With universities understanding the value of social media, universities are equally competing with companies to establish their brand value on the internet. Almost all universities have embraced Twitter, Facebook and other social networks as a medium of communication to their community.
Today, in a newly launched homepage for University of Illinois at Chicago (www.uic.edu), the home page directly links to a subreddit. And it does not stop with a link to the subreddit, a Reddit widget linking to the top 3 items from the subreddit has been listed as well. With UIC just launching this today, it will be interesting to watch how well the students and staff, would like to participate in this.
It should here be noted that Reddit is popular for its subreddits, which allow dedicated pages on specifically focused topics. This concept of subreddits is what makes this possible, unlike Digg which provides no opportunity for this and also removed all detailed subtopics in its site, creating a huge chaos of links. Reddit which has always been a close competitor to Digg in the social media news arena is slowly starting to take over the first place. Recently, Digg encountered a major debacle in trying to release a new platform supporting a new architecture and also a redesigned site. For almost two weeks, Digg has been in mostly unusable form and users have been steadily migrating to Reddit.
University-based-reddits are something I'd tried to push for a while, but leave it to some redditors to just go ahead and do it on their own. Well done. And on a related note: why haven't you done this yet, UVA? ;)