Wild dog traffic Sally Falkow has an enlightening post on the nature of social media traffic. A lot of people come quickly and then leave. There's no commitment or stickiness. She cites Scott Karp comparing Digg traffic to a "pack of wild dogs."  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 Comments

  Murdoch sees media power fading Rupert Murdoch on the new world:

"It's so pluralistic. We all have less power, much less."

"Government now has to be much more open" because of the Web.

On what media should do: "We just have to let this go. We can't reverse it."

He advised media organizations to look at social media as an opportunity, though he wasn't specific about how to do that. I don't think many media organizations will ever see this as an opportunity.

This is an interesting article because of the blunt language it attributes to Murdoch: media power is sliding away and it isn't coming back. Get used to it.

Labels: mainstream_media, social_media influence

  ¶ 8:13 AM 5 Comments

  Maybe we're not yet ready for digital democracy I've always been a big believer in digital democracy, but companies like Diebold make me wonder if we're really grown up enough to handle it.

Princeton professor and info security legend Edward Felton has been a thorn in Diebold's side. Last fall, he and two graduate students demonstrated how they could easily introduce vote-altering viruses into Diebold's electronic voting machine. Diebold responded by adding a hinged, locked door over the memory card reader. Diebold was so proud of the solution that it boasted about it on its website.

In a wonderful post from last week, Felton's graduate assistant, Alex Haldeman, describes how he was able to deduce from photos on Diebold's site the type of key and ridge configuration needed to unlock the door. He made three keys to look like the ones in the Diebold photograph and, amazingly, two of them worked. So Diebold's clever solution was undone by its own promotion. All Diebold machines use the same lock, by the way. It's one used in hotel mini-bars and apparently pretty easy to pick.  ¶ 8:11 AM 0 Comments

  Online advertising still off the mark Dave Morgan of Tacoda has a thoughtful opinion piece in Media Post today about the failure of online advertising to live up to its potential to target viewers' interests. He points to a compelling statistic from a 2005 Roper Public Affairs study: "only 21% of people said that advertising adds to their enjoyment of the Internet, versus 47% for magazines and 47% for newspapers. "

Wow, that's backwards, isn't it? In theory, online advertising should be more useful and enjoyable because it's more relevant. But as Morgan points out, advertisers are still stuck on banners and buttons and leaderboards. Most efforts to make ads more effective have so far just made them more intrusive. Does anyone else get offended when they go to a website and an audio ad starts playing? Nevertheless, the online ad market continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Imagine what would happen if advertisers got it right?

Personally, I've had fun recently looking at the ads that show up in my Gmail box. I find Google's choice of what ads to show me based upon the content of e-mails is entertaining and often funny.

Labels: advertising

  ¶ 8:14 AM 1 Comments

  Advertising free-fall at the L.A. Times The L.A. Times, in what is perhaps a precursor to the problems brewing at other newspapers, has announced a strategy to revamp its editorial profile to lead with online reporting. When you look at the numbers, though, you have to wonder if it's too little, too late:

MediaPost quoting Editor James O'Shea: "'In 2004, automotive print advertising at the Los Angeles Times totaled $102 million. And what will it be this year? $55 million.' While the company made up some of the difference in Web ads, O'Shea said the paper was losing more in print ads than it was recouping online."

Omigod! The paper lost 46% of its automotive advertising in a single year? How can you change your business model fast enough to make up for that??  ¶ 10:55 PM 2 Comments

  Hanging around No matter how the social media market develops, you can be sure there'll be a robust business for outdoor advertising. Just try this on your blog!  ¶ 11:38 PM 0 Comments

  Marriott (Bill) joins the conversation Hats off to Bill Marriott who, at 75, is diving into the blogosphere. He 'll dictate his entries to a secretary, who'll type them into the blog authoring system. Hey, it's a start! Why don't more CEOs do this?
http://www.blogs.marriott.com  ¶ 8:54 AM 0 Comments

  Learning Mambo by trial and error

I relaunched my website as well as a new site for my forthcoming book the other day, having moved both to an open-source content management system called Mambo. A year ago, I wrote about my own (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to install Mambo on a local server. This time I did it the smart way, using the Metropolis service provided by GoDaddy to its hosting account customers. Metropolis offers several free software packages for your server and is a nice resource that I’ll bet few GoDaddy customers even know about.

Mambo installed in just a few minutes and a few clicks. I then spent the next two weeks trying to figure it out. There are a few tutorials on the Web but none that I found prepared me to understand the logical structure used by Mambo. That was trial and error and it took a long time.

I’m a big fan of content management systems. My website was previously built on Microsoft FrontPage. While that gave me plenty of flexibility to play with look and feel, the pages were basically locked in stone once they were created. You couldn’t easily share content between sections of a site, move things around, expose and hide sections or move your site to a new template. Also, your page designs were stored on a local machine, meaning you couldn’t easily access them from another computer.

With a CMS, everything is in a database on the server and the content is stored separately from the page templates. Changing the site design is a snap, and content items can be displayed in a variety of ways on different sections of the site. For example, it’s simple to have an article display on the home page and also an inside page. In FrontPage, you’d need to have two copies of the article to do that, which creates all kinds of problems.

Mambo’s hierarchy uses a concept of sections, categories and content items. This structure made little sense to me when I first encountered it and I’m not sure it even makes sense now. Every content item must belong to a category and a section. You can display all items in a category or a section, which is very powerful. But I’m not sure why you need both containers.

There are basically two types of display: blog and table. A blog shows items in reverse-chron order (you can change that) with a snippet of introductory text and a “read more” link. A table displays an index of content items in rows. It’s nice being able to switch back and forth and try different styles. Mambo gives you lots of options for hiding or displaying titles, icons, navigation devices, ratings systems and other goodies. The problem is just keeping track of it all. Unless you set your global defaults carefully, your pages can all end up looking slightly different from each other.

The content editor that came with my package is MostlyCE Admin, a very nice WYSIWYG editor. The performance frustrated me until I realized you could turn off a bunch of resource-hogging features and improve speed dramatically.

There are a couple of hundred free Mambo templates. Once you set up your site, it’s fun to download a few and applying them to your site. The process is fast and easy and it’s one of the best ways to see the value of a CMS approach.

My sites are still works-in-progress and I’m sure there’s plenty about Mambo I have yet to discover. If I had it to do over again, I’d take the time to buy a book. I also wish I knew more about the PhP scripting language and how cascading style sheets work. I’ve been frustrated, for example, by the size of the headline type on my site but have been unable to figure out how to change it. There’s also a nav bar at the top that appears to be hard-coded into the design but which I can’t seem to modify or delete. I’ll figure this out eventually, but for now it’s just frustrating.

Now I have to figure out what to tinker with during the NEXT holiday season!

Labels: open_source

  ¶ 8:57 AM 8 Comments

  Social Media is real in the Inc. 500 Two researchers at the University of Massachusetts has just published an interesting study documenting that small business is far along the learning curve in awareness and usage of social media.

In their summary report, The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500 Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes report that 42% of the Inc. 500 companies they interviewed claim to be "very familiar" with tools like social networks, blogs and podcasts. A third of the companies use message boards and one in five blogs.

Perhaps the biggest news is that 26% of the small businesses say social media is "very important" to their business/marketing strategy. With less than 5% of the Fortune 500 blogging, you can assume that small businesses are way out front in this area.

Updates and analysis to the survey of 121 members of the Inc. 500 list will be published as the year goes along.

Labels: research social_media, social_media

  ¶ 10:09 AM 0 Comments

  How ubiquitous media will change our lives Andrew Gumbel eloquently analyzes the implications of ubiquitous media in this essay in The Independent. Already, citizen media is roiling the law enforcement world as crimes - and police responses to them - are captured on camera phones. From George Allen's "macaca" comments to Michael Richards' racist heckler-baiting, indiscretions are no longer secrets and they can change lives. This is still a nascent trend but it will become much bigger as the technology spreads. There'll be a billion camera phones worldwide in a few years.

Be sure to scroll to the end of Gumbel's essay for a nice list of viral phenomena from 2006.

Labels: consumer_generated_media, viral_marketing

  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 Comments

  The New Journalism: customized reporting Andy Abramson, a PR guy who is also one of the most widely read journalists blogging about VOIP, has posted an interesing essay about Creative Video Blogging and The New "Instant Journalism." His thinking mirrors my own in many respects: in the future journalism will be an amalgam of input from a variety of linked sources. The consumer will have the option of drilling down for more information on almost anything.

Labels: blogging, journalism, mainstream_media

  ¶ 9:41 AM 0 Comments

  A YouTube Kodak Moment A viral video has made its way out of Kodak and become one of the hottest clips on the Web. In it, a dignified, white-haired speaker starts by extolling Kodak's contributions to photography and our culture but then morphs into a ranting maniac, raving about the great work the company is doing in digital photography.

It's funny, but also remarkable for its self-deprecating humor. The clip includes several references to Kodak's early failures to get into digital photography and the opportunities it squandered. Its honesty reflects favorably on the company. Kodak says the video was prepared for internal use and was never meant to be seen by the public. The company has gotten an inadvertent image boost, though, by admitting to its past mistakes and making fun of itself. Good show.

Labels: transparency, viral_marketing

  ¶ 9:37 AM 3 Comments

  My holiday open-source odyssey

I typically spend some time during the down week following Christmas each year to indulge my inner geek and learn some new technology. I have no programming background apart from an eight-week college tutorial in BASIC, so it’s always an adventure. I learn by diving in and doing.

This year I focused on learning Mambo, an open-source content management system, and Samba, the widely respected file-sharing utility. I found both packages impressive in their power and scope but frustratingly difficult to learn and use. I think this accessibility issue continues to be open source’s weak point because the audience of SMB and home users who are the best candidates for low-cost open-source solutions are too inclined to just throw up their hands and walk away rather than deal with all the complexity.

A good example is Samba. My goal this holiday was to set up a simple Linux-based file server to host my business documents. Only two people needed to access the server and both needed universal read/write permission, since we frequently alter each other’s files. A directory created by one user needed to inherit the open permissions of its parent.

In Windows, the process of setting up a share like this takes about 30 seconds. In Samba on Linux, it took me the better part of two weeks, involved two complete re-installs of the operating system and probably a dozen hours of tinkering. I think it works now, but I’m still not 100% sure.

The Linux portion was a snap. Ubuntu Linux is a fantastic distribution. It installed easily and includes a nice suite of office applications and utilities. This distro has totally changed my thinking about desktop Linux. However, you can’t host a Windows directory on Linux. Samba is a great technology that runs on just about every operating system ever invented and allows file exchange with Windows.

The problem for me was that Samba takes a much more disciplined approach to security than Windows. It’s as if the developers couldn’t comprehend why anyone would ever want two users to have unfettered access to the same directory. I found a widely cited tutorial online by a blogger who set up a Samba/Ubuntu file server for $80. His instructions worked great until I got to the PhP administration section, at which time the console either didn’t launch or wouldn’t let me in. I got the share to work, but the permissions were still locked down.

Then I found this tutorial by none other than John Terpstra, the inventor of Samba, detailing how to set up a simple anonymous read/write share. Eureka! This tutorial eventually solved my problem, but it was no simple task.

Setup involved typing in a lot of Linux commands, editing Samba configuration files and setting up each PC that needed to access the directory. One problem is that different Linux distros use slightly different commands. Terpstra was using SUSE Linux and I was on Ubuntu. A couple of the commands in the tutorial simply elicited error messages from Ubuntu. Also, a command to create multiple directories bombed in Ubuntu, which wouldn’t give the needed permissions. At one point, Ubuntu refused to let me modify the critical smb.conf file. That required me to dive down another hole looking for a command that would bypass that restriction.

It seemed that in each case, I would get three-quarters of the way through the tutorial and then something would fail. Because I’m not good enough to undo my mistakes, I had to reinstall Ubuntu twice to clean up the mess.

The happy ending is that I now have an 833MHz Compaq Deskpro with a 320GB hard disk happily purring away and quickly serving files over the network. The whole setup cost about $250. Ubuntu’s reliability has been fantastic and Samba is impressive in its power and the range of options it provides.

Still, I was frustrated by the hours of work that it took to get there. My techie readers will say that I’m a fool for not learning more about Samba before starting the project. They’re right, but I suspect most advanced amateurs like me prefer to just start tinkering. In any case, I found the Samba documentation to be dauntingly complex. The online tutorials were much easier to navigate.

Windows still holds the edge when it comes to ease-of-use. This is the Achilles heel of most open source programs that I’ve used. I think open source programmers have a hard time giving up flexibility for the sake of usability. Microsoft got comfortable with that tradeoff many years ago and that’s why it’s so popular with small businesses.

Next, I’ll talk about my Mambo odyssey, which was fulfilling and frustrating for a whole different set of reasons.

Labels: open_source Linux

  ¶ 9:37 AM 2 Comments