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In the latest installment of our Bookmark These blog series, we focus our attention on the new and rapidly growing Dorms 101 website. Here’s the scoop:

Dorms 101: Your Guide to College Dorm Life!

URL: http://Dorms101.com

The Deal in a Nutshell: Dorms 101 is a robust site for students living in university housing. While the site is geared toward those living in the dorms, there’s plenty of quality content for all students, even those living off campus.

About: “Dorms101.com is the largest and most complete online source for tips, tricks, and advice on making the most out of your experience living in the dorms. This site is unique in the fact that it is written for students and parents of students who live in the dorms, or are about to be living in a college dorm room. Dorm life will be the single biggest social time of a student’s life — and Dorms 101 is your guide to making the most of it.”

What You’ll Find on the Site: Tips, tricks, and advice on:

  • Safety and security
  • Style, decorating and designing your dorm room
  • Meeting new neighbors and making new friends
  • Studying in an environment that can be more than a little distracting
  • Getting along with roommates and floormates
  • Transitioning into — and eventually out of — the dorms
  • Food, food storage, cooking, grocery shopping, and nutrition
  • Budgets and finances
  • Dealing with parents and how to help parents deal with your college time
  • How to have fun and make the most of the college and campus experiences

Why We Dig It: Dorms 101 looks really promising and poised for big things. While Dorms 101 is new and there’s not vast a ton of articles and posts, the stuff that is there is good and the site is set up in a very smart and scalable way to allow for ample growth. As well, Dorms 101 covers a vast amount of topical territory and the set-up encourages a lot of user participation and interactivity in the forms of comments, surveys, Twitter updates, Facebook and MySpace presences, and feeds. These folks definitely want visitors informed and involved.

Bonus Bit o’ Cool: In addition to loving the ways in which Dorms 101 works to create a user community (an essential part of Web 2.0), we also give props to Dorm 101 for showing as well as telling. The site has a lot of nice multimedia in the forms of sweet videos and a Flickr photostream.

–Lena

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Last week we introduced our spring blog series, Bookmark These: Must-Read Sites & Blogs for College Students. To kick things off, we focus our attention on the tremendously informative and delightfully irreverent HackCollege. Here’s the scoop:

HackCollege: Lifehacks & Study Tips for College Students

URL: www.HackCollege.com

The Deal in a Nutshell: Inspired by, but independent of, the popular LifeHacker website, Hack College is all about “working smarter, not harder.”

Mission Statement: “HackCollege is educating the students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of ‘Students 2.0.’ If we can change the way 1 percent of college students and faculty in the world view education and technology, we’ve done our job.”

What You’ll Find on the Site: Tech tips, lifestyle enrichment advice, software and other product reviews, recommended reading, blog entries and video of the HackCollege show, updates about the HC community getting together at conferences and concerts, musings on important issues to college students (politics, the environment, internships and jobs), and of course, beer and parties.

Why We Dig It: Hack College is the perfect balance of serious and fun. There’s a ton of practical advice and great resources, and it’s all presented in a slick and enjoyable way. The site is organized, easy to navigate, and loaded with quality content. It’s tech savvy without being prohibitively geeky, serious without ever being a buzzkill, professional without being uptight, and the vibe is honest and chill but never lazy or apathetic. It’s clear that Kelly and the other HackCollege contributors take their site seriously and are committed to helping fellow students make the most of their college experiences.

Bonus Bit o’ Cool: HackCollege has been so successful that in November 2008, the creators reached across the pond and launched HackCollege.co.uk to share all of the HC goodness with students in the British Isles. While the content differs between the US and the UK versions so as to address regional particulars in higher education, much of the information contained in the UK version is applicable to students in the US, and vice versa. That said, double your hacktasticness and bookmark both versions to maximize the bennies that the HackCollege brand has to offer.

–Lena

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Welcome to March, which as we all know, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. To take some of the roar out of these final bitter weeks of winter and get you through to the more docile days of spring, we’ve decided to bring you a roundup of some of our favorite student-centric sites.

While there’s no shortage of college-focused websites and blogs containing relevant news, helpful tips and tricks, resources and reviews, slick multimedia, and suggestions for ways to help you study smarter (um, and to also distract you when you need a break from all-night chem cramming), we’ve narrowed it down to our 15 favorites, which we’ve listed below.

Stay tuned for upcoming CampusBooks.com blog entries starting next Wednesday when we’ll dive deeper into some of these sites and discuss why we consider them so indispensable. In the meantime, check out our fab 15 below and feel free to comment with suggestions of your own regarding must-reads for college students.

–Lena

15 Must-Read Sites & Blogs for College Students