Software|McCombs

Get Software|McCombs Via Email

We've added email subscription functionality for those of you too lazy... ahem... too *something* to use a newsreader.  You can subscribe via the box on the right side of the blog.  Just put in your address and click the button.  You'll start getting daily digests (they'll only come on days with posts).

I was on the fence about doing this -- after all, part of the beauty of the blog is we *don't* have to use email.  BUT -- the reality is that many people still don't use newsreaders and after all a blog is more than just a pretty email replacement (the semantic web, structured content, blah-de-blah-blah).

I think this will make it easier for us to get readers who are interested in what we have to say but have not necessarily integrated newsreaders or aggregators into their online arsenal.  Next step - get those people to convert!

Hello World (First Post, Our Foray into the Blogosphere)

We have to do the "Hello World" post.  It is software, after all.  I'm very excited to kick off this weblog and this group -- Software|McCombs  This group and blog was born out of our desire to create a presence and a community place for MBA students at McCombs who, like myself, are passionate about creating and marketing software.

The blog is still somewhat of an "alpha" -- but that's OK since these days, you can be in "perpetual beta" so we actually don't have that far to go. The goal of this blog is to be a place for us to have discussions, stay in the loop about career opportunities and create a virtual presence for our group.

I may re-map the domain name - and I'll flesh out this first post a bit more and really lay out our goals and mission in detail.

Just to start discussion - my first question would be - is this blog a good idea?  Is a blog the best (or a good) way to achieve our goals of having discussions, staying the loop about career opportunities and creating a virtual presence for Software|McCombs? 

One of the reasons that I chose a blog over a static website is the simple reason that I manage the websites of three different student organizations at McCombs (now four, if you include this one) and there were two things that frustrated me about that :

1. That with all the great Content Management Systems out there (CMS), that we were still using static web pages.  It seems that MBA students shouldn't be spending a lot of time coding HTML.  And it also meant that any content that needs to go up has to go through one person -- me!!  With a CMS (in this case, TypePad) we can have multiple contributors who do not need to know anything about HTML/CSS, etc.
2. A static web page is just that -- static - there's not real opportunity for interaction.  And that's what I thought that a student organization website should be about, more than anything else.

So - is a blog the way to go?