Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Change: Get on Board or Get Run Over.”

#5: Cooks Source Copyright Infringement Becomes an Internet Meme

Speaking of getting run over…  This western New England publication became social media road kill for two reasons.  First, they were quite obviously and brazenly stealing others’ work.  But that alone did not do them in. What really spelled their demise was wanton and arrogant disregard for the power of social media. End result: splat!

Link: Wired Threat Level

#4: U.S. News & World Report All but Quits Print

Here’s a story about a company who decided to get on the bus a split second before getting run over. It remains to be seen whether or not they’ll be thrown back off but at least they’ve seen the writing on the (Facebook) wall.

Link: AdAge

#3: WordPress.com becomes a domain name registrar

The most popular post on this blog is “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress,” which provides a detailed plan for configuring a WordPress blog to act as your personal online homing beacon. I’ve been giving more and more talks about Personal Inbound Marketing lately, and my very strong advice for people is to register their own personal domain and use it for a WordPress blog. Previously, this required two steps using two different companies. Now, you can do it all at WordPress.com. It’s still not the preferred route (I’ll explain why in a future blog post), but it’s great for people who are not very Internet literate.

Link: Domain Incite

#2: Old Media Beware: Blogs Rely on Cleverer Tech, Leverage Social Media, Making Bloggers More Money

Blogging isn’t the story here; it’s democratization. The Internet and its Web 2.0 applications are obliterating barriers to entry in lots of markets. Journalism is one of the first, but if you’ve been following Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, you know that product development and manufacturing are one of the new frontiers.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Of SEO And Spaghetti Sauce

This isn’t just about SEO. The important message is that asking people what they want is a mistake more often than not. When you’re developing products, this is a huge challenge but when you’re developing web sites it’s a huge opportunity. For example, if you had conducted a massive consumer marketing survey in 2000 that asked Sony Walkman users what features and design elements were missing so that you could build a new, innovative device, the last product you would have come up with is an iPod. As the web site iPod History says, “At first, the reactions were confused and hostile, critics lambasted the $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility. Despite all this, the iPod sold beyond everyone’s expectations, went on to revolutionize the entire music industry, and the rest is history.”

The point is that innovation is pretty risky when you’re talking about product development. It generally takes lots of money to get a new product to market. But with web sites, the risk is much lower and the tail is much longer. Be specific and make sure you offer plenty of flavors.

Link: search engine land

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This post is one in a series that discusses the results of the Online Footprint Survey results.  For a complete index of questions and topics, refer to the Online Footprint Survey Results post.

The results showed that 48% of respondents did not own their own name or a reasonable facsimile.  I had, actually, expected that to be a higher percentage.  Be that as it may, this is something that is important now and going to get very important in the near future.

Here are three reasons why you need to register your :

1. There are several billion people on the planet and not nearly enough domain names to go around.  This is leading to what I labeled the “21st Century Land Grab.”  It means that time is quickly running out and the longer you wait, the less likely it is that you will be able to register anything resembling your name or personal brand.
2. We live in the Age of Content, where more and more, the content you produce will shape others’ first impression and lasting perceptions of you.  Owning your own domain name is the most effective way to centralize and control this first impression.
3. Hosting your blog or personal web page as a subdomain on a third party service (for example, jondipietro.blogger.com) is the Internet equivalent of being a tenant at will.  You don’t own the property, can’t implement your own improvements, and could be kicked out at a moment’s notice.  It’s too precarious a position to hold your online identity.

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We all know intuitively that it has never been easier or cheaper to do “x” than it is today.  In fact, statements like that are boring and pedestrian to the point that you may already be considering moving on to the next article. What if I told you it’s possible to build a web site today for $0 in one weekend that would likely have cost over $100,000 and taken several months just three years ago?

After launching the web site Truemors, entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki posted a presentation titled “How I Built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail Social Media Site for $12,107.09.”  And he did so in 7.5 weeks. Closer to home, I received a RFP to build a web site for a local association on a Friday afternoon last year.  By Sunday morning I had the entire site built with nearly double the functionality that was included in the RFP.  These two anecdotes illustrate that it has never been easier or cheaper to build web sites, communicate, collaborate, reach out, or network.  In fact, almost all of the tools I’ll discuss in this article are FREE.

Domain Registration

The first step in leveraging these tools for your organization is not free, but it is very inexpensive.  In order to gain full leverage from many of these tools, it’s important that you own and control your own domain name.  Domain registrars can be found online and include services like GoDaddy, Register.com, and Network Solutions.  Depending upon the domain level type (i.e. com, net, org) the annual registration cost ranges between $10 and $15 per year.

Web Hosting

Next, you need to select a hosting service and it may or may not be through the same company that is your domain registrar.  Selecting a hosting provider should be done on the basis of a) the operating system you intend to use (i.e. Windows or Linux), b) any applications or frameworks you’ll be installing (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke), and c) promotions that various companies may be running from time to time.  In most cases, you should not have to pay more than $4 to $8 dollars per month for shared hosting.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Free, open source web content management systems have obliterated most of the barriers to entry that have existed from the early days of the web until very recently.  I typically use the analogy of an “instant web site – just add water” to describe them.  In fact, many hosts offer one-click installations of these frameworks as part of their service offering.  Most CMSs share the following benefits:

• Ability to manage content without web or programming skills – no more relying on web masters to make changes.
• They are FREE.
• They are powerful, flexible, and scalable.

They also share most if not all of the following characteristics:

• Template (or skin) driven layout and design
• Group-based security and membership support
• Easily modified content
• Web standards upgrades
• Third party extensions

The most popular open source CMS systems are DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.  A comparison of these systems is beyond the scope of this article, but my take is that WordPress is the easiest to install and use, while the other three are more powerful and flexible with a longer learning curve.   Of the four, DotNetNuke is the only Windows-based CMS; the others are all LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP).

Google Apps

Google has a free service called Google Apps that provides a whole laundry list of FREE, powerful services including email, shared documents, shared calendar, shared contacts, web analytics, and more.  It’s quite easy to create an account and configure these services for your organization and they deliver powerful collaborative features.

Newsletters

Many organizations still send email newsletters to their customers or members using standard email.  This is dangerous for several reasons.  First, many of these home-made newsletters violate the Federal CAN-SPAM Act.  Second, if enough of these emails are sent you could be violating your Internet Service Provider’s terms of service.  In addition to these dangers, they also have several shortcomings compared to dedicated e-newsletter services like Vertical Response or Constant Contact, like the lack of advanced reporting and analytics or attractive HTML-format emails.  Plans start at $10 per month, but Vertical Response if FREE for non-profits.

Networking and Outreach

A full discussion of Social Networking is also outside of the scope of this article, but it bears mentioning.  Facebook recently introduced the “Fan Page” feature that is becoming more and more powerful as a tool for organizational outreach.  LinkedIn is a more professionally focused networking web site whose “Groups” feature is an effective means for connecting together groups of like-minded professionals.  There are many others that have their own virtues and vices associated with them, but they all have one thing in common; they are FREE.

How to Keep Up

The world is changing and although this article can get you started, the landscape is changing quickly an you will need tools to keep up on the latest trends.  Here are a few suggestions:

1.       Stay up to date by finding relevant blogs and reading them regularly, using an RSS reading tool to subscribe to news and blog feeds, and use social networking sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

2.       Ask questions about current and emerging technologies.  Again, social networking sites are great for this particular approach.

3.       Spy on other organizations similar to yours.  What technologies are they using?  How are they leveraging social media?

4.       Network with others in your space.

5.       But DO NOT simply accept the status quo and keep following the same old plan.  Technology is always changing, so keep an ear to the ground and be a “heretic.”

Whatever you do, don't do this...

We’re Talking Techno-DIY

Leveraging these technologies is similar to a “do it yourself” project at home; you don’t need to be a plumber to replace a faucet, but you may not want to install a new sink yourself.  The trick is to find your comfort zone and ask for help when you’re outside of it.  The take-away from this article is that you should, at the very least, be aware of the vast array of low and NO cost technologies available to solve problems today and you should vigorously challenge the assumption that “more expensive is better.”

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Oklahoma Bricktown Land Run

By now, many people are familiar with Cybersquatting – a process whereby a person registers a domain name in bad faith with the intent of reselling it later for a profit. Recent legislation has made it easier for trademark holders and famous persons to obtain their domains from squatters, but the process is by no means full-proof (just ask Kevin Spacey and Bruce Springsteen).
However, this is just one layer of an increasingly complex wired world…

I Registered, Therefore I Am

All large and most small/medium/micro businesses (though still not enough) are finally coming to the realization that online invisibility is a tremendous liability. But what about your personal online visibility? Many people have registered their personal names as domain names. Indeed, most domain registrars beat you over the head with requests to do so. But this article is about far more than domain names – that ship pretty much sailed years ago along with Gmail and Hotmail addresses. This is about establishing your online homesteads to be prepared for the current and future waves of social networking.

“Do you have a flag?”

This is a brilliant and hilarious skit by comedian Eddie Izzard. He satirizes imperialistic England, who claimed ownership over indigenous civilizations “through the cunning use of flags.” And so it goes with the new wired world – possession, as they say, is nine tenths of the law. You need to claim as much territory as possible as soon as possible and all you need is a flag: your name.

More and more every day, web sites are becoming tools for learning more about individuals. Sites like LinkedIn and VisualCV are becoming de facto online résumés. Blogger and WordPress are windows into peoples’ expertise and opinions. Flickr, Delicious, and Netflix allow people to share their interests and experiences. Of course, there are the mothers of all personal identity sites; Facebook and MySpace. Finally, there are aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo that attempt to tie them all together. You may utilize few if any of these sites right now, but do you want to bet your online future on the fact that you never will?

He Who Hesitates Is Lost

I’m fortunate in the sense that my name is not all that common. My identity is pretty readily available on most platforms. However, I’m not leaving it to chance. I registered my domain name years ago and have been on a land-grabbing tear recently, snatching up my identity on any site with which I come into contact regardless of whether or not I think I will use it. It’s the sports equivalent of “the best offense is a good defense.” I firmly believe that more and more prospective employers and customers will be using online searches for individuals sooner rather than later. If nothing else, don’t let them find the other “Jane Smith” before you.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Register

If you’re new to social networking and/or personal branding you may have no idea where to begin and that’s understandable. In my opinion, these are the top priorities:

• General
  • Domain name (e.g. www.janesmith.com)
  • Email (e.g. [email protected], [email protected])
  • Twitter (e.g. twitter.com/janesmith)
• Professional
  • LinkedIn (e.g. www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith)
  • Blogger (e.g. janesmith.blogger.com)
  • WordPress (e.g. janesmith.wordpress.com)
  • Technorati (e.g. www.technorati.com/people/tecnorati/janesmith)
• Personal
  • Facebook (e.g. www.facebook.com/people/JaneSmith)
  • YouTube (e.g. www.youtube.com/user/janesmith)
• Sharing and Aggregating
  • FriendFeed (e.g. friendfeed.com/JaneSmith)
  • Delicious (e.g. delicious.com/JaneSmith)
  • Digg (e.g. dig.com/users/JaneSmith)
  • Flickr (e.g. www.flickr.com/photos/janesmith)

Have I left anything out?

Photo credits:
‘Oklahoma Bricktown Land Run’ courtesy of Serge Melki from Flickr (creative commons)

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