We are letting you know before Wizard Academy fills the class: Wizards of Web: Planning, Measuring, & Achieving Your Online Goals October 21-23.

While this sounds intriguing and may cause a stir on campus, I wonder, can this really bridge the gap in national coverage between the perennial powerhouses and the “What division are they in” schools?

While it may be a start, it’s unlikely that smaller schools will reap the same long term benefits as the household names. Initially, this should increase the support from individual schools by making the games more of an event (”Let’s post that touchdown pass video on ESPNU!”), but it won’t sustain on its own. ESPNU needs to make a concerted effort to highlight videos from all schools, with no bias toward the bigger brand-name schools. If they don’t ensure that there’s fair representation, students and alumni from other schools will stop participating and the experiment will fail. If they’re not careful, ESPNU could easily cave to supply and demand, highlighting content they think viewers want to see instead of promoting the community and its members, which is exactly what drives a thriving social network like NASCAR’s.

With more and more people joining some form of social network each day, ad revenue is pouring into social media. E-Marketer estimates that social network advertising will nearly quadruple in the next 4 years. With such huge potential for a collection of niche online communities (i.e., for smaller schools and for individual sports), ESPNU has the ability to harness all of that growth potential.

If they’re going to do it right, ESPNU should adhere to the 3 triggers of word of mouth by keeping the focus on the online community and its members instead of covering the same old headline-grabbers and stories from the ESPN.com homepage.

Sound odd?

See, the campus is only a few miles from the Austin airport, but it feels like a nature preserve. So while the campus itself is breathtaking, parking currently is compliments of a rocky, gravelly lot, which, in some ways, adds to the nature preserve mojo. But since everything else on the campus has been carefully designed and crafted with care, I’m sure the lot will be as inspiring as every other building and feature. (I mean, hey, if public restrooms can garner oohs and ahs, I’m sure a parking lot can do the same.) And Wizard Academy is definitely the place to do it. So thanks to Vess, Wizards of Web attendees might just be among the first to see the new parking lot revealed.

Hope we see you there.

Location: Austin, TX at the lovely Wizard Academy campus

About: This is the ultimate course in website strategy development with an introduction to Persona-based Web-writing. Concrete examples in real time. Three days. You’ll return home way ahead of your peers.

Where else but Wizard Academy can you watch, ask and listen for 3 days as New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling authors Jeffrey & Bryan Eisenberg stand in front of a massive, 16-foot video screen and perform detailed, 1-hour evaluations on each of 12 different websites? The developers of those websites will be in the room, too. This is going to be fun.

For more information, or to register for this exclusive event, visit Wizard Academy online.

Last year we drew 142 people, standing room only, to the seminar. The money we raised helped complete the construction of Engelbrecht House.

Would you like your website to be one of those 12? We haven’t done any promotion yet. Nevertheless, mostly by word of mouth, seven spots are already taken and Roy Williams scooped us in today’s memo where he is not too loudly promoting the course by giving away an 8-page paper “The 7 Big Questions of Highly Effective Online Marketing“.

Have you read Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo today?