Blog

Web Log.  A blog is a website maintained by an individual or group that is characterized by a persistent record of old content and the regular addition of new content.  A typical blog will present these entries in reverse chronological order.

Blogroll

A list of recommended blogs that is typically displayed in a persistent sidebar

Blogosphere

The whole of the blogging world, including all blogs and those who write them

Embedding

Placing a pre-written piece of code into your blog or website so that you can display a video, widget, banner, or content block created by someone else.  By giving your visitors embeddable code you can ensure that material you produce will link back to your own site.

Lifecasting

The continual broadcast of daily life through digital media

Linklog

An online list of links to other sites (typically used to facilitate research into a particular topic)

Microblog

A blog of short posts which typically have a pre-defined length limit. Twitter and Tumblr are both well known microblogging services.

Photoblog

A dynamic online gallery of photographs.  Some Photoblogs use standard blogging services like Blogger and Wordpress, others use dedicated online photo galleries like Flickr, but to really customize your photoblog presentation it is best to consult with a CMS specialist.

Ping

An automated process that tells a search engine, aggregators, and individual blogs that you have updated your blog and that there is a reason for them to look at what you have written.  It is considered good form to ping any blog that you’ve quoted or referenced.

Podcast

A regular video or audio broadcast released through RSS or other web syndication

RSS

Really Simple Syndication.  By using RSS any blogger can create a “feed” of their content so that subscribers can read it from an aggregator of their choice.  Since most e-mail programs now include RSS readers, this means a subscriber can read your blog direct from their own inbox.  It also means that your content can be easily republished, a key factor for anyone seeking to go viral.

Video Blog (a.k.a Vlog and Vidblog)

A blog that presents a portion of its content through an embedded online video.  A typical vlog presentation will place the current video entry in a central location with links to other related videos on one side and a space for written comments below.

Viral

Content that has been spread throughout the web by viewers and readers.  You can make your content easier to spread by using embeddable code.

Webcomic

A serial comic that uses online syndication to publish one strip or one page at a time.  Web comics typically display one entry per webpage, and are built to facilitate both chronological and reverse chronological browsing of the archive.

Want to know what a blog really spends time talking about?  Wordle.net provides a fun, visually appealing, and easy to understand way to do just that.

Just type the URL for a blog into the appropriate field and Wordle will create a “Word Cloud” just for you.  Wordle looks through the most recent blog posts, and the more often a word is used, the larger it appears in the cloud.

Here’s what the recent Gold Mine posts look like:

Words from the Gold Mine courtesy of www.wordle.net

And this is not the only automated word art you can create online.  Flipscript is a site dedicated to making ambigrams upon command (ambigrams are those words that can be flipped or rotated, and then read again).

Some sites even claim to have an automated process for creating logos.  However, the art of simultaneously tying words to an industry, market, and identity is not one that I would trust to an automated process which, by their very nature, will try to handle everything in the same way.

Besides, creating art from words is nothing new.  Our own Natalya Brandt is quite skilled at it, and cartoonist Will Eisner was well known for his ability to organically incorporate titles and mastheads into his designs so that they would become a natural part of the illustrated narrative rather than editorial asides.

Online Content Management Systems allow you to consolidate the entire back-end of a website into a single secure yet easy to access location.

Traditionally any time you wanted to make an alteration to a website you needed to contact your Webmaster, who would in turn render your changes into code and and then use specialized programs to upload this code onto the servers which shared your information with the rest of the world.

No matter how responsive or dedicated your webmaster, the need to work through an additional person would build in a lag - one which would only be exacerbated by the fact that updating a website typically required a minimum of four programs (one to receive the request, one to write the changes to the page code, one to upload the changes, and one to confirm that the altered web pages still presented themselves correctly online).

Online Content Management Systems address all of these sources of delay.

First - A well-designed CMS does not require a user to know code in order to make simple updates.  Instead, they incorporate what-you-see-is-what-you-get style text editors that can create the code on their own.

Second - Modern CMS allow you to upload and edit files through the world-wide-web.  The only program you need to use on your computer is your every-day web browser - which is, most likely, the same program you are using to read this blog entry right now.

Third - Because you use your web browser in order to make changes to your website you do not need to start a new program to view your website.

Finally - Because you do not need to understand coding or have access to a suite of specialized programs, anyone can now update a website - not just a trained Webmaster.

If you have ever maintained a blog or joined an online forum, you have already used an Online Content Management System.

By getting a custom tailored CMS for your website you can experience the same ease of interface in maintaining any element of your site - from event scheduling to portfolio maintenance, to e-commerce.

One week ago a new four-colored dialog box appeared in my Gmail account.  And I don’t mean some clunky square computer dialog box that we’ve all grown accustomed to, I mean an honest to goodness comic book style dialog box.

Clearly this was some new sort of chat functionality, which surprised me, as I already had a GTalk session open.

Apparently Google was launching it’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, and you know what, I couldn’t be bothered.  I already have all the personal social media tools I need.  In fact, I have more social media tools at my disposal than I know what to do with.

But, of course, the key to a social media tool isn’t so much what it does, but who’s on it.  Even anonymous dating sites can serve as effective social media tools if you know your friends ’secret’ names.  So I figured I’d give Buzz a week to get up to speed and then take a peek around to see who was there.

Silly me - Buzz doesn’t have a sign up process, or at least not one of it’s own.  If you have a Google profile (and if you use Google for anything other than anonymous searches, you do) you are given a Buzz account.

Okay, so my friends all already have accounts.  In fact, everyone I know with a Google e-mail address already has an account, and I can follow it right away.  That’s wonderful.  There are just a few small problems.

• Since everyone was given an account automatically, I can’t easily tell who is and is not using the service (though after some digging I discovered that most are not).
• Some of the people in my address book aren’t friends.  There is no reason for me to see what their status is.
• Likewise, there are people who could follow me who have no reason to know what I’m up to.  In fact, I still sometimes get SPAM, which means I know there are people who I don’t want learning my daily activities who could, in theory gain access.

Those strike me as some fairly big disincentives to posting accurate status messages.  Since status form the spine of most modern social media services, it would seem that Buzz is a technological invertebrate.  To make matters worse, my GTalk status is automatically imported into Buzz whether I want it to be or not - which means I can’t really give my status there anymore either.

There’s another problem with the Buzz approach…

Most social media sites provide you with a way to expand your social circle.  Buzz lets you learn what people in your address book are up to.  I can tell you right now that I already know everyone in my address book - and if I want to know what they’re up to I can send them an e-mail.

So not only does Buzz introduce security issues into my Google account that hadn’t originally been there, but it doesn’t even add value to the services already available.

As always, the folks at Google are responding well to both positive and negative feedback.  However, without major changes, I will be very surprised if this networking tool doesn’t suffer the same sort of colony collapse as Google’s other social media attempts.

For the life of the Internet, the art of protecting online e-mail addresses has rested upon the ability of web developers to come up with effective ways to sort man from machine.  In short, a CAPTCHA.

If a machine can identify and grab your e-mail address, you will become a target for SPAM - but removing your e-mail altogether is not an option if you want to provide legitimate clients and leads with a way to reach you without having to leave their computer.

When I first started looking at website code (back when a 28.8 baud audio modem was state of the art) you could fool machines by replacing each letter with a specific three digit code.  At the time I wondered why the code switched from plain text to an indecipherable block of numbers whenever I reached an e-mail address.

Eventually I realized that each of those numbers corresponded to a letter - and so did everyone who wrote the programs on the prowl for e-mail addresses.  With a simple addition to their code, these e-mail harvesters were once again on the prowl.

Code alone, it would seem, was insufficient to separate human visitors from machine.

In response to this development, another solution came to popularity - placing e-mail addresses within graphics (and later within flash animations).

At first the only problem with this approach was that you could not link these pictures directly to an e-mail address (as the process of doing so would once again make the address detectable within the code of the page).

However, as optical character recognition (OCR) has grown more sophisticated, these methods have become less secure.

On the whole, OCR is quite useful.  Any time you scan a document directly into a word processing or spreadsheet program you are using some form of OCR.  However, because OCR has become so good - machines can now just look at how a page is presented to visitors (instead of at its code) to determine if any e-mail addresses appear.

However, just as OCR posed a problem, its use also presented a solution.  Every so often OCR programs will misread words.  These words, then, can be used to sort a human from an OCR using machine.  ReCAPTCHA offered a service that could be integrated into form and forum protections.

MB/I can now place just such a protection on your e-mail addresses, making them harder for spammers to gather and exploit.

While no protection is absolute, requiring human input goes a long way towards keeping your e-mail address out of the hands of abusive e-mailers.

What is it about an online article that makes people forward it on to their acquaintances?  Is it a feel good story? Practical advice? The unexpected?

According to a recently concluded study of the New York Times  all three play a factor, but the most important element is whether or not a story can evoke a feeling of awe.

There is no science to evoking awe, but there are some patterns that you can look for.

• Does your writing evoke a feeling of vastness, that there is something greater than you and your reader?
• Does your article tell the reader something that will expand their understanding of the world and what is possible within it?
• Does it go beyond expectations?

Note that while all of these elements are informative, none of them need to be immediately practical.

If your goal is a wider readership, expounding upon the breadth of possibilities unlocked by your trade is the way to go.  Inspire your readers; tell them what is possible regardless of whether or not you are the specialist for the task.  Even providing a referral will get a potential client to remember you as a valuable resource.

This isn’t to say you should eschew practical advice altogether.  Variety is good and all informative posts, regardless of the specifics of the information, are more likely to see forwards than vapid and empty text.

And if we’re being honest with ourselves, there is more to a good e-mail campaign than user driven dissemination.  It is still important to show what you can do and where you thrive - and for that, practical articles are king.

And while study of the New York Times focused on the viral nature of print media, they same patterns can be seen in picture, video, and just about any other content you want to pass from one individual to another through their social networks.

“Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”

There is a lot we can take away from the first Fundamental Principle of Olympism found within the Olympic Charter.

Yes, the Olympics are the world’s premiere athletic tournament – but they are also an invitation to reflect on the joy of effort and excellence in all endeavors.

What do you do well?

Take a moment to think about your business.

• Where do you excel?
• Who are your competitors?
• Are you in the same ‘weight class’?
• What sets you apart?

Perhaps most importantly, what drives you? When an Olympian sets their mind on being the best, they know that means long hours in an immersive regimen of self-improvement.

What are your ethical principles?

The Olympics are not just about winning, they are about winning (and competing) well. How do you define your ‘sportsmanship?’ What would you consider cheating?

Google uses “don’t be evil” as their measuring stick.

Have you told your market what you consider to be ethical behavior? For that matter, do you consider your own performance ethical?

It had better be. Cheaters may win when they compete, but they also run the risk of being disqualified as a competitor or having their accolades stripped from them after the fact (Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditing firm, folded when it was found to have obstructed justice).

Who cheers for you?

Olympic athletes are bolstered by their fans, but they are also supported by family members and coaches.

Take a moment to consider who stands in your corner. Don’t be afraid to share your victories and your trials with them. Feed on the support of your allies and reward them by using the energy they give you to do your best.

SPAM is the ultimate form of shotgun marketing.  Most SPAM marketers expect fewer than 1 in 5000 e-mail recipients to ever follow one of their links (and less still to actually buy the product advertised on the other side).  In order to support such an inaccurate form of marketing, spammers need to build up huge pools of e-mail addresses at very little cost.

That’s where e-mail spam-bots come in.  According to Wikipedia:

E-mail spambots harvest e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.

Because there are only so many ways to write an e-mail address, it is fairly easy for spammers to create these programs.  Simple ones just look for strings of code that include the @ symbol.

This suggested some of the earliest anti-spambot strategies.

For example, it is possible to write code that appears one way on your browser, but another way to the people looking at the code itself.

Unfortunately, there are certain rules that coders must still follow when taking this approach.  For most approaches, the spammers needed only to write these rules into their own code, and the fix no longer worked.

So how does one hold a spam-bot at bay?

It is important to realize that no solution is perfect.  Technology is ever improving, and techniques that work today may eventually be overcome.

However, there are two underlying principles that remain the same.

1)   E-mail spam bots are used to save costs. They will only be updated to overcome a particular anti-spam strategy once its use is widespread enough to justify the extra cost and effort.

2)   Human input is in limited supply. Spammers do have tricks that let them overcome certain human-only interfaces - but they prefer to use these strategies to enter forums, blogs, and other sites where they can hit multiple eyes at once.

Therefore the best solutions are ones that take a novel and/or cutting edge approach to ensure your e-mail can only be gathered by the actions of a human.

Apple is playing a dangerous game with its new iPad release.

Like the iPhone before it, the iPad seems positioned to sell itself as a digital multi-tool: all the apps of an iPhone, same G3 wireless connectivity, additional functionality as an e-reader, multi-touch recognition (allowing true on screen keyboards) and the size and processing speed of a laptop.

However the iPad also has one of the same shortcomings of the iPhone, no Flash.

In a handheld device where all internet access is still something of a novelty visitors who can’t load a page will simply (and correctly) assume that it does not have a mobile version.

But when your new laptop equivalent can’t access 70% of online games and 75% on online videos, you may be heading for rough waters.

Apple’s attitude seems to be that anyone who wants to stay competitive will redesign their websites to meet the iPad’s specs.  This conceit may even be justified.  The HTML 5.0 standards, which are already being implemented in a piecemeal manner, do allow for video to be embedded directly into a webpage without the need for a flash player - and the popularity of the iPhone may convince slower multimedia sites to make the conversion to HTML 5.0 standards.

However, there is also a possibility that by picking a fight with the quiet but ubiquitous Adobe, Apple may have finally bit off more than it can chew.  And to be perfectly frank, it would not be the first time that the computer maker ran into trouble by eschewing current development standards in favor of future standards that have not yet taken hold.

Another Hole in the iPad Inventory

As an e-reader, the iPad will be going up against the Kindle and Nook.  On the plus side, the iPad will be using ePub, open standards which will allow publishers of all sizes to handle their own formatting.   On the minus side, the iPad will still be backlit, which makes it a harder device to read from.

However, perhaps more importantly, Apple did not secure the rights to include Random House or McGraw-Hill books in its collection.  These are the US’s largest publisher and educational publisher respectively, and by omitting both Apple is lopping off access to more than 20% of the publishing market.

Those are two very big holes for an all-in-one device to overcome.  However, if anyone (other than Google) is in a position to simultaneously re-shape web design standards and the electronic book industry, it would be Apple.

A little over a decade ago comedian Eddie Izzard joked that Britain built its empire by stealing countries through the cunning use of flags.

• I claim India for Britain.
• You can’t claim us, we live here?  500-million of us.
• (Smug) Do you have a flag?
• (Flabbergasted) We don’t need a bloody flag.  It’s our country.
• No flag, no country.  You can’t have one.  That’s the rules…

Staying on the cutting edge of the technology curve works much the same way.  You may think you have your market cornered - then someone you’ve never heard of comes along and plants their “flag” in Facebook or the iPhone App Store and suddenly your loyal customer base starts looking elsewhere.

It may not seem like this should be the case - especially if you’ve spent time building up your customer base through traditional, off-line means.  Unfortunately, social media and the mobile web have become the accepted stomping grounds of the modern consumer - and (in the name of convenience) these consumers are willing to accept the claims that anyone who’s anyone will be working in those same circles.

If you’re not in these modern markets then you are effectively working without a flag.

Now, just because you have a Social Media or Mobile presence doesn’t mean that you can avoid conflict with your technological Britain - even countries with flags got into border conflicts and ideological wars, but at least you’ll be fighting rather than rolling over and letting someone claim your territory as their own without so much as a “by your leave.”

Designing Your Flag

Just as you wouldn’t want to take a cast off garment and run it up a flagpole - you don’t want your first foray into either social media or the mobile web to be haphazard.

Whatever you produce, you want it to be something that people can rally about, and ideally something which supports a narrative of what your company does and stands for.

Until next time…

- Ciao