I think flickr is sufficient for pulling in geotagged images. I just took a look at the implementation and I think it looks great. Thanks!

The photos that are currently shown were uploaded by Middlebury and are actually quite old (check out the Voter Hall interior for a blast from the past). We’re working on getting those updated. Great suggestion about adding geolocated images! I can add in images using the Flickr API. Any other sources of geolocated photos I should check out?

edit: The map now includes photos from Flickr. Any photo geotagged within 0.1km of a building and uploaded since January 1, 2008 can be seen on the location’s page under Photos.

I noticed each campus location has a Photos tab. Are those photos uploaded by Middlebury, or are they geotagged photos pulled in from other websites? If not, that might be a fun feature to include.

I can’t really say for sure why many of Middlebury’s social media users go for a broadcast rather than interactive approach, but I bet it may have a lot to do with time crunch. It’s no secret that Midd staff are a hardworking lot–with so much to do, are social media easy to keep up with? Perhaps not.

We’ll be rolling out a lot more features for the Campus Map shortly, so stay tuned!

I think it’s wonderful that social media at Midd is the responsibility of a “ragtag crew.” Having no specific owner can hopefully allow for some experimentation and cross-campus teamwork. From what I remember, this loose collection of people then could all claim success for the Aunt Des videos even if they were produced by Communications. Even with Murmur to a lesser extent, there is a shared sense of “hey, that’s cool” which makes us feel a sense of ownership.

But notice that in both examples the College is taking a primarily broadcast view of social media. I would argue that there is very little listening going on outside of various Middlebury blogs which are somewhat buried in the Middlebury web. My suggestion would be to really “get” social media, you need to do a lot of listening and then be able to act upon what you hear. And people are already talking at Middlebury — take alumni tweets about reunion this past weekend. That content is gold but no one even sees who @replies to @middlebury. @middalumni hasn’t tweeted in 80 days and neither account makes a point to @reply anyone. Compare @williamscollege which live-tweeted their graduation and consistently engages their community on Twitter.

Perhaps counterintuitively, students at Midd take their queue from the College’s view of social media. See the Solar Decathlon twitter account (@middsd). That student-led team is not hindered by any formal College rules on social media but they treat their Twitter account, blog, and a little bit of FB as broadcast tools whereas students personally don’t use their own social media like that.

To be clear, I’m not saying Middlebury should jump all over Twitter, but I am saying that we’re missing something if we’re not listening and actively pursuing two-way social media channels. It’s scary when students, alumni, faculty, staff, townspeople, etc. can “talk back,” but it is worth the investment to build an infrastructure that can convey the warmth and depth of the real-life community online. In fact, the most genuine and authentic way to represent Middlebury online is to bring the personality of the community forward by mirroring the openness and dialogue that already happens across campus.