So I was preparing a conference presentation, and was wondering whether most campuses called their portal "MySomething" or "Something Portal," I needed a list of .edu domains so I could hit my.domain.edu and portal.domain.edu and find all of them. Luckily, Educause allows wildcard searches on their whois database, so I wrote a quick script to walk through the entire database and write them to a file.
Anything where you really need data on what folks in higher-ed are doing online, here's a few ideas I'm still working on:
- Ranking campuses by the insanity of their Sharepoint HTML.
- Seeing the popularity of various CMSes in the .edu space.