Marketing On a .EDU Domain

wrttnwrd, an Internet marketer, opens a can of whup-ass on LinkAdage and the Pickering Institute, which have teamed up to rent blog space on a .edu domain for $50 a month. Technically legal maybe but undermining of the trust a .edu engenders.

Comments

All the education you need!

[billy901]

A legal loophole that exploits school should not be allowed. Not only do our tax dollars go to school so that they can have .edu domain names, but they are being exploited. On the other side, this will make a lot of money! I have to applaud the people who made this because they were smart and will make a lot of money. This will likely be a large blog, based on some stats I have of old blogs.

Re:All the education you need!

[edlinfan]

As far as I see it, advertising on an EDU is perfectly ethical if it is used to subsidize bandwidth (and NOT line the pockets of a greedy bureaucrat).

Not only do our tax dollars go to school so that they can have .edu domain names, but they are being exploited.

And when the schools introduce a method of reducing their need for your hard-earned money, you complain?

Re:All the education you need!

[Seumas]

I don't see what the problem is. If it's okay to advertise mcdonald's on a child's report card, stuff his school full of taco bell, pizza hut, subway as well as pepsi and coke machines and pump "educational" television feeds with customized advertising to them in the class room, then what's wrong with a banner ad or something on a *.edu?

It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired.

Re:All the education you need!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I used to think all of my wall mounted plaques made me far better than my fellow men, until I met a few guys who changed my mind.)

I once had a prof who told his classes that the only positive thing getting a Ph.D. would do for you was to make sure you'd never again be afraid to talk to another Ph.D. because you'd know they knew just as little as you did.

Re:All the education you need!

[Chaos1]

I originally posted this in the grandparent by accident... but where exactly do you live where this goes on? I have never seen anything like this on my child report card, nor have they ever been fed fast food outside of school trips. I'd be sure to kick some school board butt if they tried.

Re:All the education you need!

[Nullav]

And when the schools introduce a method of reducing their need for your hard-earned money, you complain?

Loudly, and until they take a cut in funding to make up for their new source of revenue. They can profit on it when they stop receiving funding for whatever they're using to make more money.

Re:All the education you need!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired.

No, the idea is very much alive. The existence of these various outrages doesn't mean the idea is dead; it means we should fight against the new outrages that pop up.

Re:All the education you need!

[WNight]

The problem is that they're government schools. They get your kids, and your tax money, no matter what. Basically, they just aren't accountable to any of the groups that the people feel should be their bosses, the parents as taxpayers, or the children as the receivers of the teaching. Instead, schools are indebted only to our system of handouts and meeting those arbitrary metrics.

I'd stop dealing with a private school that did this, but as a public school they get to double-dip, taking tax money *and* getting paid for pushing marketing on the kids, and the government keeps stuffing kids in with hardly any concern over the desires of the parents or students.

It's not the poorest schools that are doing this either. If this was some inner-city crack-shack that was doing this to afford rat traps, or school breakfasts, it might be forgivable. Instead it's always some fairly wealthy school (who wants to advertise to poor kids?) that's seeking ever more money.

You can tell how much a school really needs money by how closely its administration building (where the principal/dean is most of the time) matches the condition of the rest of the campus. If one is posh and the other not, the school (like many) has a lot of fat to cut in administrative areas before they really get close to needing money. If on the other hand administrators work in worse conditions than students, they probably do need the money.

It's a tax-based thing, I can't pick a school I trust and fund it - my taxes go to help the badly run schools that spend more on admin toys and pompous architecture than teaching as much as they help any other school. Because of that I do fight schools' tax grabs, like all other tax grabs, because I have absolutely no oversight over that money once they take it and I can be sure they aren't as careful with it as I would be, nor half as useful to students or society.

Hypocrisy, slashdot.org is thy name

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'all got some big brass ones to post an article like this... aren't .org domains supposed to be for non-profit organizations, et al?

Anyone else notice that slashdot.com redirects to slashdot.org, and not the other way around, as it should?

Hey, I've got no problem with Slashdot being a for-profit venture: I'm rooting for you, honest I am. But, for the sake of all that's nerdy, how about a little less hypocrisy and a little more honesty in advertising?

Yes, I know: "I must be new here".

Let the modbombing begin!

The rules are not static

[EmbeddedJanitor]

So currently Google uses the .edu to pump up page rank. So what! When anyone tries to game the system it is easy enough for Google to just change this part of their page ranking algorithm to compensate (eg. don't add the .edu + modifier if the page is a blog). People have been gaming the system forever and Google have been combating the gaming too.

Re:The rules are not static

[Galactic Dominator]

Yeah, it really easy to change google algo now isn't it? I mean what it only took them 4 years to come with an answer to google bombs? There is far more involved than a simple algo change.

People have been gaming the system forever and Google have been combating the gaming too. That's kinda the whole point now isn't it? Except this to some extent is virgin territory for google --edu's are part of the foundational base of PR. The tone of your post would seem to indicate you believe google has done a decent job keeping up with the gamers of the system. I guess that's a subjective topic, but google's main motivation is to disallow PR being a bought and sold commodity, and if you're judging on that basis alone google is a miserable failure at enforcement.

Scam

[mbulge]

More proof that not even the editors read the links. The "about" page of the .edu in question links to a Rickroll video, and the application for registration immediately asks for credit card info using poorly written English. I suspect people will be more likely to fall for this because of the edu domain, which is a shame.

Re:Trust in .EDU domains

[hcmtnbiker]

That's exactly what I say. Let them taint the .edu TLD, because it SHOULDN'T be trusted. Just because a source has the .edu tacked onto the end of it doesn't mean anything besides that the author has access to a school network. Stop making things more then what they are, .edu is just a TLD for schools to have so you don't have to go "hmm... was that dartmouth.com, dartmouth.org, dartmouth.net???"