I want to defend Bowdoin’s honor a little bit — we have 7 blogs on our career planning Ning site, but you can’t see how great they are because it is a student-only website. We did that so students and career advisors can have frank discussions without creating a searchable web record visible to the larger world — e.g. if a student writes seeking advice about how to respond to a job offer by a company who is their second choice, we wanted to make sure that conversation stays private. Student response has been pretty good since we launched in August, with 900 students joining in September and October.

But we have 185 posts on the blog so far (including student blogs), plus discussion threads for ride-sharing to faraway interviews, advice about LSAT or GRE test preparation strategies, and student-made videos about how they landed summer internships.

We’re pretty proud of it — in fact, just got stats from the web group on campus telling us that the average student visit is more than 5 minutes long, way better than the websites of other organizations on campus. We keep trying to make it better, though, and I hope to get some good ideas from the blogs you’ve featured here.

We have it set up so our blog sends automatic updates to our Twitter feed and our Facebook Fan Page does the same thing when we update it with events, statuses, videos, etc. to pull Twitter into the mix without creating more work.

Thanks for all of the useful information on your site!

The career offices are understaffed… and blogging doesn’t help them reach some of the bizarre objectives the school places on them, like revenue generation.

Plus, academia worries about risk. What happens if someone leaves a negative comment? What happens if we say something we get sued for?

Thanks for putting together this list of mavericks!