I also have a post on Web 3.0 here
http://www.edumorphology.com/2008/07/education-30-what-web-30-means-for-education/

Just a couple of quick points:

1) Call it what we will Web 2.0 / 3.0 – people have conversations, where they have them is irrelevant
2) Like it or not our students (and anyone who comes in to contact with our brand) are potential ambassadors – some will be negative, hopefully more will be positive but likely even more will remain silent
3) These ambassadors will help develop our brands around what’s relevant to them and to their friends, utilising their own networks and tools
4) Our content will be developed for us (especially if we can enable this to happen) but we can’t expect to control it (in terms of quality of content or messaging) so it will often jar with an official line that we may want to take
5) How we engage with the content could be crucial to our success or failure.

Now a couple of questions because apparently, we (collectively) are good at this sort of thing

1) We will still have our own official content but how can we fit it in to relevant conversation spaces? Related to this is how do we enable our content to allow it to be used.
2) What should our strategy be to manage the unofficial content?
3) Once we have classified this unofficial content (if this is necessary) how do we disperse it – link journalism (or some future equivalent)? If so what editorial policy should we run?
4) What are the related issues – SEO and content management immediately come to mind – but what else will be affected?
5) Finally what sort of content is going to be the most crucial for us, is it lots of surface information or do we less but deeper content?

Also, you never know what site visitors will regard as good content or bad content. A grainy YouTube video may not pass muster with a university’s marketing police, but it might be awesome to an 18 year old. Who knows? Better to offer it up via an embedded piece or a text link or a Twitter pointer or whatever else. Put it out there and see.

Anyway, my point being, that in today’s information age, we are often encountered with the problem of TOO MUCH information–that’s why you see the emergence of all these recommendation sites like Digg and Stumble and info aggregators like Google Reader–people need help keeping up with all the information that’s available to them now, but also a way of canceling out the “noise” and weeding through the inevitable gunk that can accrue.

I think in Web 3.0, wherever it may take us, emphasis should be placed on the QUALITY of content and information, because clearly we have no idea amassing an astounding quantity of info. Finding ways to locate the most helpful, the most useful, the most pertinent information and then helping the user to process it should be a priority.

Anyway, those were just my 2 cents. Hope they were coherent, LOL.

If an institution has a strong brand and positive reputation, makes it easier to incorporate user-generated content from other sites.

Your right though. Businesses and institutions (i.e., schools) are losing control of their image online. They will be better off in the future working on their “product” than trying to convince people to buy into what they’re selling.

They wouldn’t fight it? What would they have done- a cease and desist letter? A lawsuit? I don’t know the legalities of making and posting videos made on the grounds of a university, but even if it can be legally stopped, I can only imagine the kind of bad press the school would get for doing so.

Fighting this sort of content is a lose lose situation where both loses are on the university’s side. First they lose an overwhelmingly positive stream of credible video testimonials from ordinary students. They next lose the public relations disaster whereby they are seen as Big Brother squashing the little guy for not parroting the officially approved talking points.