Word: campustap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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About three weeks ago, a new player quietly showed up on the battlefield of websites vying for Harvard attention spans. With a small release party and a single Crimson article, CampusTap, a Harvard-centric blogging community with the tagline ‘This is your campus—Go ahead, say something,” opened its doors. By most counts, the launch went well for creators Harry I. Ritter ’06, Adam J. Katz ’07, and Jeremiah L. Lowin ’07. They convinced a few high-profile Harvard blogs—Cambridge...
...idea behind CampusTap is an interesting one. The site seeks to encourage discourse by creating a forum in which Harvardians (many of whom, undeniably, like to hear themselves speak) can expatiate freely on subjects ranging from national politics to more banal questions like ‘Why doesn’t the dining hall serve more red spice chicken...
...order to promote risk-taking and a willingness to speak, CampusTap follows a model popularized by the Facebook. The site allows blog authors to easily restrict their audiences to those with harvard.edu email addresses, or even to specific people—a blocking group or the board of a student organization, for example. In this way it creates what Katz refers to as a “walled garden”—a safe place amidst a sea of unfriendly or unwanted outsiders...
...imagine certain situations in which the lines laid out by CampusTap do make a great deal of sense. While we may value openness for political discourse, it seems somewhat less important for discussions of Harvard-limited subjects like final clubs, and much less still for students aiming to air their personal dirty laundry. A number of blogs have appeared on the site which amount to semiprivate diaries of their authors’ lives—a way, in effect, for a group of friends to keep tabs on one another despite hectic Harvard schedules. This seems harmless—insofar...
...fair, CampusTap offers some intriguing community-building features independent of its “walled garden” structure. “Tags,” short one or two word phrases about the content of a particular blog posts, are aggregated onto a page called “Campus Chatter” so that readers can get a visual feel for what issues or people are hot topics of discussion. Blogs come with calendars attached so that student groups can use them to advertise events or meetings, and calendars for all the blogs you read regularly can be viewed...