Disruptive Conversations

So I knew that I tweeted a good bit when down at Enterprise Connect, but didn't quite know how much I tweeted! Analyst Dave Michels analyzed the last 1500 tweets on the #enterprisecon hashtag and produced this graphic (click for the full-size image):

Yep, my @danyork Twitter account is that big blue wedge in the upper right. :-) Dave later tweeted out that I had sent out 284 tweets in those 1500 tweets. In truth, I actually sent out a few more, since I used the @voipsa account to live-tweet the security talks on the final day (which is the 6th-highest account, the purple-ish wedge in the lower right).

Kudos to Dave for putting together this chart... fun to see!

P.S. Of course, Lawrence Byrd had to wonder about quantity vs quality... :-)

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Tonight Stuart Henshall contacted me on Skype IM to let me know he couldn't reach my Disruptive Telephony blog from Mumbai, India to read my recent post about Google Voice and SIP addresses. The site was very definitely up, so I asked him if he could see this Disruptive Conversations blog. Nope. Danyork.com? Nope. All of which are hosted on TypePad. Stuart could see my Code.DanYork.com site, but that's separately hosted on a standalone WordPress install.

Wondering if this was a block on all of TypePad, Stuart tried

• Seth Godin's blog. Nope.
• The Marriott News Site. Nope.
• Sarah Lacy's blog. Nope.
• The National Geographic blogs. Nope!

Given that Stuart uses "Airtel Broadband" in India, he did a quick search online and found this report in an online forum that Airtel was blocking TypePad! The forum included this response with a graphic clearly showing the problem:

The text says:

This site has been blocked as per request from Department of Telecom

And all I can say is:

HUH?

I mean, yes, I know that India's Department of Telecom has been blocking VoIP calls since Feb 2009, so sure, I could maybe see an argument for blocking my DisruptiveTelephony site since I talk about Skype and other VoIP services (but would the Indian Dept. of Telecom really notice my little blog? Seems a stretch). But blocking Seth Godin? Come on!

Even better... blocking the National Geographic blogs? I mean... Hello? What has NGM ever done to India? And I guess there is the assumption that no one in India will want to read news from Marriott? Or from any of the 10s of thousands of other people writing blogs on TypePad?

Curiously, Stuart could get to the main page of www.typepad.com, something that others mentioned in the most recent posts to this online forum, but he couldn't get to any of the actual blogs hosted on TypePad.

So what's up? Why can't people in India read any of our blogs? (And TypePad folks, are you talking to the Indian Dept of Telecom about this?) It seems crazy for a country to block an entire hosting provider!

I'd say that "if you are reading this in India, please contact your government"... but obviously that's the point, you can't read this in India. I guess if any of you reading this outside of India can somehow clue people inside of the country to this problem, perhaps they can be asking questions of the Dept. of Telecom.

Meanwhile, if you are in India and you click on one of the links in my tweets and find it doesn't work... well... it was probably a link to one of my blogs on TypePad! (Not that you'll ever know, since you can't read this post.)

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If you look at the original post on Voxeo's blog, you can see that the images look fine there:

And in the RSS feed, viewed in a browser, the images look fine, too:

What's the issue? I'm sure some of you have figured it out by now... the image we are using for Tobias Goebel is in fact a larger image than we are showing in the blog post. The image is 302x420 pixels. We are then using the width and height attributes of the <img> tag to reduce the display of the image to the smaller size. In the IMG tag, we have these attributes:

width="89" height="123"

And sure, we can get into a philosophical discussion around whether this is the right thing to do or not. I personally do not do this in general because from a speed point-of-view you are sending a larger image file than you need for a display. I resize my images to the size I want before uploading. In this case, I grabbed a link to the image from another post without realizing it was doing this type of image resizing via attributes. My mistake.

Be that as it may, the point is that the post is out there... it is published... and...

FACEBOOK IS IGNORING THE HTML ATTRIBUTES!

Facebook is simply ignoring the width and height attributes.

HUH?

Given that we as authors do often use those attributes to specify the size of our images, why wouldn't Facebook render them correctly?

This of course makes me wonder... what other attributes is Facebook ignoring? Do I have to be checking every single post that gets imported into Facebook to make sure it looks right?

Thinking that I could just simply go into the text of the "Note" and change this, I naively went into Facebook, used the "Use Facebook As Page" feature to switch to "Voxeo" so that I could edit the www.facebook.com/voxeo page... and promptly found a completely blank Wall:

Nice, Facebook... really nice. :-(

I tried it in both Google Chrome and Firefox. No joy.

This is for the entire Wall of the Page. I see... nothing. I'm not even looking at the specific post yet.

I can switch back to "Use Facebook as Dan", of course... but then the only option I seem to have is to delete the post. There is a "Edit" button, but that just lets me add tags to the post.

So for the moment it appears that Tobias is going to be stuck with a huge image until I can go through the process of:

1. Deleting this "Note" out of Facebook.
2. Changing the original post to have a smaller image of Tobias.
3. Re-importing the post to Facebook either as a Note or as a link.

Multiple steps that could be completely avoided... if only Facebook respected the HTML attributes of the original post.

Ah, the fun, fun, fun of living in the Facebook world...

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Ouch... I was doing so well... I have been well on my way toward my goal of 365 days of blog posts in 2011. I published a blog post every single day of January and February, including the entire week I was on vacation.

And then I blew it and missed the goal instead on just a regular, mundane Saturday...

I did NOT publish a blog post on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

Not on any of my personal blogs... not on any of Voxeo's blogs... nowhere. :-(

Now, yesterday I did create my weekly audio report for the For Immediate Release podcast, but that doesn't count since it won't actually be online until Monday. I did post some photos to Facebook and post some status updates there. I did put out a few tweets, too.... but none of the longer-form content on my blogs that this goal was all about.

I could, of course, rewrite history a bit and publish a post today that was dated yesterday. None of you would know just from reading the blogs... but of course that wouldn't be honest and, besides, close examination of my Twitter stream would show that I didn't publish any posts (and... (gasp!)... I only tweeted twice yesterday). :-)

I can't claim it was any big distraction... it was just a regular Saturday. I was exhausted after a crazy week of travelling and was just enjoying my first full day back with my family. Doing some errands, taking a small road trip to see a local curling club, hanging around the house... just reveling in the normalcy of time at home. And completely spacing the fact that I didn't have a post queued up to go out.

And that's the key that has helped me achieve my goal thus far:

I have been scheduling my posts out several days in advance.

Acting on my own advice, I have been writing posts and queuing them up across my blogs. In effect I have had a blogging "buffer" that worked great for days like yesterday when I got busy and didn't think of writing (or thought about it, as I did several times, but didn't do it). For my vacation week, I had almost all the week queued up in advance for both my own blogs and the Voxeo blogs. I have had a queue of posts to go up online and then have added more posts that have been responding to breaking news or events. It's been working great.

So what happened?

Well, I unfortunately let the queue of written posts run dry. It certainly wasn't from lack of ideas... my brain continues to be constantly exploding with ideas. But I hadn't turned those ideas into actual written posts... which was exactly the discipline that this 2011 goal was all about.

So what now?

I will continue, of course. The goal will now be for 364 days of blog posts in 2011... and if I don't blow it again and continue the process into 2012 perhaps I will be back here on March 6, 2012, writing about how I wrote posts for an entire year!

I wondered if I could make it the whole 365 days... but didn't expect to miss it on day 64. Ah, well. (On the other hand, I had a truly wonderful day with my family yesterday, and at the end of the day that is what is most important! :-)

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There's an exquisite irony to receiving a spam comment asking about spam... :-)

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I can certainly count myself among that number. I do have a MySpace account, but I honestly haven't logged into the site in ages... maybe not even at all last year. (Ha! Actually, my MySpace profile still says I work at Mitel... and that changed back in, oh, October 2007! I guess it was a wee bit longer than a year... )

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For those of us who spend our time creating content online (as I do) and strive to make that content of the best quality and of value to people, the rise of so-called "content farms" has been an annoying feature of the online landscape: both the networks of sites that simply scrape our content and surround it in ads... and the networks of sites that churn out incredibly large quantities of low-grade content that is optimized for SEO so that their pages can rank highly and get eyeballs to their pages and their ads.

For we who strive to create "high quality" content, the spammers and content farmers were annoying in that Google search results seemed to feature these sites (because they were trying to game Google) when our higher quality was ranked lower.

The good news is that as they threatened earlier, the folks at Google stated that they have changed their ranking algorithm to de-value low quality sites. That is to say... they are aiming to hit the spammers and content farmers at their critical reason for being: search engine result placement.

From Google's blog post, with my own emphasis added:

But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

Yet to be seen is exactly what they do and how they tweak the algorithms... there will always be an arms race, I fear, between the search engines like Google and those who want to try to game the system.

Regardless, the move is welcome!

Many articles written about this today... some I liked include:

• SearchEnglineLand: Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
• GigaOm: Google Tightens the Screws on Content Farmers
• Mashable: Google Declares War on Content Farms

Bring on the changes, Google! We who spend our time striving to create high quality content welcome them.

Image credit: rgs_ on Flickr

UPDATE, Feb 26: There have been a number of articles out there seeking to show the actual impact of this change. One of the best I've seen is this post from SISTRIX that shows the 25 biggest losers according to the research they've done.

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One of the slide shows that I've seen circulated lately on Twitter is this "Social Media Overview" deck by Lou Kerner. It's a great set of statistics and slides about social media. I'd be curious to hear Lou give it at some point, but in the meantime, the slides are quite interesting:

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The big news in the WordPress world this week was the release of WordPress 3.1 with all the goodness a new WP release brings. The release blog post and the more detailed entry in the WordPress Codex mention a number of features, but two that I definitely like are:

1. The New "Admin Bar" - This shows up on the top of your WordPress window and does indeed give you easy access to common functions. When you have comments, the number of comments shows up to the right of the word "Comments". Seems to be quite nicely done.

2. Internal Linking - Hooray!!! If you are writing frequent blog posts, like I do, and want to easily reference older blog posts, it's always been a bit of a pain to have to find and reference those older posts. Now, when you use the visual editor in WordPress 3.1, you can simply select the text and click the link icon in the editor. The standard window to insert a link pops up, but with a new option "Or link to existing content". You can then simply search through your older posts (or choose from your list of most recent posts). Click the post you want, press "Add Link", and... ta da!

This is truly an awesome capability for those of us who want to frequently reference older posts.

The blog post announcing WordPress 3.1 references a number of other goodies, including improvements to the "Network" support, that I'm definitely looking forward to trying out.

If you use WordPress and have upgraded to 3.1, what do you like the best?

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Why doesn't it work for me? Mainly because I already have a whole system in place using TweetDeck for monitoring Twitter that I check regularly... and for the "browsing" that you can do with Paper.li, I'm a big user of FlipBoard on my iPad.

Still, I can understand the value in getting a daily email summary that can highlight some of the things you may have missed. It's good to see these kind of tools being developed. The whole issue of curating the insane volume of content out there is a topic that will consume us all for quite some time, I'd say...

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