Greetings from San Antonio

I'm currently attending the Association of Communication Excellence conference in San Antonio, Texas. So far, the experience has been enjoyable - my wife and I are trading off attending sessions while the other watches our son. This is a great place to have such an arrangement; the conference is at the San Antonio RiverWalk hotel, which is right on the RiverWalk. I can take him out in the stroller directly out of the hotel and onto the riverwalk, where we can stroll up and down the river, watching the boats and ducks. I went out last night to take some photos, but we left our card reader at home, so I'll have to wait until we get home to post them.

The conference itself is pretty good so far, although a lot of what I'm hearing is stuff I already know. For instance, I went to a session on using RSS for news syndication this morning, where I was hoping to get some insight into some character set problems I've been having with our own news feeds (in the Southwest, you get a lot of tilde's and accent marks). Unfortunately, the session was aimed more at the beginning RSS user. I did have some discussions about RSS with some other people afterwards that were productive on some other fronts, but I still don't know how to do tilde's and accents.

Most of my other time was spent learning more about "e-eXtension," which is a proposed way of unifying Extension efforts online across the country. To hear them talk, it will be the be-all and end-all of online Extension presences; it promises to take "the best of the best" - but still allow localized content. It will serve up great publications from, say, Arizona, but brand them as your own university's, and your stuff will get served to people in other states.

There are still a lot of questions, though. For instance, they're saying things like "standards based" and "any format any device," but they're also saying that each content group will be needing its own "Multimedia Designer" and "Multimedia Programmer." I'm not sure exactly how they plan to achieve multimedia-based, interactive, media-rich web sites that are standards compliant and play back on any device.

The other concern I have is that this is sounding more and more like a separate corporate entity that expects national Extension employees to just give them content for free, while they turn around and sell advertising on the site. The idea of a federal, state, and locally funded web site selling banner ads strikes me as being a bit odd. Ostensibly, we're here to be unbiased reporters of the results of scientific research in the public interest, but won't having corporate ads undermine that independence? Is it appropriate to have Yu-Gi-Oh ads on our national 4-H page?

However, I'm willing to put all of my concerns aside and participate. IF they turn out to be right about being able to deliver what they are describing, and IF this doesn't turn into a cash cow for someone, then it could a pretty great way to strengthen everyone's Extension efforts. Extension needs a unified presence of some sort, and even if this isn't the best way, at least it's some way.