Technology
Entries related to technology.
Liveblogging a Conversation about Reading Twitterville
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 12:34Yesterday, I receive a review copy of Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel. I started to read it beside the Country Club of Woodbridge swimming pool and thinking about how best to review the book. I'm only thirty pages into it so far, so I'm not ready to write a more traditional review.
However, one of the key points, at least in the beginning of the book is about how we are moving from an era of broadcast to an era of conversation. Twitter is a great tool to join into a conversation that may apply to your brand, your life, or anything else you want to talk about. With this in mind, I thought that it might be interesting to write a different sort of blog post, sort of like carrying on a conversation about the book and perhaps even like live blogging it.
So, I may have assorted posts up on Twitter about reading Twitterville. I'll also take time to share random thoughts about the book as I read through it.
This isn't a completely new idea for me. A while ago, I was rereading Blue Highways: A Journey into America
Meanwhile, back in Twitterville, the first thing that I noticed is that so many people are referenced by their twitter handles. If only to get a good list of interesting people to follow on Twitter, this book is worth it. I'll mention some of them in subsequent posts.
Arrested
Shel starts off the introduction to his book by talking about when James Buck was arrested and posted that single word in Twitter. Arrested. It can mean to be taken into custody by the authorities. Yet there is another meaning to the word arrested. It can mean to stop. The moment that James' tweet reached Shel, through a serious of re-tweets, it seems to have stopped Shel in his tracks and caused him to rethink his views about Twitter. That is a great thing about Twitter. Through your network of friends you are likely, if you are open to it, to stumble across tweets that stop you in your tracks and make you think. To me, this is a good thing.
Joining the Conversation
As I noted above, an important focus about this book is on the conversations that take place within Twitter. Mr. Israel is a journalist who understands the responsibility of putting information into context, into a story that people can understand. I look forward to some of the stories that he will be telling. He also puts the nature of conversations into context as he talks about The Cluetrain Manifesto
Twitterville examines the inefficiency of traditional marketing. It argues the case for using social media instead of ads. It argues that from a business perspective, Twitter is the most effective tool yet delivered into the growing arsenal of social media tools.
As I read this, I thought about the various Digiday events. I would love to hear Shel speak there.
The History of Twitter
One thing that always causes me to pause is when I stumble across comments about how Twitter Inc was formed in October, 2006. My first tweet was in October 2006 and I have to go back and double check, did I in fact tweet the first month they were incorporated? Yup.
Shel also does a good job of talking about how Twitter started, where the team came from and capturing some of the development ethos.
So far, I'm enjoying the book. Anyone else have a review copy and want to join the discussion? Do you have thoughts about what you've read about the book, either here or other places? Let me know.
Blog Advertising - EntreCard, Adgitize, and Beyond
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/26/2009 - 09:23There are several sites that bloggers use to try and drive traffic to their own sites, and Entrecard, one of the most discussed sites has recently announce yet another change in service. It seems like every few months, EntreCard announces yet another major change which further alienates their users. There former scheme was that when you 'drop' and EntreCard, you receive one credit, as does the blog that you drop your card on. Credits are removed from the system by the large cut that EntreCard takes on advertisements.
The problem, according to EntreCard is that there continues to be more credits generated than removed from the system and this is generating advertising inflation, they claim. To address this, they are looking at changing the scheme to pay credits only if someone drops on a blog, and not to the blog that will be dropped on.
They have not provided any detailed numbers about the number of credits in circulation, nor have I seen an inflationary impact of such credits. Indeed, based on my experience, there was a major deflation of advertising costs when they introduced paid advertisements, which they have removed due to user backlash. There was inflation in advertising costs after they removed the paid advertising. It briefly reached back to the level prior to the paid advertising fiasco but has now fallen back a bit. I should note that this is based on the ratio of advertising price to popularity which is a loose proxy to cost per impressions.
How much of an effect will this have? It is hard to say. For people that advertise solely for the purpose of getting people to visit their blog, it shouldn't have a substantial effect. However, many people advertise, in part, to get credits from people clicking on their ads. This incentive is being removed, and could end up reducing the demand for advertisements.
For me, I'm careful not to flood the market with too many advertisements. Too many ads are infective since people are likely to only visit your site once a day, no matter how many times they see your ad. So, a decrease in demand for advertisements is likely to cause larger advertisers to curtail some of their advertising.
In the bigger picture, EntreCard needs to do something to address their declining market share. I have move a bit of my advertising over to Adgitize. They have a different model. You have to buy advertisements with real currency. They cost $14/month. However, based on the traffic you get, you can easily earn back more than the cost of your advertisement. For me, Adgitize is generating cash for me, as well as nearly twice as much traffic as EntreCard.
Another blog advertising site is CMF Ads. Adgitize and EntreCard both have been generating much more traffic for me than CMF Ads. CMF Ads doesn't have incentives for people to click on the ads, but I've found the bounce rate and time on site from people visiting from CMF Ads to not be substantially different for people visiting from Adgitize or EntreCard. They have been fairly effective in generating revenue, but like EntreCard and unlike Adgitize, I have not 'cashed out' any revenue from them. Adgitize sends me a monthly credit on Paypal.
Another site that generates a lot of traffic for me is BlogExplosion. They are similar to EntreCard and the others in that you get traffic directed to your site based on which other sites you visit. In there case, it is much more direct. You get credits for visiting a site, and those credits get used to send people to our site. They've been around for a long time and have driven a lot of traffic to my site. On the other hand, they've had problems with tech support and their future also remains dubious.
All of this said, blog advertising can be a great way of reaching new readers. What is much more important, however, is having content that people want to read. Getting discussions going about your content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, and comment systems like Disqus can be even more significant.
So, what are your thoughts about EntreCard today? How are you driving traffic to your site? What are you doing to keep people coming back?
Digiday:APPS, an Old Programmer’s Recap
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/24/2009 - 11:10Well, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my expectations for the Digiday:APPS conference. As a programmer, I wrote about the importance of the development environment and did a shout out to open source development.
I was not surprised that most of the discussions were about developing applications for Facebook and iPhone. They are the most popular platforms, and they aren’t particularly Open Source. At times, speakers mentioned that there were other platforms and a few people did shout outs to open source development. Yet what was most interesting were the discussions about data and various applications.
Geek Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/23/2009 - 09:12Yesterday evening, I took a little time away from my normal activities to play with technology. I have an old IBM ThinkPad model R51. It had come with Windows XP, and somewhere along the way, XP stopped working. The laptop has sat unused for quite a while. However, I had recently been upgrading one of my servers to a later version of Ubuntu Linux and I thought it would be fun to see if I could resuscitate the old laptop to run smoothly with Linux.
I downloaded the ISO format of the Ubuntu 9.04 installation CD, through it in the laptop and booted up. It was a quick and easy installation and just about everything seemed to work smoothly. It found my Wifi and connected without difficulty. I connected my old cellphone, a Motorola Razr V3xx and it mounted the file system without a problem. I changed the connection options on the Razr and it recognized the Razr as a cellular modem and gave me the option to connect to the Internet. Likewise, it recognized the old Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera and assorted memory sticks that I had kicking around.
It has played audio and video fine, although it has had to go out and download multimedia plugins and has complained that the MPEG-4 AAC decoder is from the 'BAD' set.
Right now, I'm using Firefox on the Ubuntu laptop along with OpenOffice for my word processing.
The Ubuntu 9.04 desktop installation CD also comes with Ekiga, a SIP based Voice over IP application. I've installed Ekiga and did an initial test. The site talks about connecting with other SIP systems and I'm thinking about how it fits into Asterisk, an open source PBX which I have on my server. I also noted that they have attempted to connect with Yale's SIP server, but had difficulties. I'm also curious about how this might connect with an OpenMoko device. For that matter, I'm curious about the interaction between OpenMoko, Asterisk, GTalk2Voip, Ekiga, and perhaps even Google Voice. I've read that people have had some success connecting Google Voice to SIP phones, so this is promising. I do need to configure my SIP phone to get outside the firewall and I'm interested in seeing what can be done with SIP and IPv6.
The problems I've run into is that I can't get Bluetooth to work properly, the internal mic does not seem to be working and I haven't been able to play DVDs yet. I get a message say "Could not read from resource".
On the other hand, it seems to run much better than my newer laptop that has Vista. The Vista laptop every now and then switches into some mode where it is pegged by the system processes and is virtually unusable.
In other geek stuff, I've finally set up an account at CoverItLive. Today, Fiona will be going to a horse show, and I'll try to cover it live, tweeting from my phone. My CoverItLive page is set up to pull in my tweets, as well as any tweets with a #ctgymkhana hash tag:
That's it for this morning's geeking. And remember, tune into Fiona's Radio Show this evening.
Is Sergey Aleynikov Really a Russian Spy who stole Trade Secrets that Could Cost Goldman Sachs Millions?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 18:19A top story of the day on many of the news outlets is about Sergey Aleynikov, the thirty-nine year-old former vice president who allegedly stole trade secrets from Goldman Sachs and stored them on a foreign server. The breathless headlines are staggering. Code theft could cost Goldman millions, US says, To Catch a Rogue Quant, Russian Said to Be Ex-Goldman Worker Charged in Theft and The Dumbest Man at Goldman Sachs.
As President Obama visits Russia, the homeland security, terrorism and anti-immigrant blogs are abuzz about the alleged Russian spy. You have to look hard to find the headline, Goldman sees no impact from computer programmer-source. It isn’t as exciting.
Before Aleynikov is hung for international espionage, I thought it would be good to dig a little bit deeper into what happened. According to the an affidavit by Michael G. McSwain entered into the Southern District of New York, FBI agent McSwain charges Mr. Aleynikov with “unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, without authorization, copied, duplicated, sketched, drew, photographed, downloaded, uploaded, altered, destroyed, photocopied, replicated, transmitted, delivered, sent, mailed, communicated and conveyed, a trade secret that is related to and included in a product that is produced for and place in interstate and foreign commerce with the intent to convert that trade secret to the economic benefit of someone other than the owner thereof, and intending and knowling that the offense would injure the owner of that trade secret, to wit, Aleynikov, while in New York, New York, and elsewhere, copied, without authorization, proprietary computer code belonging to a financial institution in the United States and then uploaded the code to a computer server in Germany.”
