Category: blogging

My continuing Feedburner story

As I mentioned previously, my feed subscribers dropped by 20% when Google switched me from Feedburner to the Google-branded feeds that are replacing them, and a couple of people have told me directly that the feed just stopped working, requiring them to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new address. I subscribe to my own feed in Google Reader, and haven’t had a problem — it just switched transparently — so I’m suspecting that it’s some combination of specific readers and whatever Google is doing to remap the feed to the new location. Regardless, I’m not happy about it.

Coincidentally, I missed the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner this week, but saw this followup post about a TGGD blog feed created using RSS Mixer. Off I went to check it out, and to see if they had included my blog in the feed, and below the list of feeds that are in the mix, I saw a Feedproxy error message.

I Googled around, and found this thread on the FeedBurner help group that indicates that Google is doing something different with the feedproxy.google.com feeds than was done with the feeds.feedburner.com equivalents, which is the likely culprit for having broken many of my readers’ subscription (depending on their feed reader) as well as the RSS Mixer feed (which would act sort of like a reader).

Fix my feed!

It’s official: Google screwed up my feed when I switched from the feeds.feedburner.com URL to feedproxy.google.com, even though it was supposed to remap seamlessly. Nice going, guys. I’ve had it confirmed by at least two people that the feed just stopped working, and they had to remove and add it again to their feed reader. I suspect that this doesn’t happen in Google Reader — at least, it didn’t for me, where I monitor my own feed to make sure that it’s working properly — and in fact, this may be specific to certain readers.

If you haven’t seen any updates on my feed for a couple of weeks, remove and add it again using the new URL: this one for posts, and this one for comments. Of course, if you only ever read Column 2 through your feed reader, you’ll never see this post, and just assume that I’ve retired or something. Sigh.

Feed stats

A few weeks ago, I switched over to the Google version of Feedburner for my RSS feed (since Google owns Feedburner now, they’re transitioning to feedburner.google.com), and my subscriber numbers instantly dropped by about 20%. Either the stats on one or the other are screwed up, or they dropped a bunch of my readers.

Anyone else seeing this phenomenon?

Let’s all play nice, now

Amazing what happens when people lose sight of the need for civility in blog comments, just as they might exhibit in a face-to-face business conversation.

For posts on someone else’s blog where I add a comment, or where I’m interested in following the discussion, I tag it in co.mments.com and subscribe to it in my feed reader — that means that I might see two versions of a comment if it is edited by the original author (if the site allows commenters to edit their comments). Imagine my surprise at seeing the following comment added sometime last night on a long conversation thread that had been very professional up to that point:

Unfortunately this post is based on a lack of understanding of the real requirements of [deleted] applications. I’ve posted a clarification as a response to curtail this wayward discussion:

[URL deleted]

Hope this helps clarify.

I was going to post a comment to ask the commenter (in a nice professional way) if he knew that he sounded like an arrogant jerk, but within a few hours, he had edited the comment to read:

I’ve posted a clarification:

[URL deleted]

Hope this helps clarify.

For those of you who tend to write off-the-cuff nasty comments on blog posts, keep in mind that the internet remembers everything, even if you change it. It also knows your IP address, so using a fake name doesn’t help much.

Source obfuscated to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

I’m back!

I was off last week for a vacation in Iceland, which explains why it was pretty quiet around here. It wasn’t my first trip there; I also visited in December 2003, at the complete opposite in terms of daylight hours, and loved it at both times of year for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to try a completely different way of information access while traveling: I turned off email forwarding to my Blackberry — my provider’s roaming rates are outrageous — and used my iPod Touch wherever I could get free open wifi, such as at our guesthouse or many of the cafes in Reykjavik. Although the iPod Touch interface is vastly inferior to the Blackberry when it comes to composing email for those of us who can touch-type with our thumbs, it’s fabulous for reading email as well as web browsing, which is all that I wanted to do while on vacation. Interestingly enough, after my friends became aware of the device’s capabilities, one of them asked me if I would use my “computer” to look up an address for her, showing that any device with a certain level of functionality will be perceived by the non-tech-savvy as a computer, regardless of form factor.

Today is Canada Day, a national holiday celebrating the country’s confederation in 1867, but Oracle conveniently scheduled their BEA strategy briefing at noon so I’ll be spending at least a couple of hours at my desk before heading out to enjoy a day of beautiful weather and some spectacular fireworks in the evening.

Enterprise 2.0: Micro-blogging Panel

Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or “a-ha”, moment. It’s like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you’re twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):

  • Instant field reports from remote sites, conferences, meetings…
  • (You may not know the answer, but you know someone who does.)
  • Fast, powerful way to query your own experts/source unique solutions by getting the question to the right niche expert quickly
  • Flatten hierarchies
  • Cultivate mentoring opportunities
  • Foster camraderie and esprit de corps
  • Share ideas
  • Create versatile mobile communications networks around sales teams, events, global projects and other geographically dispersed teams/groups
  • Create opportunities for collaboration, contextualization and spreading ideas fast
  • Tap into and create a powerful network of loose ties within your organization

Feldman took the opposite tack, saying that he thinks that micro-blogging will never take hold in the enterprise because of the openness and the brevity of the medium — the very things that people love micro-blogging — and Brogan mostly agreed that it would likely only be used for internal technical communications. In fact, Feldman referred to Twitter as “dopey” (he’s a video guy) and thinks that text, particularly 140 characters at a time, isn’t rich enough for the sort of immediate communication that Twitter is trying to provide. As someone who drives thought processes through writing, I don’t agree: I consume (but rarely create) audio and video at times, but text is a much more useful medium for me.

There was a lengthy discussion, including both the panelists and the audience, on whether enterprises would do this on a purely internal system, or on a public system like Twitter, and the relative advantages. There is no suggestion that micro-blogging would entirely replace other methods of enterprise communication, but it can augment them for cases when you want asynchronous but nearly-instant communication to a very broad audience in a public manner, with the capability for interaction between a large number of participants. It can change the velocity of business, critical in today’s market. It can also be a distraction, if people are micro-blogging (or IM’ing or Blackberry’ing) during a meeting or conversation, but that’s a matter of protocol and culture. I don’t even take interview notes on my computer because I think that it gets in the way between me and the interviewee in a face-to-face situation, so I’m very unlikely to ever micro-blog while in a small group, but others are more comfortable with that. If you’re micro-blogging in the context of real-life conversation, then it’s really no different than taking notes on paper in terms of attention.

Enterprise users are using social networks, whether their enterprise masters like it or not. If their work environment gets locked down so that they can’t use them there, they’ll use them from their mobile device (hence the popularity of platforms like Twitter, which is easily consumable on a mobile browser or purely through SMS). Enterprise computing policies will never go away, but it’s time for enterprises to realize that they might actually gain an advantage through their employees participating in social applications like micro-blogging. At the end of the day, I’m not convinced about the value of micro-blogging to me, but I’m not ready to write it off: I likely just haven’t had my a-ha moment yet. That being said, this week is the first time that I met someone who, on hearing my name, told me that they just started following me on Twitter.

What’s on Page 123

James Taylor tagged me in the recent blogging meme, “What’s on Page 123”, where I have to write about the book that I’m currently reading, and quote the 6th to 8th sentences on page 123.

I always have a few books on the go, but just started re-reading Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott. The book barely has 123 pages — my edition ends on page 130 — but here’s the excerpt from that page:

But it occurred to me that a young and docile Hexagon, with a mathematical turn, would be a most suitable pupil. Why therefore not make my first experiment with my little precocious Grandson, whose casual remarks on the meaning of 33 had met with the approval of the Sphere? Discussing the matter with him, a mere boy, I should be in perfect safety; for he would know nothing of the Proclamation of the Council; whereas I could not feel sure that my Sons–so greatly did their patriotism and reverence for the Circles predominate over mere blind affection–might not feel compelled to hand me over to the Prefect, if they found me seriously maintaining the seditious heresy of the Third Dimension.

I first read this book in late high school or university (yes, I’m a math geek), and re-read it when doing graduate studies in multi-dimensional pattern analysis, since it helped me to think about dimensions beyond those that we perceive. I won’t summarize the whole book — Wikipedia has a good summary, and I recommend that you pick up a copy of Flatland and read it for yourself — but it has operates on two levels. First, it’s a mathematical treatise disguised as an allegory: an inhabitant of Flatland, a two-dimensional world, is visited by a Sphere, who attempts to educate him about a three-dimensional world (given that the Flatlander is a Square, this is probably the first true instance of “thinking outside the box” 🙂 ).  The subtext of the story, however, is a satire of the societal class and religious system in Victorian society at the time the book was written (1884).

I recently recommend Flatland to my other half, who has been writing a story about Sigma, but he just couldn’t get into it; I, however, am enjoying this reading of it as much as I did the first.

I’m bouncing this meme over to Bob McIlree, who is undoubtedly reading something more current about enterprise architecture, and Kate Trgovac, whose blog always introduces me to the coolest stuff and therefore must be reading something interesting. I’m probably supposed to tag five people, but James only tagged me so I figure that I can take some artistic license with this.

Media relations, the old-fashioned way

I attend a lot of conferences, and blog about them while I’m there. This is good for me in a couple of ways: it gives me lots of things to write about, hence increases my blog readership and therefore my exposure to potential customers and networking contacts, and I usually learn something by attending conference sessions. It’s also good for the conference organizers, since my blogging becomes publicity for the conferences or for related conferences or products. This symbiotic relationship is why I don’t expect to have to pay for admission to any conference that I’m blogging about, and why vendors not only give me free admission but also cover my travel expenses to attend their user conferences.

Some of the large software companies are starting to treat bloggers as regular members of the press, or as analysts, hence are including them in the expenses-paid press events such as conferences without special requests.

It surprises me, after that, to see the old-fashioned way in which some conferences still view the media credentials process. For example, there was a conference recently in Toronto (where I live, so no travel costs) that had a couple of interesting tracks on SaaS and Web 2.0, although large parts of it weren’t of interest to me. I received the standard attendee invitation, and emailed back to say that I was a blogger and ask for a press pass to the conference. Usually when this happens, the immediate response is “sure”, so I thought that it was weird to receive no response after a week. A friend of a friend recommended a different contact, I emailed again, no response. The friend of a friend then poked them directly, and finally I had a response from the conference organizer with a link to the media registration form on their site: a PDF that I’m supposed to fill out and fax back to them. No, that’s not a typo, I said “fax”. Welcome to 1985.

I then checked out their required press qualifications:

Media Category Please Provide
Editorial representatives One of the following:
• A business card with your name and title from an industry publication
• The masthead page of a current industry publication with your name listed
• A copy of a current by-lined article
Freelance writers • A letter from the editor of an industry trade publication stating your assignment is to cover the [conference name] Conference for that publication.
Web/Internet media representatives • Printed proof of the site demonstrating content to Linux/Open Source and/or Network technologies and/or Storage/Security technologies
• Proof that the site has subscribers that are qualified and the site is secure.
Videographer Reporters & Magazine Producers from recognized broadcast media • Business card with your name and title from a recognized broadcast media organization.
Press members w/press cards • A photocopy of your press card

I assume that I fit into the web/internet media representatives category, so checking out the qualifications… printed proof? As in printed on paper? This is starting to sound like a joke. And the second requirement: “proof that the site has subscribers that are qualified” — qualified for what? — “and the site is secure” — secure from what, in what way, or by what standards? Add to that the fact that the part of the conference that I want to cover has nothing to do with Linux/open source, network technologies or storage/security technologies.

I duly sent off an email to the publicist explaining that I’m an analyst and blog about a number of topics, including SaaS and Enterprise 2.0, and pointing her to relevant posts and articles of mine online. Of course, I didn’t fax it in, and I linked to the posts and articles rather than printing them, so I may have risked disqualification for those reasons alone.

Several days later, and only a couple of days before the event was to start, I finally heard back from the publicist:

There are some bloggers who request media badges, but they only blog every now and then and they just use it as a guise so they can attend events like [event name] for free. That’s why providing media badges to bloggers is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Um, yeah. I really wanted to blow off two days billable time in order to not get paid to go to a conference where I would pretend to be a real blogger.

The best part happened a couple of days after the conference, when the organizer (the one who couldn’t be bothered to answer my original emails) called me to complain that he felt my blog posts cast the conference in a negative light — although I had been mostly positive — and wanted me to change them, but was unwilling to post a comment on my blog because, as he said, “some things should just be settled in private”.

I don’t want to pick on this little conference or its organizers, since I see the same thing from much larger conference organizers and from vendors. In the past month, I’ve had a vendor ask me to change a post that I had made about their product but refuse to comment on the post themselves, and another vendor pay my expenses to be at their conference but not let me blog. Vendors and their PR people are coming under a lot of heat lately, and for good reason: the new world order of press is about transparency, and many of the big guys aren’t quite comfortable with that yet. There are many exceptions to that — I have to say that SAP’s blogger relations is a stunning example of how to do it right — but there needs to be a lot more open communication in the industry to make things better for the consumers of the technology.

IT360: Social Networking for Business

I’m dropping in on a few sessions at the IT360 conference being held in Toronto this week — nice to be able to walk a conference for a change — and attended John Reid of CATA Alliance talking about the value of social networking for business. He’s a stand-in-the-audience sort of guy, and is standing about 4 feet from me, so I’m here for the duration. 🙂

He started with some pretty mainstream stats and information about social networks, such as a new blog being created every 2 seconds, then moved on to discuss the degree of risk that comes from publication and dissemination of information, starting with a bit of an obscure story about being threatened with a lawsuit for some information that he distributed in a spammy sort of fax operation several years ago up to how some companies are starting to ban Facebook access from inside the firewall.

He’s doing the presentation almost completely with audience participation; having first done an audience poll on whether we fell that social networks had high, medium or low value for business, he’s selecting people from each of the respondent categories to say why they feel the way that they do about social networking. We’re hearing about how social networks can be used to get closer to your customer, although this is dependent on the industry, the target audience and the company’s corporate culture. There’s a lot of old-school types in the audience, those who raised their hand for "low/no value"; more than one person said that they use no social networks at all, and these were people who appear to be considerably younger than me. One of them even referred to "this blogging thing" in a somewhat derisive tone. This is not, as Don Tapscott proposes, an issue of age; it’s an issue of culture and position. In fact, the most vocal supporter of social networking from the audience declared himself to be 59. There are a lot of self-declared skeptics in the audience who say that they’re going to wait and see what the value is; one person said that he could spend the 8-10 hours per week that he believes is necessary to maintain a Facebook presence; he has 70 contacts on LinkedIn but it’s never really come to anything; and he wonders what happens to all those blogs that have a lot of effort put into them but no one reads them. Get real: if you put effort into blogging about something that’s of interest to someone and put some effort into being a good citizen in the blogosphere, people will read it. This blog is proof.

The business owners who are speaking up really seem to be in command-and-control mode: one stated that they’re blocking Facebook because they’re concerned that employees will put confidential information on it; doesn’t he know that if he hires untrustworthy people, they’ll do that from their home computer, so that blocking Facebook at work doesn’t solve that problem? He also said that people will spend too much time on sites like this if they’re allowed to do so, but you have to consider that people do have to take breaks sometimes, and allowing them to read their personal email or check Facebook while they’re on a break is no different than allowing them to make a personal phone call on their break. If you have sufficient technology to block specific sites, then you likely have the ability to monitor the usage and raise flags if people appear to be abusing the privilege rather than just blocking things outright.

Keith Parsonage from Industry Canada (who is speaking later today) popped up and admitted that he can’t access Facebook or a personal email service like Gmail from his office, but that the federal government is on a campaign to hire young people. This is definitely going to come back and bite them, since people who expect to be able to access sites like Facebook and Gmail while on their break at work aren’t going to be happy in an old-school corporate environment where they’re treated like irresponsible and unprofessional children.

Reid is really trying to get to the key points of how to incorporate social networking into business in terms of outward-facing communications, such as blogs; it’s unfortunate that this turned into too much of a discussion of who does and doesn’t use Facebook, and whether they’re allowed to do so at work.

Unfortunately, there’s no free wifi at the convention centre; in fact, the only available wifi is that geared for exhibitors and priced at an extortionate $395 for access for a single computer. I grabbed a couple of 30-minutes online passes in the press room, but I’m tempted to boycott it just so that MTCC doesn’t get the conference organizer’s money for this.