends is falling for the fallacy of taking trends to their logical extreme. In this case, you take the trend that people are showing more drone like behavior and extending it to the extreme that we will all become drones.
Point taken however I think this point in history is far more dangerous than past ones because of the rate at which information (or in this case disinformation) flows. It's much harder to fight something that everybody "knows" is true than something that everybody hasn't heard of yet. That's the danger of the media. Most people out there (a generalization I know) watch the news and take it hook, line, and sinker to be the truth. Unfortunate but also very very real.
Historically trends are cyclical. Stretches of group think are followed by stretches of individualistic rebellion. Look at what's happening right now. We see countless protests being staged by people who are fet up with corporatism and globalization. Are these people becoming drones?
No they are not but I think that they are also too small in number. Corporate America(tm) has a very loud voice - it's going to take a lot of people to drown it out. As for historical trends - you are correct. But do you want to wait that long to get your freedoms back?
I think you are way underestimating the desire to be an individual in human beings. There is a desire to be part of a community and to identify with others, but there is also an ego driven desire to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
I do not count the spirit of the individual out but I also am more pessimistic about the strength of Corporate America(TM). There's a lot of things you can do with large amounts of money to make sure the truth does not get told and I think some of those things are being put in place as we speak.
The Tick - "Spoon!"
NEO - "There is no spoon."
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I personally don't use it, but it is not an inherently bad thing. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like Campus Pipeline helped pay for some of the hardware setup along with software costs for the system. So overall everyone is a winner. Soon with browsers such as mozilla that allow easily blocking images from specific hosts, you won't even have to view the ads.
I'd be terribly saddened to see the great Universities adopting this kind of scheme.. I'd honestly expect them to come up with something better themselves.
However, I don't believe this is aimed at those places (yet). There are far more schools and small colleges with minimal budgets that can't afford a decent computer department.
for thoe places, this kind of deal is a boon all round. Students get access, and the businesses get a cut to keep them happy.
As long as the deals don't tie in 'in-perpetuity' clauses, and allow you to cease the agreement at any time, then, it's a good thing.
The worry is, if it should be a 'tie in' deal with clauses to make it almost impracticable to leave.
It's a good first step to take.
And one thing to remember about trying to hold on to customers.. They have to give what's wanted, and they have to be good...
I think it's a good thing, from what I can see, but, as with all potent tools, the scope for it's misuse is vast, and that would be a serious blow to any academic institution.
Malk
It will not spam the users with promotional email
Of course not. And neither will our valued business partners.
The article mentioned by /. says the software is free, but doesn't mention that you need to buy a pretty expensive Solaris box to run it on. And I guess university IT departments have plenty of available manhours to administrater the system, huh?
Campus Pipeline appears to promise the world to everyone. They say they can tie existing university systems together (with Java). They say they will be coming out with a version that runs on Linux. I think they are simply a company spin-off that was aiming at a big bucks IPO (before that bubble burst).
Faculty on many campuses don't like it and are putting up a fuss. That, plus the fact that the IRS is looking at taxing income unrelated to an educational institutions "primary mission", may be putting the brakes on Campus Pipeline implimentation.
Yes, Campus Pipeline is (at best) tacky but the fact that many institutions are hopping in bed with them is a result of the financial pressure that many universities are under in the face of State government funding cutbacks.
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
Last year, my school (WestMoore high in Oklahoma City) got a rather speedy internet connection, and it was simply a direct tcp/ip pipe to the 'net. I returned for my senior year and found that my school is now filtering websites using the 'Bess' system. I now have no access to any webmail, web storage, good content, shockwave games, or anything not using IE to access the 'Net. Many of these restrictions have no base in logic whatsoever. I must have some place to store my C++ files, as a disk doesen't work worth a damn, and the teacher has some mental addiction to ghosting the hard drives on a bi-weekly basis. Another problem is that my school is now pimping my eyes off for some reason. On EVERY webpage, it places its own banner. It can't even detect frames, so it REALLY fux0rs frames. I miss my freedom.
Okay, I attend Westark Community College in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Since our college here has recently inflicted this program upon us, I have a few things to say about it.
I don't mind the ads so much, its just that this whole system is designed not to help the student, but instead to sell them things. Maybe I don't want to spend 20 minutes checking my mail each day..maybe i want to spend them studying.
Anyway, on an unrelated note, yesterday i noticed that one of the e-mails I'd received was sent to "everyone@collegename.edu". Thinking it was too easy to be true, i sent a limerick to the address (really short rhyming dirty poem). Turns out my limerick went to ALL the faculty! Had I been thinking clearly, I would have sent it anonymously, and probably would have sent an essay on why pipeline sucks. As it stands now, my Pipeline access was promptly suspended after a chat with the Dean today. Ah well....i guess i really deserved that. (if any of the faculty read this, i profusely apologize!) I certainly won't miss Pipeline, though.
-- Juju
I think a better question is where all the money in a large school goes.
They don't consider themselves as delivering the product of education, and justify their expenses based on how they help to deliver this product. Instead, everybody fights for the money to do whatever they want to do, and scrambles to get even more money from outside.
Teaching is just a chore that must be done, not the main purpose. Everyone there has another agenda.
Any chance to grab extra cash is taken. That's why universities have wealth-based "assistance programs"; actually, they have sliding prices based on the principle of "take every penny they can lay their hands on".
It's not just expensive, it's specifically as expensive as they can get away with. Of course, this varies a lot depending on the political climate. In some countries, there is a strong political push for education to be "free", so the students just don't get charged tuition (they get 'em where they can, though).
Everybody's always "short of money" because everybody has a bottomless appetite for the stuff. Anything that can be cut off of someone else's budget will be... at least until they fight back.
So, in a nutshell, universities are bottomless money-sinks by their very nature. Don't expect any relation between what you pay and what you get, there isn't one.
--------
at a price that is easily underestimated: converting students from thinkers into advanced consumers.
Price? And here I thought all along that was the goal of American education!
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Clearly someone got paid to distribute these. I suppose the university may have benefited slightly, but I certainly didn't see the value, not after my folks and I had forked over big bucks to get me there.
Sure, the advertising and crap are going to be there. But it is incumbent on the university to make good decisions about same. Seems like Campus Pipeline is one that the good universities should forget about.
Besides, if your university can't even run an email server, what the fuck do you expect to learn there?
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Depends on the point of view. Having a full personal record from your college years is almost as good as having your immunological footprint. They can do things almost as intrusive as selling your eyes.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
An example: there is, naturally, a section on printers. At the bottom of the page is a picture of a Hewlett-Packard inkjet that looks better than what you see in a four-color catalog. A half-dozen pages later is a focus on two innovators in technology, Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. The facing page has a spotlight on a company on a cutting edge--Hewlett-Packard. Flip to the section on E-Commerce, and there's a screenshot of the Hewlett-Packard online store showing somebody about to buy--you guessed it--a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer. There are also multiple pictures of Pavillions, etc., scattered throughout the rest of the book.
HP isn't the only offender, not by a long shot. AMD gets an "oh-by-the-way" mention in the body of the text, but all the pictures, charts, and examples show Intel processers, chipsets, etc. Office programs only come from Microsoft, period (and, yes the first technological innovator is Bill and the first cutting-edge company is Microsoft).
The sidebar on how voice recognition works is probably a direct quote from the side of the Via Voice box. It mentions all of the great things that voice recognition can do, and how Via Voice is the best program to do all that. Would you be surprised if I told you that a few pages later was a bio of Lou Gerstner and a puff piece on IBM?
Sun is only mentioned a couple times, and then only for Java. Java isn't even listed as a programming language, but instead as a two-paragraph description of multimedia enhancements to web pages, right after Shockwave.
Iomega is the only company that makes removeable mass storeage.
Oh--and I forgot: this textbook is "web-enhanced" by CNN. At the end of every chapter is instructions to go to a CNN web page where you can watch movie clips about the preceeding material. So, naturally, the chapter on processors has a movie bio of Andy Grove and another multimedia something-or-other about Intel.
I think I should shut up now before I break an O-ring....
Well, okay one last comment: I all but told the students to take the books back, and I'm supplying them with my own resources or pointers to web pages, etc.
0-7895-5937-4
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I thought that the professors needed a new down payment for a Porsche, so they add a few paragraphs, change the chapters around, and ask the publisher to make a new edition.
everyone wins then
On the other hand, Netcraft says "www.campuspipeline.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris".
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Urbana-Champaign is right here (well, I'm in Urbana-Champaign anyhow). We don't need no steenking web portal that forces everybody to use IE 4.0 or better to check their email when it's just as easy (easier) and more secure to use pine on a cluster server. Don't like CLI? Ok, use the web frontend. And there are no ads on it, for God's sake. Class discussions online? USENET. Registration? Well, it's annoying, but also automated online.
What's my point? Well, first of all, Universities are some of the last places where the Internet is still more than the web. Another thing too: if there's one big centralized portal, there's one big centralized thing that will break all at once. With one centralized group of people running it. And that's bad. If for some silly reason an email server (for example) goes down, it doesn't take class registration with it, or the newsgroups, or the website, or anything else. In fact, if an email server fails it only takes out _part_ of the mail.
I can see it now... Whoops, campuspipeline.uiuc.edu is broken again, I guess I can't turn in my homework or get my email or get the weather or go to class or...... you get the picture. Not a good thing for 40 thousand some odd students.
Is this kind of commercial deal common in the US? Can your children opt out of these "mandatory" ads and newscasts (who selects stories and editorializes them?). Soviet-style "The five year plan again yields record crops for happy farmworkers" news is rightly derided by all - how is this corporate brainwashing any better?
I thought you guys had the Land of the Free...
TANSTAAFL, so the cost of this computer system has to come from somewhere. There's really only one possibility: it comes from the people who buy the advertised products. Most likely, the people who buy the advertised products are going to be the people who looked at the ads, therefore, when you look at an ad, you are paying for the delivery of that ad. There is a cost to you, both as a monetary (but hard to calculate) expense, and of course there's the whole aesthetic thing.
Therefore, doesn't it follow that when a student chooses what school to attend, they should be made aware of the cost of attending each school or taking advantage of its services? "Free email" is misrepresentative if the school actually uses Campus Pipeline.
We can debate how much that cost is, some say it's so close to zero that it doesn't matter; others say that it is very high and therefore an outrage. I say let the market decide. And the first step toward letting the market decide, is for people (e.g. senior high school students) to be aware of this cost's existence, prior to making a decision about what school to go to.
Hmm.. maybe we can get the word out by buying a spot on Channel 1. ;-)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What do you expect? Many Colleges and Universities are no longer institutions of higher learning and research; instead they have become money making institutions. They exist to make money.
My university started putting televisions in public places that constantly blast gubbish music and advertisements targeted at "twenty-something college students who know nothing about debt with credit cards given to them by parents". You can't turn down the volume (they are contractually obligated to keep a particular volume), turn them off, or otherwise exist in a public place without being marketed to. Only after serious complaints (by alumni, I'd wager) did they shut off the televisions in the cafeteria. Not only that, but the shit they blast just plain sucks; the kind of trash music propagated by Mtv and the like.
So my solution is not to go to these public places, and more importantly, not to spend any money at them. Unfortunately, so few other people seem to care. But living in a corporate engineered reality doesn't sit well with me.
This sig is false.
>> "how is this corporate brainwashing any better?"
> Pepsi Co has no gulag.
No, but Nike does.
Reality has a liberal bias
Hold on, are you trying to say that they have access to your email? This is a whole new ball game
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
At least their web site is running:
www.campuspipeline.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on Solaris
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Why not simply impliment some banner rotation software and make the money for themselves?. Even better, schools could form a consortium to provide space in the rotation for national advertisers. Give them a place to buy ads on the whole consortium network.
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
When I went to college in the pre-internet era I was presented with ads in the school newspaper, on every telephone pole or other stapleable surface, on the college's radio station, and so on. Now I regularly see ads in the alumni magazine (and still hear them on the radio station). Schools and school organizations selling student eyeballs to subsidize education has a long history. It's rather disingenuous to think the tradition wouldn't be extended to the internet. Interesting thing about the referenced article criticising campus pipeline is that the criticism focuses not on selling student eyeballs, but on schools not getting a big enough cut of the action beyond free software and integration.
Ok, I know you're always looking for a way to save money, but what will you do when/if this company goes down the drain?
People who had network access and then lost it can get pretty nasty, and they'll have lots of time on their hands.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
A-fucking-men!
Score: +5 (Insightful)
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Instead of pimping out students, they could have better software and keep some respect.
God, how many more unfounded assertions about how bad university education sucks can you get in one post? As for how much it costs: at my school (Rice University in Houston) tuition is around $10,000 a year. It costs, on average, ~$50-70,000 to educate a Rice student for a year, meaning that the university itself is coughing up most of the cash. Though the numbers vary, the trend holds true for most prestigious universities in the US (I don't have any information about community colleges, etc).
Also at Rice, the faculty is well-paid but not ridiculously paid for the most part. And while there are some professors who don't like to teach particular topics to which they have been assigned, by far the majority of my professors have been both amazingly intelligent and dedicated to communicating their knowledge and skills to their pupils. Again, Rice is by no means alone on that front.
I can't speak for everyone, but as for myself, I certainly have not gotten the education that my father got at school- my education has been ten times better, by his accounting and mine.
--
-jacob
-jacob
"We are looking to become the Windows of the campus Webtop," Muir says. ouch! their goal is to become one of the least respected and biggest moneymaking companies in the world, I think he lays out their plans pretty clearly.
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
Campus Pipeline is trying artificially reduce competition to their product. Students will be more likely to buy from their advertisers not because the products are better, but because they managed to trick the system.
--
Emphasis mine:
I don't feel compelled to go buy the product, check out the website, or punch the monkey to win prizes. Hmmm, perhaps it's the lack of subliminals...
Yeah, those ads just go right under your mental radar...
Jay (=
(OK, to be fair, if you can't name the product/service the ad is for, it's not a very successful ad...)
The first time they approached the people who run the network. They wanted us to use their modifed browser on all computers at the university. This included all privatly owned computers in the dorms as well as faculty computers in offices, and even dial-in users. Additionally the university would be required to provide network access to C.P. so that they could sell their "service" to private appartment complexes in the area. No guarntee that those appartments would not have USU students. We are not allowed by law to provide network access to people not associated with the university. And one other little thing...they wanted a 5-year exclusive contract with no commitment on C.P.'s part that they would upgrade any part of their system to keep up with the times. We were to trust that they would.
So, we were supposed to force everyone associated with the university to use a specific browser. We were also supposed to provide Internet access to anyone that happend to live in an appartment where they resold our bandwidth. We got a 10% kickback on the net proffits and we would be stuck with it for five years. We said no.
The second time they approached the university administration directly. The story they told them was "hey look, FREE MONEY!" Since administrators tend to be whores, they were for it. I mean what problem could there be with free money? FREE MONEY! Additionally they "gave" transmiters, radios, etc., to the university to get a high speed connection to the president's home. This was a gift "free from obligation." It took an act of war on us mere techies to convince the administration that this was not a good idea. After it was clear that we were not going to bite C.P. took back the "gift" of the free radio link equipment.
There are lotst of details that are too messy to get into, but we figured that this would be a tar baby, and we would be sorry if we had taken the offer.
-g
The students, staff, and faculty WILL use pipeline for all their e-mail. POP, IMAP, alternate e-mail clients are not allowed because if you get your e-mail that way, you won't see the wonderful advertisements.
It's horrible, but I have no choice besides just up and quit...
(And I *am* an anonymous coward and have good reason to be! :)
My point is that advertising is everywhere and we really can't do much about where companies can advertise. Schools are the best place for companies to advertise because the students can't help but see it.
I'd be a lot more concerned about all these attempts to capture "eyeballs" if there was any evidence at all that the eyeballs actually resulted in enough sales to make it worth the advertiser's while. As it is, I fully expect all of these schemes to collapse under the weight of massive consumer indifference.
It seems to me that colleges & universities should lose the "Academic" pricing of their computer software because it is now being used for commercial advertising.
I know here at RIT, we can't use systems for comemrcial gain because that's in the terms of our academic licensing... but I wonder how a system like this would affect that status...
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
For schools with, for whatever reason, low IT budgets, Campus Pipeline seems like a workable and cost-effective solution. It will not spam the users with promotional email, and it sounds like the banners will be discreet and in every way normal, much like the ones I can see on /. right now. Since universities aren't in the business of generating cash from their intrnets to begin with, there is no reason to complain that Pipeline takes the revenue. The only cost is the learning curve associated with integrating the Pipeline software into the individual environment. And then there is the difficulty, as with any intranet, of getting people to use it (especially faculty, as any of you know who have worked in academic IT).
BTW, the post is misleading in that it sounded at first like schools would be harvesting their students' organs and trading them for an intranet. Makes a great futuristic thriller/social commentary, though.
I attend Appalachian State University in Boone NC. My school began beta testing Campus Pipeline sometime last fall, and let me tell you it sucks. I work at the help desk on campus and I have had nothing but trouble with the beast. It is slow, requires java and is prone to crashes, which causes a 1000 calls to the help desk "Help I cant get my email". It sucks to have to explain that it is Campus Pipline's fault. Why cant the school just set up a pop server? Hell I had rather use Pine over VMS or UNIX.
It really ticks me off that I pay to attend an University and I get spam in my inbox because the university wants more money.
I think the concensious (sp?) here at AppState is that Campus Pipeline sucks major ass. What is happening at other schools?
Statistically even, today's youth has a lot of pent up anger. Just check out the medication levels that the educational facilities are pumping into them...
It's really sad when noone sees the relationship between this and the constant barrage of psychologically-defined, targeted marketing that is constantly trying to sell, sell, sell.
Already the complaints about kids being distracted in schools is deafening. The only way this marketing model will work is if it further distracts the students...
You've got to ask yourself how much available memory space you have for retaining important information, and how much of that space is taken up by CocaCola campaigns, McDonald's jingles, etc. Billions and billions of dollars are spent each year in a battle for your memory space.
If you get that info into brains when they're young, it's more likely to remain forever. So kids are having attention deficit problems? Retention deficit problems? Jesus, I wonder why...
"We are looking to become the Windows of the campus Webtop"
-Chad Muir, CEO
That sums it up for me: evil monopolistic business practices, lousy product, contempt for the user, and a confusing marketing buzzword for spice. They're really setting out to imitate MS in every way they can.
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I am a college student so I speak from experience. Even if i saw something I wanted on a banner ad, I wouldn't have the money to buy it. so what is the point? WHAT IS THE POINT?
It's obvious that advertising, because of its pervasiveness, is the single most influential force on American culture. :-). When is the last time you saw ads against patents, cookies, tracking, and closed source? Also, how many ads are written in support of wacky computer cases, linux wristwatches, and mozilla? The loves and hates of the slashdot crowd certainly aren't unduly influenced by advertising. And how many slashdotters own rackmount computers like the ones advertised on this site?
/. banners)
I can't really comment on the US as a whole, so let's look at a subset we're both familiar with, slashdot. Slashdot is easy to understand because everyone's thoughts and opinions are posted
Advertising can be, and often is, much more entertaining than the product it is selling.
I own a tivo. I can rewind tv broadcasts and watch 'em again. I use this feature fairly often, but never for commercials. Only the Superbowl has commercials that are useful in their own right. And I don't watch the Superbowl.
How often has a preview for a movie been more entertaining than the movie itself?
Never. Perhaps more entertainment/minute.
As for newspaper subscriptions, you can subscribe to a newspaper for a couple of bucks a month these days, and you're mainly paying for the priviledge of having it delivered to the door rather than going out to pick it up yourself.
I pay $33/month for cable (AT&T in Woodside, CA; no premium channels). I think we get about 50 channels, that's about 66 cents/channel. Is that much more than the priviledge of having it delivered to the door? How does television survive?
If it's entertaining, then it's worth your time...
Not really. If my goal is to be entertained and the ad is more entertaining than all other currently available activities, then it is worth my time. Otherwise, no. Why are you reading slashdot instead of watching advertisements tv ads or gazing at billboards? (must be for the
And yes, some things annoy me that appeal immensely to a lot of other people...
Overall, advertisements result in net annoyance. If a tv channel had a sister station that broadcast the same programming without ads which would be more popular? No one would watch the station with ads (except during the Superbowl halftime). Why don't premium movie channels have advertisements (last I checked; they might now).
Ryan
The risk to watch out for is when commercial interests are interfering with academic liberty. When commercial interests are asking universities to keep controversial professors quiet is when you should be worrying. Frankly I don't see that potential here because the intranet service is just as much in need of the university's positioning as the university is in need of the intranet software. Seems like a mutually beneficial relationship overall.
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But many magazines, newspapers, and so on accept advertising and yet produce quality work. In some cases the ads make the paper MORE useful. Also, may fewer people would by newspapers, for example, if they cost $2.50 per copy. So ads do serve an important purpose, in my view.
sulli
RTFJ.
For a small university it's a good deal. At least when you compare it to larger institutions that take in huge ammounts of cash for sports.
If I was going to a school because of a well rated Comp Sci program this would scare me off. I think the school should be self supporting in that regaurd.
I think a better question is where all the money in a large school goes. For instance a large group CALC I class being taught by the non-english speaking TA who's getting 50 bucks. Hmm, 200 students in a class, 300 bucks a head. I'm just saying...
I think someone mentioned this already, but this is just like Channel One in secondary schools. In exchange for paying for televisions in every classroom and a closed circuit network, schools have to agree to make the national Channel One newscast (and highly targeted commercials) part of the mandatory instructional day. The newscast actually wasn't that bad, but the Pepsi commericials and movie previews were completely mindless drivel.