{bp} formerly known as WebBP :: Blog

U of O Goes Public with Capital Campaign

The University of Oregon went public this afternoon with a $600 million capital campaign dubbed, "Oregon: Transforming Lives".

This press release provides an overview of the goals of this campaign, as well as some of the major gifts so far. As is common in fundraising circles, the campaign has already raised over half of its goal. In an oversight, the official campaign website only lists campaign progress of $210 million to date. Oops.

Check out media coverage via Google News.

Addendum: The university has now updated the official campaign website to reflect $316 million.

Photo Management for the Masses

Google has released an updated version of Picasa, the photo management tool that it acquired last year. The early word is that it is much improved, with many new features, though it still falls short in some key areas (can not write IPTC keywords for example).

If you are like me and still looking for the "right" photo management solution, check out this excellent review and comparison to Adobe's consumer photo solutions (Album, Photoshop Elements).

A few highlights after the jump.

Banishing the Bullets

Edward Tufte has put a chapter of his forthcoming book online and it is an intriguing read. He attacks the passive voice, data mining (a technique he considers useful "only for those who have lots of data but no ideas") and bullet lists. (via Newmark's Door)

Noteworthy

Oregon State's University Honors College received a mention on NPR's All Thing Considered evening news program last week.

Seizing on the opportunity, OSU put out a press release noting that the NPR series featured Harvard, Julliard, the Colorado School of Mines and Oregon State. Nice company indeed.

Link: NPR : 'Far Side' Entomology Class Has Students Abuzz.

The 38 percent solution

From E-Commerce Times:

Blogs are becoming a key part of online culture, according to two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, but a majority of Americans still don't know what a blog is. Only 38 percent of all Internet users know what a blog is, according to Pew.

This, despite Big Media's growing obsession with covering blogs as a story throughout 2004. The New York Times alone published 121 articles in 2004 about blogs. The standards-bearing Time magazine has published 39 articles about blogs and another 35 about bloggers (I recognize that these search results may overlap). They even considered naming bloggers their Person of the Year.

Perhaps this story is really more about the declining readership of newspapers, magazines and mainstream media. Journalism.org reports that, "Today, just more than half of Americans (54 percent) read a newspaper during the week, somewhat more (62 percent) on Sundays, and the number is continuing to drop."

At year end 2004:

• "Overall, some 55 million newspapers are sold each day, 59 million on Sunday" - The State of The News Media 2004

• "by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers" - Pew (PDF)