San Diego Reader

UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which spends a tidy chunk of its taxpayer-furnished budget on public relations, has recently outdone itself, coming up with what it calls an “experiment in institutional lifecasting.” What the heck is that? Well, actually, it’s just an elaborate blog, called Calit2.Life, with Flickr streams and YouTube links “capturing the institute’s previously unwritten history with stories that might not qualify yet for a long-form news release or feature article on the main Calit2 Web site.” In a news release trumpeting the purported PR breakthrough, institute head Larry Smarr says the venture was undertaken because “in the age of social networking, we also need more informal ways to secure a larger share of the global attention stream.”