Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

Just an announcement that we are going to be discussing Why you MUST have a Twitter Strategy at Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs on August 21, 2008.

I’m going to present a short intro/overview to Twitter and then, god willing and the creek don’t rise, we plan to have two (2) video conferences, one from Triangle Tweetup and the other from a soon-to-be-announced Industry luminary with over 25,000 Twitter followers!

After the 8pm break we’ll have a roundtable-less discussion and Q&A led by our featured participants:

• Sanjay Parekh (sanjay on Twitter),
• Tessa Horehled (driveafastercar on Twitter) and
• Paul Stamatiou (stammy on Twitter).

Anyone that wants to attend should first be sure to have a Twitter account and to follow atlantaweb. We’ll use that list as a roll call for the meeting and we’ll announce our special guest on the atlantaweb Twitter account by 6pm Wednsday August 20th.

For more details and to RSVP see go here.

driveafastercar, paulstamatiou, people, sanjayparekh, stammy, strategy, tessahorehled, twitter

Wall of Spam courtesy of freezelight and enabled by Creative Commons

Damon Clinkscales blogged about Twitter Spam last month where he advocated proactively cleansing one follower’s list of "follow spammers" to help reduce the load on Twitter, improve Twitter’s reliability, and increase the value of the Twitter community in general.

I agree!

Still, I think Twitter could take a proactive step reasonably easy that would make it so we don’t have to. I think Twitter could reduce most of the type of Twitter follower spam I got today by applying two simple criteria (And I think Damon also got that same spam today. BTW, nice blog theme Damon! ;-)

I think a strong indication of Twitter follower spam is simply:

1. Their following/follower ratio (or their ing/er ratio for short), and
2. Their follow rate (i.e. how quickly they follow someone after that last time they followed someone.) 

This spammer I got today followed me with 4 different Twitter accounts within a few minutes and each account had around 2000 followings and just over 10 followers making their ing/er ratio about 20-to-1 and I’ll bet their followers were all auto-followed. It’s also clear from the fast & furious tweets that I was not their only mark.

I think it would be reasonable for Twitter to auto-block anyone with a ratio of greater than 15-to-1 ing/er ratio. Twitter could even remove the auto-followers from the calculation; those that follow within around 90 seconds of being followed wouldn’t count as a follower. Doing this Twitter would still give someone the ability to follow 15 people for every one that follows them, and heck they could give them their first 150 people[1] for "free" (i.e. not counting against the limit.) If someone really wants to follow 15,000 people they need to be interesting enough to have at least 1000 people follow them. Shouldn’t be that hard…

Also, Twitter could limit followings per day to, say, 75.  That should be enough for anyone, even the most hard-core twitter newbie (150 "free" + 75 more), and it’s not unreasonable to require a newbie to wait a few days to follow lots and lots of people. 

If I were in charge of setting these limits, I’d set the ing/er ratio to 5-to-1, give them only 25 "free" and then limit to 25 followings per 24 hour period, but I shot high because I was trying to be "reasonable." Of course, Twitter could allow for special cases by allowing people to request to have those limits manually raised if they provide a good justification for it.

What do you think?  Would this work to reduce most Twitter follow spam?  I think so.

antispam, follower, ratio, solutions, spam, twitter

Gotta love this error message I got when trying to set a password that was "too long" on Intense Debate:

error messages, intense debate, xml

Photo by Nemo’s great uncle

Several months back we had a meeting on Leveraging Mobile Apps for your Web-based Business at Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs and on the topic of mobile push marketing the consensus of the attendees was overwhelmingly “Don’t you even think about it, or I’ll end up ramming my mobile device far, far up someplace you’d really it rather not be.” Or something like that. Soon after I made a comment on Douglas Karr’s blog  on his post about bluetooth proximity marketing saying exactly that.

Well I just noticed that Michael Katz of AdMarkTech.Com posted a response entitled Do We Really Know What We Want? where he takes the position that bluetooth proximity marketing is less intrusive that television advertising because when watching TV you are not "in the shopping zone."  He then posits that:

"Maybe Bluetooth proximity marketing seems more intrusive than other forms of mainstream advertising because we’re just not conditioned to be approached while we shop."

He then claims that (with emphasis mine):

 "bona fide Bluetooth proximity marketing campaigns, similar to contextual vertical advertising platforms, are no different to television commercials"

And he summarizes with:

"The capabilities of two way push, receiving surroundings based information, on-the-spot offers and the ability to instantly reject or to receive based on Bluetooth activation preference, Bluetooth proximity marketing is actually less intrusive and potentially more helpful than television advertising."

Maybe.  But television advertising is not a fair comparison to bluetooth proximity advertising. First the TV viewer (or radio listener or magazine/newspaper reader or website viewer) makes a proactive choice to engage in a medium that they know is supported by advertising and that is part of an implicit pact where people gain content in exchange for attention. In the case of walking by a store, a person may or may not be in the frame of mind where they am ready to perform an attention exchange for an advertisement, and if they are not it is highly intrusive. Sure people could potentially be "conditioned" to accept it (shades of Apple’s 1984 campaign?) and he may be right, but I doubt it for the next reason.

There is a natural limit to advertising that can be inserted into content before people will no longer accept the exchange; only so much ad time on a TV or radio show, only so many square inches in a magazine or newspaper, and only so many square pixels close to valuable content available on a web page.  In the case of bluetooth proximity marketing it’s likely a person walking down a mall will be inundated with ads; literally tens if not hundreds in a short period, and that is far more than anyone can process.

In my opinion that’s a major reason why people hate email spam; that it overwhelms them. If we could somehow configure the number of commercial emails we’d get per day, and we could have them filtered by our preferences I think we’d be happy to get "unsolicited" commercial email. But there is no moderation on on spam, and without moderation on bluetooth proximity marketing it will just be another form of spam, only even more offensive because the devices are smaller.

Can there be moderation on bluetooth proximity marketing?  Ads on TV and radio, for example, come in series. Bluetooth proximity marketing would comes in parallel as does spam, and with nothing to moderate it. One possible way to moderate would be for governments to set up regulatory agencies to manage and meter access to said marketing but that sounds like a cure worse than the disease. Another potential way would be gatekeeping companies to control who can broadcast bluetooth proximity marketing messages to their subscribers and who cannot, and people would subscribe based on who does the best job of filtering. But I think a lot of visionary people in very powerful and competing positions would have to come together to make such a network of gatekeeper possible, and I just don’t see it happening.

Bluetooth proximity marketing is a typical example of how most people spend too much time on what they want and too little time creating value. Michael’s post title (Do We Really Know What We Want?) is a great example of that.  It sounds to me that Michael is asking "How can we convince people to want what we want?" That is wrong-headed, we should instead be thinking "What do they want, and how can we make a business to give it to them?"

Here’s a product I know people will really want instead; something that blocks all bluetooth proximity ads from ever reaching their mobile device.  Now that is a product of tomorrow that will be in VERY HIGH demand!

bluetooth, cell phones, douglaskarr, michaelkatz, mobile devices, proximity marketing, value creation

Interesting.  I guess my recognition of the similarity of WordPress’ new Revisions control to Mediawiki/Wikipedia was not unique.  Andrew Hyde proposed Wikify, as a plugin for WordPress to allow readers to revise posts for facts, spelling errors, et. al. Great idea. 

Of course it becaming popular would be a mixed blessing as we’d have yet another thing for which we’d need to manage spam. :-)

andrewhyde, mediawiki, plugin, revisions, spam, wikify, wikipedia, wordpress

When I relaunched my blog site I went with v2.3 but did most of the work several months before I launched. When I had time to launch v2.5 was out but I decided not to delay launching again and just went with v2.3 with plans to upgrade to v2.5 as soon as I had time (I’m working with 2.5 on a client probject and it is much nicer.)

Tonight I saw that Douglas Karr had a nice simple visual upgrade tutorial to WordPress 2.5 so I was going to see if I could do it tomorrow. No sooner did I find his post than up popped a notice on Twitter about WordPress 2.6 (how will we ever keep up?!? :-)  Looks like I’ll be killing two birds with one stone, and hoping that the 2.6 upgrade will be as easy as Douglas made the 2.5 upgrade look.

Anyway, here’s a quick look at WordPress 2.6 from WordPress.org (note how it looks a lot like Mediawiki (Wikipedia) embedded into WordPress halfway through the vid):

wordpress 2.6 upgrade

I’m at the Fox Theatre in my hometown of Atlanta today checking out the Adobe AIR Bus Tour Summer 07. It’s nice to be at the first event nationwide. I’m attending at the behest of a friend who thinks it going to be the "next big thing." I’m skeptical. I fear yet another proprietary attempt to empower developers to craft unique custom web interfaces to provide desktop functionality as a layer over web technologies, and that’s not a compliment. These types of things, especially when looking at the black box nature of opaque Flash SWF files, do their best to ignore those things that make the web work, i.e. stateless URL-addressed resources. The reality of Adobe AIR remains to be seen… P.S. It would have been nice if Adobe had consulted me to ensure that this event was more convenient for me. I mean, I actually had to leave my home and cross the street to attend. Adobe, Please! ‘-)

adobe, adobeair, blogging, dasblog, drupal, events, php, webarchitecture, wordpress

You gotta love that some at Microsoft actually have a sense of humor! From the PopFly FAQ (emphasis mine):

Why did you call it Popfly?

Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

events, humor, mashups, microsoft, popfly, web2.0

I just had an epiphany!  (So everyone, go ahead and send me 50 links that I personally have yet to run across where others have already suggested this. :)

I’ve always wanted to review key numbers related to my company’s permformance on a periodic basis; i.e. each day, each week, and each month, etc.  I know this is needed by almost every person in almost every company. One method is to create an “intranet dashboard.“  But I find I am personally more projected-focused and don’t look at my dashboard consistently enough.  Another is to send an email, but then I have to “manage“ those emails in additional to all my other emails; yuck!

My epiphany was to create a single RSS feed for periodic report distribution.  When the report server generates the report, it would get pulled down by my SharpReader and a Outlook-style notification pop-up would tell me about it if I’m at the PC otherwise next time I look at my reader I’ll see the new report and be able to review it.  There would be no need for me to manage those reports because they’d all be on the feed and stay there until my configured expire date, which could be different for daily, weekly, and monthly reports.  If I wanted a report that had dropped off my reader, I’d just go run the report like I currently do today.

Implementation wise, there would just be an “item” table in a SQL Server database where generated reports would be dumped by scheduled tasks.  The item table could have a “category” field that would also allow subset feeds for each category.  Super simple.

Is this idea cool or what?  :-)  Maybe I should track down the SQL Server Reporting Services guys and ask them to consider for v1.1?  Or maybe some SQL Server guru somewhere could just write a custom output format and custom delivery target and publish an article somewhere?

business, reporting, rss, softwarearchitecture, sqlserver

I’m blogging today about an email conversation I had with the publisher of "TechLinks", an Atlanta-based email newsletter that, according to their website, "supports the fast pace of change within the Georgia technology community."   I’m going to relay the conversation and then ask your opinion: “Do you think RSS has benefit for TechLinks?“

Basically the TechLinks email goes out daily on business days. On Monday it provides a list of meetings and events, and the rest of the week it lists press releases from Georgia technology companies (click here to see an example.)  I’m subscribed to TechLinks because it occasionally has something important to me, but usually it doesn’t. Each day when TechLinks arrives in my inbox, I get this pained feeling of "do I really want to spend 5 minute of my attention to actually read this thing?"  It doesn’t help it is two to three pages long.  Usually I just delete it, but feel guilty because "maybe I missed something?" 

Since Scoble turned me onto blogging last month, I’ve notice lots of ways RSS, if used, could improve my everyday computing.  After returning from VSLive last month and swimming through my email inbox I had one of those epiphanies.  There were at least five daily issues of TechLinks, and I thought "Damn, in RSS format I could read it a lot faster using SharpReader, it wouldn’t clog my inbox, and I’d stress about missing something. After all, TechLinks is perfect for RSS because it’s a bunch titles with links to the TechLinks website."

So I shot off an email to the founder and editor of TechLinks Mike Adkinson suggesting:

Why don’t you turn this into an RSS feed?

I also thought it would help Mike if he had not considering offering RSS for TechLinks.  To my email I got a one word reply:

Why?

I thought it a bit rude so my reply back to Mike was admittedly was a bit sarcastic:

Uh, maybe so you won’t be the last content provider who isn’t?

Or maybe one of these people can say it better than me:
http://www.wired.com/news/rss
http://www.infoworld.com/rss/rss_info.html
http://news.yahoo.com/rss
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1097192,00.asp
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/dlee/550/rss/whyuseit.htm
http://www.oreillynet.com/rss/
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/
http://www.greatwesternpublishing.org/rss/rss.html
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
(Also see: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,933657,00.asp)

Or maybe so I can actually READ your newsletter and not just delete it (RSS is much easier to read using a RSS reader like SharpReader [http://www.sharpreader.com] instead of read email newsletter.)

I never got a response. 

Yesterday I got another TechLinks and thought "Hmm, let me send another email with those RSS links I posted on my blog today." Here was my email:

Here is more about RSS (and why you should offer this email as an RSS feed):

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/04/XMLFiles/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssVersionHistory

To that I did get a reply, probably to keep me from bugging him again:

I asked one of our people to explore this idea and the resulting message back to me was that we did not find where it offers a business advantage for us in any way that we could determine. It does take some effort and for reaching the audience that we want to serve, there was no apparent advantage.

Thanks for your suggestion and maybe someday there will be some kind of ROI for using RSS but for now, it does not seem to do anything for us.

I was floored!  This is the same TechLinks whose printed version received the Georgia Technology Leadership Award for Technology Public Service in October 2000. That award was created by the Office of the Governor to recognize outstanding technology leaders who have made a positive impact on the advancement of technology in Georgia. This doesn’t add up!

Other technology publications have already seen enough business advantages to implement RSS feeds. I won’t list many because it’s late and I’m tired, but I’ll list a few important ones:

Wired
InfoWorld
CNet
eWeek
PcMag
Though not a tech publisher, even Amazon is getting in the game!

I was so shocked and frustrated by Mike’s reply I replied quickly and extremely sarcastically (I was probably way out of line and wish I had not been sarcastic):

Really?

I do think it ironic that the people involved with the Atlanta newsletter labeled "TechLinks" aren’t able to recognize the most significant trend and groundswell since Mozilla combined http+html to create the web. Especially since it is so relevant to your business.

Oh well, to each his own.  Thanks for the reply.

If you are interested, here are two more articles:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/start.html?pg=7
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/blog.html

To which I got this reply:

I appreciated your initial suggestion but I object to the conclusion you reached. I did not say we did not think it was popular. I did not say that it was not good.  I did not say that we thought it insignificant.

I only said that at this time, we do not find a return for our business that warrants an investment of any resources.

You should try harder to understand the difference between our messages before making judgments.

I have no further interest in this conversation.

Okay….  Realizing it would only piss him off more if I continued, but also realizing my frustration created a need for me to apologize and to clarify my thoughts, I replied with:

Acknowledged.

But let me I apologize for my assertion as I did not intend to insult.

I really did not mean to say I thought you were unable to recognize the general trend, though that is what I stated. I was just so very surprised by your belief it was irrelevant to your current business I stumbled over my words.

That’s the end of it (thus far.)

Why would I blog about this? Blogging about an email could be viewed as a breach of implied trust, which normally I wouldn’t do. However, this was not a personal dialog but unsolicited suggestions from someone Mike Adkinson did not know. I’m sure Mike as a professional writer knows not to send something in email he wouldn’t want to see as a front page headline for, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In that context, I thought it fair game.

I didn’t intend this to ridicule Mike Adkinson’s business or technology acumen. I’m sure he’s busy running TechLinks and just hasn’t had time to realize how relevant is RSS. Similarly there have been many times I now wish someone had slapped me and made me pay attention. A former Xtras employee Glen Gordon had to almost literally scream at me to get me to pay attention to this new thing called a "Browser" and "The Web!" (Glen is now a .NET evangelist for Microsoft.)

Further, I didn’t intend this as a critique of Mike’s email responses. I’m sure I would be horrified if I only knew the number of times a customer has viewed one of my email replies as rude or frustrating. In this information overloaded world, we all do it. "Let he who is innocent cast the first stone."

Instead I wanted to ask: “Do you agree with my assertion that RSS is completely relevant to TechLinks?” If so, maybe you would email Mike Adkinson [mike@techlinks.net] to let him know why implementing RSS would be valuable to him, especially if he could be somewhat an early adopter?  And you could let him know how simple RSS is to implement. I’m sure he won’t be as harsh with you as he was with me.

If he does implement RSS, he’ll thank us all down the road; I’m sure of it.  And if he does it will reduce my email clutter by just a tiny bit more. :-)

business, georgia, mikeadkinson, robertscoble, rss, techlinks