Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

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

This week’s High Five is about all things Internet.  It includes some interesting uses, abuses and threats that are not only worthy of mention but long term monitoring.

#5: The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model

I don’t generally use this space just to list “cool stuff.”  However, in addition to having pizazz, it seems to me that this model has some serious potential to become a game-changer.

Link: Wired

#4: Optimize LinkedIn Profile for SEO

Mike Volpe from Hubspot provides some very simple yet important tips for optimizing your LinkedIn profile (it led me to immediately make a couple of quick tweaks).  I am constantly evangelizing how important your online presence is, and this short tutorial is great for maximizing its effectiveness.

#3: China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’ – Updated

The conclusion from this article is that China’s algorithms for censoring the Internet were messing around with Wired magazine’s availability, which seems to be intermittently available.  The interesting nuggets from this article are the notations that China tends to block any sites with RSS feeds and blogs.  Why RSS feeds?  Because they are a push mechanism instead of pull.  In other words, it’s easier to track people when they have to visit a site to read what’s on it.  I know none of this is particularly shocking, but it’s important to understand what governments can do to encumber the Internet.  And before you start feeling too comfortable in the U.S. or E.U., read on…

Link: Wired

#2: Court to FCC: You Don’t Have Power to Enforce Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is the principle that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) should not be able to deliberately throttle back bandwidth for particular sites or protocols or otherwise interfere with them.  This ruling is about Comcast’s efforts to hamper use of the file sharing site BitTorrent.  Since these “torrents” are frequently used to illegally share files, there may not be much sympathy.  However, consider that Comcast has also been accused of interfering with Vonage as well, who is a competitor to their voice over IP service.  The courts and government seem to be setting the stage for an Internet that is going to be patrolled, regulated, fettered, and not at all like the one we are used to right now.

Link: Wired

#1: Senator Demands IP Treaty Details

This is a follow from last week’s story about the possible efforts by U.S. and E.U. authorities to deputize ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to be the Copyright Gestapo.  This week, we see that a U.S. Senator is having to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the details of this treaty.  That the government is trying to hide information is nothing new, but the fact that this Senator is from the same political party as the current administration makes you wonder what’s in this bill that they don’t want people to know.

Link: Wired

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Alec Baldwin's character colorfully presents his selling philosophy, "ABC: Always Be Closing."

Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many.  It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech.  Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.

“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates.  This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure.  I’ve included 4 tips to help you get going.

#1 Intelligence

I am not referring to the ability to comprehend, but rather the collecting of information.  For me, intelligence is the oxygen that fuels my content generation.  These are my intelligence gathering tools:

• Barnes & Noble: I read, read, read, read…
• Google Reader: I subscribe to 210 RSS feeds and have read over 11,000 articles in the last 30 days.  However, keep in mind that “read” is probably an overstatement and it’s more accurate to say that I “scanned” those articles, looking for interesting content and then reading, bookmarking, and sharing as appropriate.
• Twitter: More and more, people are using Twitter as a source of “pre-qualified” information.  Because you are presumably following people you trust and/or in which you’re interested, then it stands to reason that links they share will be of interest to you also.  It’s becoming a real time news echo chamber that helps me stay on top of the latest tech developments and trends.

This is a shot of a hotel room I stayed in for two weeks that is still in the "hopper" waiting for a hotel room rant post that is coming.

#2 Raw Materials

Words are the foundation of all online content, but pictures and video constitute the paint, carpeting, furniture, etc…  Throughout the course of the day, I am mindful to be collecting pictures, screenshots, and video that may eventually be used in a post somewhere.

My BlackBerry Bold smartphone is absolutely indispensable as a raw material collection tool, as it is something I always carry and can take pictures and videos that are of perfectly acceptable quality for online use.

I use TechSmith’s SnagIt as a screen capture tool for grabbing screen shots of programs and web pages that may come in handy later on.  I also use Camtasia Studio for authoring and editing screen casts.

#3 Total Consciousness

Content collection needs to become a habit, which requires you perform the action at least 21 times.  Here are some tips to help ensure you remember:

• Write down the habit you’re trying to establish and post it in as many places as possible.
• Schedule your content collection ahead of time.  Obviously, you can’t really schedule something like this, but if you can put calendar appointments on your phone, then at least you are getting regular reminders that will help keep you in that frame of mind.
• Reward yourself every time you come up with a new blog idea.
• Concentrate on consistency rather than results.  In other words, don’t worry if the content you’re collecting is not of the quality level you’d like it to be.  The most important thing is to keep developing the habit and mindset, which will eventually become a habit that will result in more “aha” moments and better quality stuff.

My blogging tools of the trade

#4 Be Prepared

Assuming you fuel the content machine, collect the raw materials, and develop the proper habits, the last piece of the puzzle is being prepared to trap and keep that content.  I’ve settled on a system that relies on two tools; the voice recorder feature of my phone and a Moleskine notebook.

If you’re as scatter-brained as I am (and even if you’re not), then a voice recorder is a non-negotiable, must have tool.  I finally grew tired of ideas zipping in and out of my head as often as Tiger Woods… well, you get the idea.  I’d been telling myself for quite some time that I need to pick up one of those small voice recorder devices when it occurred to me that my BlackBerry had one built into it.  Now, I’m in the habit of carrying my phone everywhere, including some places that may be construed as a “too much information” moment, because you never can tell when your next blog idea will strike.  I had three in row occur to me when I was shaving the other day, and quickly dictated them to the phone’s voice recorder.

Eventually, the random thoughts and musings get transcribed off of the phone and into my blog notebook.  This notebook contains a diary of ideas for articles that is actually starting to grow quite fat.  I am gradually picking up the pace of my posts as a result of growing confidence that I’m not going to run out of content any time soon.  They key is to build up a healthy backlog of articles that can smooth the peaks and fill in the valleys.

These are just my ideas – let’s hear about your tips and tricks.  I’m not sure I’d recommend Dogbert’s approach:

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Making membership free will not, in and of itself, build an effective army. First, they must be recruited. This is where the long tail comes into play. Next, they must be equipped with the latest technology, afforded competent and inspiring leaders, and trained in effective tactics.

Recruitment

The “Long Tail” is a phrase attributed to Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, who wrote an article in 2004 about “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” Engineers and economists would already be familiar with the numerical component of this phenomenon, known as the power law distribution curve or more colloquially the “80/20” rule. The transaction costs historically associated with institutions’ ability to organize people required that the focus scarce resources (people and money) on the top 20% of people who would contribute 80% of the work, value, donations, revenue, content, etc…

I think the current strategies are more focused on maintaining the 20% than pulling in the other 80%. It can be done now, because (assuming a freemium model) the transaction costs to the organization and barriers to entry for the members is essentially nil. One example (though certainly not the only) is the reluctance to embrace strategies that rely exclusively on Internet-based technologies. The reasoning is that not all members have broadband access or are active enough, which may or may not be true (show me the numbers). But the point is that it doesn’t matter. I submit that losing a few thousand members in order to gain a hundred thousand is a good trade. Sometimes you need to fire your customer and go find better ones.

The benefits to a long tail may be self evident to anyone reading this, but in case they are not I will provide two anecdotes. The first is taken from Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” which is, incidentally, the most profound book you can read on the subject of the “power of organizing without organizations.” Shirky discusses the fundamental misunderstand of open source software by Microsoft. They long fought against the concept of open source, calling it a myth that it was developed by thousands of programmers because only a few hundred contributed more than a few lines of code. He goes on to say, “It’s easy to see, from McGrath’s [Microsoft U.K. executive] point of view, why the open source model is the wrong way to design an operating system: when you hire programmers, they drain your resources through everything from salary to health care to free Cokes in the break room.” Microsoft simply can’t afford to pay a programmer’s entire annual salary for a mere two dozen lines of code. But what if that code fixed a buffer overflow vulnerability that put millions of computers at risk? Borrowing from the cheesy world of informercials, now how much would you pay? The point here is that when the transaction costs of organizing are free, so are the failures. You can afford the hundreds or thousands of failures in exchange for one game-changing success.

The second anecdote is simply an interesting description of Amazon.com’s business model. As one employee described it, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” That one takes a few moments to digest, but it’s the quintessential differentiator between atoms and bits, scarcity and abundance, costly and free.

Equipment

Once free membership and the long tail begin filling the membership hopper, the next step is to “arm” them with the latest technology. Much like the weaponry for a particular soldier is dependent on his or her mission, so to must our tool sets match the mission.

• Listening – Our members must have state of the art tools for listening to ISA activity in their preferred communication channels. These may include any combination of RSS, email, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc… And by the way, these will change from year to year.
• Sharing – When members have news to share or interesting ideas, there need to be easy and efficient ways to share that information. Again, there is no single tool or technology but ISA must be connected with all of the common platforms. Automated social media channels could be set up to mash up mentions on various networks.
• Collaborating – Every Department, Division, and standards committee must have its own shared workspace for effective collaboration. This could be done today for free using sites like Ning. They are currently being assembled ad-hoc, which is obviously inefficient and alienates ISA from the process.
• Publishing – In order to leverage the contributions of the long tail, members must have a platform to easily publish their work, accomplishments, opinions, and (perhaps) open letters to ISA leaders. There are a multitude of technologies available to do this in extremely interesting and profound ways. One of the simpler tools is simply to enable a blogging platform where all members get to publish themselves in a common area, perhaps by subject area. This is not unlike traditional user forums with a few exceptions. Blogs allow complex content and multimedia (images, video, and presentations), they are more easily indexed by search engines, and they are an easier platform to monitor.

Leadership

It is important not to look at the membership as one big mob, but as a collection of interconnected networks. Member Sally may be a cybersecurity expert in HMI systems and wireless communication with zero interest in the finer points of flow measurement and calibration, while Sam may be a pump designer who does care about flow, while Dan is VP of marketing for a large automation distributor and needs to a little bit about everything. With the proper tools in place as already described, these small networks will organize themselves and the leaders will naturally rise to the challenge. ISA’s job will transition out of the planning and organization business and into the coordination business. It will be important to provide these leaders with the tools, support, and motivation to succeed at leading their respective tribes.

Tactics

Some members will be right at home in this new paradigm (they will be the first generation of leaders). Others will need some training, best practices, guidelines, tips, and hacks. The better ISA can train the leaders in effective tactics, the more value the members will be able to provide. It’s not unlike training office staff in using Word and Excel.

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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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What is RSS?

Well, it stands for “Really Simple Syndication” but given the fact that there is still not widespread adoption and so few people understand it, one could take exception to that moniker. In any case, let’s try to use a newspaper analogy to explain this. Think about reading your local newspaper. For many people, there are certain sections that are of more interest than others. And maybe some sections that are of no interest. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could call up the newspaper and tell them, “I’m only interested in the Local, Business, and Sports sections, so would you please only include those in my newspaper? Also, I’d like the newspaper delivered to me at home, the office, and in my car – depending upon where I am at the time.”

So, that’s it in a nutshell; it allows you to subscribe to “feeds” that contain news and information from sources that are of interest. And depending on your technology platforms, you can read them from anywhere, anytime. You can scan over headlines, deciding which (if any) sound interesting, choose whether or not to read the entire article, and even make notes, mark them as a favorite, or share them with your friends and associates.

For this particular article, I’m going to stay away from the more technical how-to stuff and try to concentrate on the “what” and “why”. I’ve spoken with many colleagues in the past couple of weeks who are either new to the concept or don’t really understand how it can be leveraged by them to help them meet their personal and/or professional goals.

Here’s a snapshot of my Google Reader. It’s only showing publications I haven’t yet marked as “read” (click on the image to see full size).

So you can see that I’ve set up my reader to “tag” feeds with certain keywords (e.g. “FFL”, “LinkedIn”, “News”, “Sports”, etc…) I can browse through the publications based on these categories and when something seems worth reading more, I’ll either click on the article to read it immediately or “star” it so that I can read it later. Because I’m using Google Reader, I can also do all of this on my BlackBerry as well using Google’s Mobile Reader Application.

Why Do I Care?

• Let the information come to you. For me personally, this is the most compelling benefit of RSS. I don’t have to worry about missing out on information that might be important to me by failing to read a particular issue of a newspaper or seeing a press release on a company’s web site.

• It takes all kinds. There are many different types of RSS feeds available for subscription that make it possible to stay informed of many different topics. You can subscribe to news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, Craigslist postings, press releases, etc…

• It’s OK to look. Any RSS reader will display a headline and several summary lines describing the publication, allowing you to quickly and easily scan through for items of interest.

• Save, tag, share, and/or comment. RSS readers generally provide capabilities to perform tasks to organize, document, and share your subscriptions. If you see an interesting article but don’t have time you can save it to read for later. You can assign “tags” that categorize articles and even share them with others in your social and/or professional circle.

If you want to start utilizing RSS, the first decision to make is selecting a RSS Reader. Read this Lifehacker article to get some recommendations. You can also see how many different ways there are to make use of your RSS feeds.

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