All Things Cahill

Category: Web 2.0

  • Newspaper Deathwatch: Attacks from Without, Attacks from Within

    Another really bad week in which to be a lover of print media. Yesterday came the stunning announcement that The New York Times Company ad revenues for all papers had declined 18% in July when compared with last years numbers. Even worse, especially if you’re a member for the Boston Globe or Worcester Telegram staff, the ad numbers for the Time’s New England Media Group dropped 24% vs. last year. Keep that in mind for a couple minutes…we’ll come back to that shortly.

    Chicago Sun-Times Columnist Quits – Says Papers Can’t Compete with Web

    Jay Marriotti, who many of us may know from ESPN, quit yesterday. Cbs2chicago.com reports:

    Mariotti told CBS 2’s Dorothy Tucker that he decided to quit after covering the Olympics in Beijing because newspapers are in serious trouble, and he did not want to go down with the ship.

    “It’s been a tremendous experience, but I’m going to be honest with you, the profession is dying,” Mariotti said, “I don’t think either paper [Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune] is going to survive.

    Meanwhile, Back in Boston:

    Radio Station WEEI recently relaunched its website with the expressed goal of becoming the authoritiative source for information on Boston sports, directly competing with the Boston Globe, and in fact, hiring several former print journalists. Hence, we can reasonably infer that they’ve seen the weakness of the print media, and they’ve decided to attack.

    For those who don’t know, WEEI is the local sports radio station, who for years has literally given a voice to many of the cities sports columnists whom we’d only otherwise know through their 5 column inches a day. A few years back, The Boston Globe tweaked them hard, by banning appearances by any of their sports staff on WEEI airwaves.

    This means that exactly at the time when print media in Boston is reeling, specifically The Boston Globe with a 24% ad revenue loss , they’ve now got to step up their competition.

    If WEEI pulls this off, it’s a model that we can expect to see repeated across the country. The recipe is clear and one wonders if we’re going to see it in Chicago next.  Columnists like Jay Marriotti will be taking their personal brands, brands which were built at great expense in the print world, and taking them to compete directly against their former task masters via the web.    There are rumors that WEEI has been courting high level columnists at both print newspapers around Boston to join them.  And they could easily end up with a bigger stable of top names than both the print rags combined.

    Choose your own analogy:

    The barbarians are at the gate…

    Like a wounded mastondon…

  • The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

    We’ve all done it. Try to email something to a friend and Outlook, or whatever mail client we use accidentally selects a different contact to send to. It’s not such a big problem when you’re sending pictures of the baby, or directions to the weekend barbeque, but what happens when you accidentally send sensitive information to the wrong person, like a journalist.

    The problem is utterly compounded when you give accidentally give access to your information sitting out in the cloud. Things like sharing a Google Doc with the wrong person, or giving access to sensitive Google Analytics info with a journalist. Especially one who works for a competing media giant.

    That’s exactly what happened at Community Newspaper Holdings recently. Apparently someone meant to share Google Analytics access for all their sites with a staffer named Denise Gallagher but instead shared access with David F. Gallagher, who writes the tech blog for The New York Times. If you were the person who gave access to the Times, I can sum up your thoughts on seeing this headline: “I’m in Your Google Docs, Reading Your Spreadsheets.” That thought has got to be “my career is over.”

    There was a time when it would have taken a fair amount of criminal activity to get access to this much information about a company’s internal workings and Web site performance. Now an employee can accidentally drop it into the lap of a random outsider without even knowing that anything is amiss. That’s the power of cloud computing at work.

    Most of the discussion about the security of online applications revolves around whether or not you can trust Google and its competitors to protect your data. In this case, CNHI needed to be protected from its own employee. Google could help with this by, for example, flashing a warning before you share a document with a person you have not exchanged e-mail with in Gmail. But in the end, security requires careful typing — and perhaps some careful decisions about whether some documents would be better left behind the corporate firewall.

    Here’s the issue, as we all make more and more use of Cloud Computing apps, like Google Docs, like Google Analytics, we’re taking huge risks with not only our company data, but our professional lives. This is the one big failing that we tend to miss, the potential for error is so great, that it’s really not a matter of if mistakes will happen, it’s a matter of how many, and how severe.

    What Google has missed by forcing us to use gmail addresses as the common login parameter for these apps is that for business security reasons, we must be able to authenticate against our own internal, authoritative systems. It’s wrong to expect business to maintain customer access in potentially hundreds of cloud apps, instead they need to open a bridge to the business so that one single point of authentication can be maintained. In this manner, it’s easy to add someone, and more importantly, easy to remove them if you need to.

    This is a huge problem right now in business. I know of people who have left previous employers and are still having company email, including staff only stuff and management level group email, forwarded to them at their Gmail accounts. I know of situations where a year or two later, users still have access to external systems like Webex, etc. Is it all inept management? No, the problem is that the more logins you must manage, the more likely you’re going to forget something. And once in a while, that something is going to be really, really important.

  • Full On Winston Wolfe Mode

    Sorry for the lack of updates.  I’ve been in full on Winston Wolfe mode for the past week and a half as I got pulled into a time critical project to upgrade performance using Akamai for 15 or our websites, some of which I’ve never seen before.

    The good news is that the Akamai DSA product is for real – an incredible boost to performance that requires very little work to set up and very real benefits.

    This sums up my life for the past two weeks:  Winston Wolfe

    The Wolf: You’re… Jimmie, right? This is your house?
    Jimmie: Sure is.
    The Wolf: I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.
    Jimmie: Good, we got one.
    The Wolf: So I heard. May I come in?
    Jimmie: Uh, yeah, please do.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48[/youtube]

  • Week 1 – Community Building Field Test

    (If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…)

    We’re moving right along on Cycling.com – and it’s beginning to look like the site now has a pulse!

    Things improved dramatically after we got our login issue fixed.  Here are the basics for the week:

    • 40+ users registered
    • Several new photos added
    • Comments starting to come in
    • 2 new regional cycling groups were created by users
    • The first weeks poll had 65 votes – and I only seeded it with 10 votes…
    • We had our first ‘real’ forum post, i.e. one that I didn’t write

    No doubt a lot of you are saying “gee, that’s not many users” and you’d be right.  The thing is, as low as that use level is, it’s much higher than the previous couple months, in which all we had was spam being posted.  The secret of community building is that when you start from ground zero, it take a while.  If things are going well, I expect to see a geometric progression of traffic for the initial period.  The problem is, that is very hard to do when you aren’t actively marketing the site and you’re left with only guerrilla techniques.

    That comes with only a modicum of effort.

    • Olympics articles updated every day or so, as time permits
    • New videos are upload as soon as I find something worthwhile on YouTube
    • Forum posts are created pretty much daily

    Next steps

    Since we started registering users in March, I’ve decided we’re going to send out a newsletter.  I wanted to do it today, but unfortunately time has gotten away from me, so we’ll be sending tomorrow.  The basic play will be “We’ve got Olympics coverage” but deep down, the message is more simple, “we’re alive, come visit us.”

    I’m looking to have stickers made, but I’ll admit that CafePress is an utter let down.  I don’t think a simple oval sticker is worth $2 per in a 50 unit increment.   So now I need to actually figure out what the design will be and go to bid with the traditional vendors.  Anyone have any luck recently?

    Findings

    It’s too early to make any prognositcations.  I have been surprised by how much I’m learning about the platform we’ve built, and most of it’s good.  I really like the ease I can post stories, the ability to easily post videos, the way user generated content is handled, and way that users can easily interact.  On the negative side, i really don’t believe that BBPress is a competetive solution for forum software.  Even though we enhanced the heck out of it, I don’t feel it is close to Simple Machines, or the gold standard in my mind, vBulletin.

    Surprisingly, I have found that which Sal commented on in the first post in this season – the user interaction is spread all over the site, and that makes it that much harder to see what’s happening.  I’m wondering if we missed something by restricting you to seeing only what your friends are doing on the site, but deep down, I know we were right on the privacy issue.  Perhaps a homepage widget that boils up all public activity, such as wall posts, blog posts, forum posts, comments, etc. to show “What’s happening right now.”

  • Day 1 – Community Building Field Test

    (If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…)

    Got off to a bad start, after upgrading the site to WordPress 2.6 and the latest BBPress, I find that our Ajax login isn’t working.  What’s worse is that I don’t use that to get logged in usually, so it’s been that way since late Friday afternoon.  Hence I am the only one that was able to login.

    After such a bad trip down the rat hole, it’s hard to call anything good news, but I do notice that I’ve had 59 votes total in my poll that went up on Friday afternoon.  Not bad, although i did seed it with about 10 results.  Also, we’ve had 15 new registrations.  I’ll email the users personally to welcome them tomorrow morning when I know the login issue is fixed.

    So why do I post about this?  Because this stuff happens – a lot.  You are going to make errors while you build your community and things aren’t going to work the way you planned.  Get used to it – you are going to need to do a lot of adjusting, fixing, etc.  The trick is to keep going, and to make things better.

    Oh, and I find that drinking *(heavily)* often helps.

  • One is the Loneliest Number…Community Building 101

    Technically, building a community platform is easy: you just get a fist full of developers, hand them a spec, give them a blank server and turn them loose.  At some point in the not so distant future you have your new community site ready for testing.   Soon there after, you’re ready to welcome the real users.

    The problem is, you quickly find, even if you’ve got a premium domain, that the world isn’t sitting around waiting for you to open your new site.  It’s time for the real building work to begin; and if you’re in the position most of us end up, there’s probably little or no budget for the community development.

    It’s time to go guerrilla!

    I’ve decided to take a site with great potential and adopt it as my own for the purposes of proving the guerrilla community building tactics I’m about to share with you – so this article will actually come in a series of installments; think of it as a lab experiment.

    The site I’m using is Cycling.com which I’ve chosen as it’s a likely candidate for a bump from the Olymics.  You’d expect that you’d be able to discuss cycling events at a site like cycling.com, right?

    First, an overview:

    Cycling was relaunched on a new platform, vs. the old park page that had inhabited the site, sometime in late February, and since has had little or no attention from either the site editors, or anyone that could be considered a community builder.  It is built on a hybrid platform of WordPress and BBPress, with pretty much all of the community functions you’d expect to see:

    • Forum
    • Personal profile page
    • User generated content, including articles, videos, photos, blogs, etc.
    • Groups – which also leverage the ability to create private group articles, photos, videos, etc.
    • Friend capabilities – add a friend, see friends activities, personal messages, etc.

    For the Olympics, we’ve added an RSS feed of the Lenovo Bloggers that gives us access to the cyclists who are blogging.  Very cool (big thanks to David Churbuck at Lenovo).  This gives us a steady flow of new content, which I don’t have to write.  I’ll also be putting up summary articles of the cycling action as the events unfold.  This evening, I’ll be writing up both the men’s and women’s road race events.

    Where we are now:

    We’ve got the classic problem: no one wants to be the first, and there hasn’t been enough forum traffic to get any gravitas going.  Yes, we get traffic, but it’s almost all unique, meaning that we’re not getting the return traffic. In short, it isn’t working.

    Guerilla Community Building 101:

    At random, here are some of the techniques I will be using to try to jump start the discussions:

    • I’ll be posting on the forum under a couple of different user names, so that it doesn’t seem that anyone is “the first” to join the community.
    • I’m looking to enlist some friends who are avid riders to get things going.  I may resort to bribery by making it a condition of my sponsoring them for the Pan Mass Challenge (benefit for cancer) although they all know I’ll contribute no matter what.
    • I’ve added a tag line to my email sig as well as the sig I use on my established, successful sites.”Join me on Cycling.com for 2008 Olympics Cycling News, Videos, Athlete Blogs, and Discussions”
    • I’ll keep the discussion going by adding new content daily.
    • I’ll have an email sent whenever anyone posts, and will make sure that any question is answered within a reasonable time period (to me, that means within 2 hours during the work week and 24 on weekends, but I will aim to be better.
    • Graft – I’ll have some gimmee stuff done up to hand out, and put a bounty on best post of the week (once I have some posts).
    • Stickers – I’m getting some bumper stickers to both hand out and put on my own vehicles.
    • If I were truly an expert, I’d be participating on other cycling sites, acting as the expert, answering questions, and I’d have my url in my sig.
    • I’ll be commenting on cycling blogs and you can bet I’ll be using my own url.
    • I’ll enlist help wherever I can get it –  Within the company I know there are some pretty serious riders.  I similarly have friends who are riders and I will ask all to give me a couple posts a week for while.
    • Early adopters will be cherished – I will find ways to make them feel special and to show them they are truly appreciated.

    As such, I’m also asking for *YOUR* help!  If you’re a cyclist, join the site and let’s start talking.  Since you’re coming from this blog and this post, you then no doubt have some community building skills to add, and I’ll be happy to have you on board!

    I’ll be reporting back on what’s working and what isn’t.  Of course, as with anything in community development, your mileage may vary.

  • The Gray Lady Gets Trolled

    In quite possibly the single most shoddy piece of journalism I’ve ever read, The New York Times has been taken on a ride by a few Internet dirt balls.

    In a piece that ran in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Mattathias Schwartz examined the phenomena of Internet Trolls, in a story entitled “The Trolls Among Us“.   Unfortunately, neither Mr. Schwartz or the copyeditors seem to really know what the definition of an Internet Troll is.  Too bad, as its been more than adequately defined and an accepted part of the online lexicon since the days of the bulletin board. From Wikipedia, who dates the term to the early 1990s:

    An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

    Unfortunately, that which the article attributes to trolling is really no more than online stalking.  Even worse, they give play credence to the type of activity that needs to be prosecuted, not published:

    Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.

    Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.

    The interesting bit is that they’ve apparently accepted a term “lulz” which is a bastardization/pluralization of “LOL” for laughing out loud, which the article says these fine folks collect as a rating on their adventures.

    The only problem is, that it really isn’t true.  If you search Google you’ll find two or three vague references, which come from exactly the same folks they’ve interviewed for the article.  I’m sorry, but a handful of clowns doth not a circus make…and they certainly won’t suffice as sources for an article in the Gray Lady.

    The article is utter rubbish – an attempt to create a trend where one does not really exist, and frankly, we should expect better from The New York Times.

  • Great LA Times Piece on Revision3

    I’ve said it before – they’re changing the way broadcast media is done…check out the LA Times piece on  Revision3.

    nd so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

    “What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

    I don’t miss a single episode of Tekzilla and Systm – great shows, and they work very well downloaded right onto my Iphone – I no longer fear waiting rooms.  They are there when I’m ready to watch them – utterly convenient, as opposed to traditional broadcast

    The real thing to get out of this article is this: online video is the place to be right now.  The rules are being written and the frontiers are being explored.  Look at the stuff that Leo Laporte’s doing at Twitlive.tv and definitely take a very close look at Revision3 – this is the next wave and it’s happening now.

    (Disclosure: Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback is a friend from college – but that had nothing with my decision to run this post, although I am extremely happy for him and the Revision3 crew…)

  • Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks

    Traffic stats – the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy.  This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening.

    The truth is that the only true measure is cash.  The cold, hard green stuff, the only thing that slays the monthly mortgage beast, or allows us to consume fossil fuels with reckless abandon.

    Now the stats for this blog have got me completely befuddled.  Yes, I can see what is happening, and I see that all too clearly.  The problem is that I have little notion of how I should react.

    From the top:

    • I notice from from MyBlogLog Stats that I’m getting 300 or so readers a week, up from 50 or so a couple months ago.  Google confirms this.
    • The primary referer for those users is Google Images, specifically if you search for “sharks” which will show an image from one of my posts from June in the #2 spot.
    • My “One and Done” rate is (the site bounce rate) is threw the roof.  I have lots of traffic that simply isn’t engaged.  They’re coming to the wrong site and leaving.
    • That image is in danger of being hot linked all over the web.  Google images is the place people generally go to find image for use on their blog, and frankly, it’s where I found the image in the first place.  I am worried someone will live link, and I’ll end up getting a huge bill for bandwidth (this site is setup to withstand a visit to the Digg homepage or slashdotting).

    Eugene and Tom, tell me I should be flattered.  I’m not so sure.  Perhaps it’s experience, perhaps its just my inbred belief that things tend to go from bad to worse, not good to better.  So what are my options:

    • Do nothing – my wife’s beliefs aside, this is not my strong point.  I hate inaction…
    • Throw in an htaccess rule protecting the images, then sending an adverisement for my site to anyone who links live.  Nice idea, but frankly it’s hypocritical.  I live link…a lot.  I know it’s bad, but darn it, I like having images.
    • Go with Tom’s suggestion: start doing more shark content.  Darn it, if they’re coming for sharks, then sharks they’ll get.  I guess this is a good one, except for the fact that I have little access to shark content.  Even though I once was almost shark food…and wear a mako shark tooth around my neck, and have a set of mako jaws on my wall above this very computer, that was caught on my boat while I was captaining, by my father.
    • Delete the image and wait for it to drop from Google.

    Sadly, here is what I see:

    • Writing about sharks = actually making something out of this blog.
    • Writing about Social Media = sending lots of smoke up the chimney, and getting readers who’d never, in a million years, click on an advertisement
    • Writing about the Death of Print Media = talking to myself – its a dead issue, and no one is reading my posts about it anymore.

    I guess if I really thought I wanted to monetize this blog, I’d start writing posts like “Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks.”  Then wait for the diggs to roll in…

    That, I think I might be able to do…and for the record, I miss the days when I used to get paid to write stuff like this (and paid well, I might add…)

  • Why Most Online Communities Fail…

    David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“.  David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages.

    1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

    The point I’d like to make goes more to the point in Churbuck’s piece that will be overlooked – “This is bad research on a tired topic.”

    You see, the thing that all of the social media gurus, wannabes, and willneverbes would have us believe is that community is easy. You build it and they will come.  The truth is so very far from there that if it was commonly known no marketer in his/her right mind would ever utter the words “let’s build a community, gang!” again.

    Sounds harsh?  Well, it ought to.  There are way to many businesses committing to creating community development without the slightest thought of what the real ramifications of failure are.  And even worse, they judge the cost of creating their communities solely on the basis of what the servers, dev costs, etc. will be and routinely devote little or no resources to actually managing and developing that community.

    I say it again, more clearly: a community will fail surely if you do not devote experienced people to building and moderating it.

    Note that word, people.  I don’t say person.  And there’s a lot more that goes along with this.  There are ton of real, hard costs that you’re going to face in order to make a community successful.  Building in these terms isn’t development, it’s people attracting other people to your service, getting them committed, and giving them reasons to stay there.  This big myth is that communities build themselves.  When done right, it will look like they build themselves,  but there’s always someone helping the community get going.

    This is where I see companies fall flat on their face time and time again (sorry, not gonna name names here, but I could).  They think that assigning a marketing intern to run the site they just poured a million in development and up front costs into, is going to be sufficient.  People come in once, if your lucky, look around, realize they’re essentially hanging out in an empty room and leave.  Eventually the company folds up shop, does a post mortem, fires the intern and promptly forgets every lesson they should have learned.  Then someone chimes in “hey gang, let’s build a user forum and share our brand.” Then the cycle starts all over again.

    Most businesses have no business running communities.  They want to make “the brand more transparent” and in the end, they hurt the brand by creating a bad user experience that has nothing to do with their actual brand, but through association, it’s now taking the hit.

    If you don’t have experts who can show you working communities they’ve built, and if you’re relying on consultants who aren’t cautioning you, you need to be very wary. Personally, I feel the best place to expose the brand to a community is through active sponsorship of existing communities.  You don’t need to own it, you get a ton of mileage for your buck, and the positive effects start right away, not a year from now when  your development cycle is done.

    Think about it…why own a community when you can rent one…

    More reading:

    Helen Whitehead on Why Do Online Communities Fail? – a well thought out piece with some good advice.

    R. Todd Stephens, Phd – making the point that communities struggle when there’s no good business reason to get involved.

    C. David Gammel at High Context Consulting on the Three Reasons Branded Online Communities Fail

    Update: Tom O’Brien at A Human Voice commented on the Churbuck post with probably the most important note of all “the community vendors were scrambling hard to pull the curtain back up..”  Darned straight, they have been scurrying to get the genie back in the bottle.  Tom’s own post – “Social Media Madness: Build it & they will come . . .” also puts the lie to to the maxim that brands need to develop communities.  As he puts it, the community often already exists, and “increasing brand value” isn’t their goal.