Money for Nothing and Your Chicks for Free…

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Mark Cahill

(Disclosures: I work for Namemedia, who is technically a competitor of Internet Brands, owners of vBulletin. I also run several sites that use vBulletin and spend a significant part of my work week working in vBulletin code…)

Over the past month, there’s been a slowly erupting feud in the vBulletin community over the new pricing structure that was announced for vBulletin 4.0 by Internet Brands.

You see, back in the day, the original vBulletin license cost $185 (originally $160 I think) and could be renewed for a yearly fee of $60. With the new version of the software (which has not been released yet) they are moving to a license per major level release, rather than what might be best described as a yearly fee structure. New licenses will cost $195.

I’m going to say right here, right now, that I don’t get why people are so up in arms about this. We want Internet Brands to be able to develop excellent software, right? We want to use the best, right?

Well that won’t happen if they don’t get paid for their software. Ford does not upgrade your car for free. Microsoft did not upgrade your Vista operating system to Windows 7 for free, so why the expectation that Internet Brands will offer perpetual free upgrades?

I know part of the complaint is that it’s going to get expensive if you have a bunch of vBulletin sites. My answer is this: if your sites don’t earn enough to pay for the license upgrade, then perhaps you shouldn’t be running so many sites! If it isn’t earning then by all means you ought to be running open source software.

The plain truth is this: many of us would pay MORE for vBulletin if we could get an enterprise level support agreement. Those of us who have mission critical vBulletin installations would love to be able to get preferred support from them. So perhaps some level of tiering in pricing might work.

The bottom line is this: I have no problem paying good money for good product. I don’t expect free, and neither should you. There are plenty of free open source bulletin board solutions out there, if you can’t pay, I suggest you try using one of them.

Sad to say, but the world of vBulletin has far too much drama about it. Perhaps we will be better off without the complainers…

Forget Disclosure and Transparency – We Crave Honesty

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Mark Cahill

That’s right you heard it here first …the darling of the noveau marketing is “transparency” and unfortunately, it’s the wrong answer. Transparency and disclosure simply aren’t enough. For some crimes, Mea Culpa simply won’t cut it.

Yes, if you are accepting payment from outside entities in return for writing that blog post or tweeting that little tweet, you need to disclose. For me, all the “disclosure” in the world isn’t going to absolve you if you’re writing a disingenous post about some product that you wouldn’t have reviewed otherwise. But hey, if you want to use your blog or twitter account to become the online version of “Headset Vinnie” that’s up to you.

It’s time we brought back an old custom: Shunning. Wikipedia defines it as:

Shunning is the act of deliberately avoiding association with, and habitually keeping away from an individual or group. It is a sanction against association often associated with religious groups and other tightly-knit organizations and communities.

One of the big tenets of Social Media is that it is almost universally “opt in” which means we have to invite you in, otherwise we’re not going to see you. By the same token, if you’re using your various accounts to shill for pay, then we’re going to just as easily opt out. As the line from the rock opera ‘ Tommy’ goes, “Let’s forget you better still!” and that is exactly what we’ll do.

Eventually, we’ll all have our Google Profile or something similar and we’ll be filtering what we see through the groups we’re associated with. These groups will consist of our friends and peers and in that, there will be an implied level of trust. Just as you might have an issue with your cousin if he sent the Kirby Vaccuum guy your way, we’ll be darned annoyed at people that are themselves trying to make cash by becoming the Kirby Vaccuum guy.

Frequent readers here will know that I’m not a big proponent of “personal branding” but I will say this: using your personal brand to pitch for pay, as our friends who use Izea are doing is a recipe for disaster. Take my cue and shun anyone who’s posting for pay.

When we get right down to it, we’re not really interested in transparency or disclosure; we really want honesty. We expect our friends to not put their access to us up for sale to the highest bidder. We expect that our friends will do the right thing…and that is what honesty is all about.

What is the next Wave?

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Google Wave - a chance for us to rethink Social Media?

For some time, I’ve been looking for the next compelling thing in social media sites. For that next development that transforms the way we interact, that re-envisions forums, chat, photo galleries, articles, etc; in fact a redefinition of the way in which we communicate online altogether.

For the past couple years, I’ve watch as vBulletin, my favorite forum software, basically did minor incremental releases, remaining essentially the way it was in 2001. Wordpress has done better, yet still, the fundamental blog/cmslite experience remains pretty much as it was 4 years ago. Photo gallery software, chat, etc. all remain pretty much as they were when they burst on the scene.

The user experience on most sites now is very segmented. Comments are in one spot, while forum posts over here. Most sites don’t integrate chat, as it tends to remove us from the page view model on which our revenue streams are so often based.

We’ve patched together separate systems, and in virtually all cases, the seams are showing. Clear lines of demarcation block logical points of information transfer. Most of what happens isn’t real time, or anything close to it. It’s a post then wait and click refresh experience for most of what we do.

That’s the point of entry for Google Wave, the new open source project that launched in private beta today. It has real time communications, chat has both private/public components, that can take on the threaded view of a forum with real time updates, that can be presented as a forum, or a blog, or whatever you imagine.

You see the important thing here for a developer is that they’ve built the basic tools, but we can add whatever we want via their api. To demonstrate this, they added Google maps integration. Yet that bit could be a video, or even better a live video stream or a recorded application view (think Webex presentation), live photo gallery, or all of them. All of which can be manipulated and edited real time by multiple users.

So what is this Google Wave, really? It’s opportunity for us to FINALLY break out of the box, to really do something new and different, to for once rethink the way we do our sites.

I can’t wait…

Check out the abridged version of the video from the I/O conference to get a taste of what I’m talking about.

Google Sidewiki – Because we haven’t made your life hard enough yet…

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Let’s say you own a business. It’s a small business, and you’ve tried very, very hard to build it into something. Along the way, like most businesses, there have been bumps, but for the most part, you’ve got a bunch of customers who love you. Then one day, right in front of your door, someone puts up a huge billboard, and on it, they will allow anyone with anything to say about your business to put up whatever they want. All of a sudden you’ve got some really nasty comments about your business hanging there where any potential customer will see them.

Sounds, far fetched, huh? No one could get away with that, right?

Enter Google Sidewiki…an add on product to the Google Toolbar which opens a sidebar when you are visiting sites that allows you to comment about sites as you visit them. So now, instead of commenting on my blog, you could leave comments on Google Sidewiki, where I am unable to moderate them. Hence that troll who’s been stalking me, that one I banned from one of my sites, is now free to flame away, and the only recourse I have is to report him to big brother Google.

There’s no opt out here, no metadata I can add to my site to keep them from doing this. And frankly, because it’s Google, I’d really think long and hard before using it if there were, because one could reasonably expect at somepoint, they’ll find a way to make Sidewiki comments a component of my overall score in the Google algorithm. So opting out might make me liable to lose search position.

I spend enough of my time trying to work with Google, either watching my analytics position, or managing things in Google Webmaster, or working with Adsense. I don’t need yet another way for them to monetize me. How about, for a change, they make my life easier, not harder?

A New Forum User Experience?

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Mark Cahill

I’ve been a huge fan of vBulletin forum software since I first installed it on Reel-Time.com in 2001. In the intervening years, I’ve seen software come and software go, but vBulletin continues to chug along.

Over the past 10 months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on a massive vBulletin site, http://www.splitcoaststampers.com and I’ve got to admit, I’m finding the vBulletin experience somewhat lacking. Perhaps it’s just that so many of the same old foibles remain in the core product, but truthfully, I’m looking for a more satisfying experience in forum software.

Let me be clear, the software works great and continues to chug away. My issue is that some of the things I’d like to be able to do with the software that should be easy, aren’t.

My main grudge is this: the software is still table based. Tons and tons of nested tables, all of them making it a nightmare to style. Each of the pages reuses a common header, but due to tons of <div> tags with no id or class, you have to get very creative to make any changes. Even worse, those divs are reused throughout the software, in different roles, so often, you will want to make a change on one page and you’ll end up affecting others. So you write a conditional (if this, then that) which is page specific. However, soon you find you’ve got a header file that is hundreds of lines of code, as it must account for a multitude of variables.

The vBulletin folks are in the process of a rewrite, which will be released in the fall as version 4.0. This version will supposedly get rid of all the tables and move to a fully css driven design, but frankly, I’m hearing rumblings now that, well, it might be mostly css, or worse.

My general list of stuff that’s got to be fixed:

Search doesn’t scale - one of the systems perennial Achille’s Heels, and a constant source of pain for site owners.
Tables, bloody tables - yeah, I mentioned it before, but it’s got to be mentioned before.
Template debugging – the vBulletin template system consumes errors. Testing of templates and plugins is an utter nightmare, because it doesn’t allow you to see even PHP’s most mundane error message.
Nesting of Conditional Statements - we’ve got a pretty good model in PHP for how an if then statement ought to work. However vBulletin conditional statements for some reason don’t follow that logic. They’re powerful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re hard to keep straight when you have a need for a good “else if” which currently requires nesting.

So I’m now thinking: is there any other software out that that isn’t table based that is both scalable and provides a top notch user experience? I’m interested in your suggestions…

The Advent of the Micro-Celebrity

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Admit it...you want to be the object of attention!

Welcome to our brave new world…it is a place in which style triumphs substance, and appearance supercedes truth. A place where the personal myths we create become truth, and are rechristened as “personal branding.”

We are in the age of the micro-celebrity. The era in which we don’t need to be fully rounded individuals, where simply being the “thought leader”, guru or expert in a certain online niche is enough. Warhol was right, we indeed will all have our 15 minutes of fame.

Deep down, we all really want to be the Paris Hilton of our own personal fiefdom. We’d all like to have red carpets rolled out for us, to have a tribe of fauning syncopants to “me too” our every post. We want everyone to realize what utter geniuses we really are.

The problem is that in online communities, like sewerage treatment plants, it is not only cream that floats the the top. It is easy, at least for a time, for the poseur to assume a position of stature within a community. The good news is that over time, and as the community matures, the fraud is generally identified, the true experts eventually become evident.

So how do we become that micro-celebrity in our online community?

Be a good citizen - it’s not all about getting involved in the latest falderall. Take the time to welcome newbies, answer the simple questions, and generally be available.
Correct The Incorrect - I see oh so many “accepted truths” that are absolutely incorrect. Perhaps they fit for one situation, but not for the one in question. Don’t let it pass, but do so in a way that builds the corpus scientia, without starting a flame war.
Discuss and Accept – We don’t know everything…and we’re learning all the time.
Give Credit – It’s easy to do, and everyone likes to be appreciated.

I’m tempted to add a list of what not to do, but instead I just offer this advice: before you are the teacher, you must first be the student.

News Has Always Been Free…

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Image couresy of WSJ.com

I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“. His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels.

Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How could Walgreen’s compete against Drugstore.com without compensating for the stock options that could make someone an instant millionaire? They couldn’t. The dot-com bubble burst threw some people out of work for a short period of time, but did nothing to bring salaries back into line.

So all of a sudden, in 2001, I went from making $45,000 for the print publication to $60,000 per year for the online version while working for the same publisher, Conde Nast. Not that I complained. At my last full-time position, I made $90,000 per year working as an editor at Ziff Davis Enterprise – and had reporters working for me who earned well above that. It’s public knowledge that Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal earns over $1 million per year.

I posted the link via Twitter and was quickly reminded by Stephen Hadley that “…Most of my reporter friends who are losing their jobs aren’t overpaid. It’s just that the papers they work for no longer are able to sell advertising to support their staffs. Ad dollars are moving.”

That, to my mind is the crux of the matter. You will definitely spot other problems throughout the newspaper industry, but the real problem right now is ad revenue going away. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a myriad of other compounding issues here, such as circulation declines, outdated technology, Jurassic management, etc., and certainly those are all factors. But the real problem comes down simply to a matter of dollars not coming in the doors.

Brian Carr pointed me towards the AnnArbor.com launch – a Michigan newspaper opened a new site, using 54 staff members. (according to their site masthead) Ponder this: 54 newspaper folk took a couple months to launch a site using what appears to be a bog standard MoveableType installation. Frankly, given part of a weekend and a 12 pack of Mountain Dew, I could have outdone them. Seriously…

The big problem for journalists is this: even though Hickins may tell us that the web got us big salaries back in the day, the sad truth is this: the prevailing thought on the Internet today is that content is free. As content originators, that means our work isn’t under valued, if FLAT OUT ISN’T VALUED.

Back in the day, I got $500 for a blog post. Granted, those were some excellent blog posts, but right now I do basically the same thing for free.

Look at the fiasco a few weeks back when Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, and EIC of Wired Magazine lifted huge sections of wikipedia articles for his new book “Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price” (and yes, he’s talking about free content…). If a Wired Magazine editor can’t even manage to properly cite Wikipedia, what does that say for his view of the value of content? Oh, right, I guess we should re-read the title of that book…

The real problem inherent in all of this is that after we’re done killing off all the reliable primary news sources, such as newspapers, television news, or even magazines, is that we’ll find we’re left with a gaping void. The thought is that blogs will take over. unfortunately, while blogs are generally interesting sources of commentary and opinion, I see very few that provide anything like news, and when and where they do it, they generally do not do it reliably. You can’t count on today’s source to have good info, or any info, tomorrow, and you definitely should not expect extensive enough general coverage that will allow you to get a good picture of the world, or any small part of it for that particular piece of time.

Okay, I’m sure one of you is thinking now about the Iranian Election a few weeks ago, and how it broke on Twitter. In fact, it would have broken on major news outlets as well, but it got bumped for the MJ Media Circus. Even so, Twitter may be many things, but it’s not a reliable primary news source. Yes, it may provide a lead here or there, but any good journalist knows, that’s just where the story starts…not where it ends.

Getting back to the original theme here, I think now that we can see that news generation was a loss leader for newspapers. It took a lot of effort to do it right, but it was something they could monetize through ad revenue. Today, we need to forget about how content gets delivered, and remember that content generation is still a valuable and necessary product. When we rediscover a proper way to monetize it, the world for journalist and everyone will be a better place.

Because none of us wants to work for free…

5 Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Jim Louderback of Revision3.com has a great article up at JackMyers.com entitled “Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong” about the companies recent trip to the Internet woodshed over their handling of I-celeb Martin Sargent during a recent online spokesperson ballot.

While the specifics are generally quite funny…Jim gives us an excellent list of 5 takeaways that any of us who might consider a Social Media campaign ought to commit to heart:

Respect the Wisdom of the Crowds: If you’re going to solicit entries from the internet, and then ask people to vote, then you need to at least pretend to abide by their selection. Murphy-Goode built a framework that would have let them finesse this. All they had to do was put the top ten vote getters into their top 50. Even if they had zero intention of ever giving Martin or the other nine a job, they should have – at a minimum – given them some recognition for winning the popular vote.

Know Your Web Stars: You may have never heard of Martin Sargent. But he’s an extremely powerful web celebrity – both because of his own following, and his influential friends. If John Stewart, Tom Brady or Britney Spears had entered – or even Wine Spectator editor James Laube — you can be sure they would have been treated with kid gloves. Martin got snubbed and snubbing sucks. But Martin was powerful enough to get a (well deserved) revenge.

Monitor Constantly: While running a social media campaign, keep a close eye on what the social-sphere is saying about your brand. Use Twitter search tools, Tweet Deck, Trendrr, backtype – among others – to keep track of how your campaign is doing. And when you notice something going awry…

Fix it Fast: As soon as “Martin-Gate” began to spread around the web, Murphy-Goode should have jumped in and fixed it. Perhaps they could have added a 51^st finalist to the list. Or maybe they could have expanded the competition to end up with two winners, a winery choice and a people’s choice. Rapid action could have saved this campaign. Even an apology and am “I’m Sorry” would have gone a long way to repairing the winery’s reputation. Instead, company representatives responded with lame platitudes like “You’re too famous” and called Martin overqualified for the job. That just served to fan the flames – particularly because one of the top ten finalists was Rachel Reenstra, former Animal Planet and HGTV show host.

Don’t be half-assed: But here’s the biggest slap to the face of everyone who created, watched, voted and even paid attention to this online kerfuffle. As the story got out, it turned out that some of the candidates for the temporary position were actually sourced by recruiters, who told them that “the online votes were relatively unimportant.” That’s the worst thing that ever could have gotten out. Today’s engaged social network users are no less passionate than the millions of Iranians that flooded the street when their votes were ignored. And they’re far more connected as well. Be honest, be authentic and be real. Murphy-Goode, alas, tried to pull a fast one. But on the internet, it’s extremely hard to be opaque.

I think the big thing here is this: if you’re going to do a campaign that is designed to look and feel “democratic” you better be prepared to accept whatever the results from the people are. Otherwise you’re going to have a lot of people feeling very disenfranchised, and in the end, that’s worse than not having done the campaign at all.