Disruptive Conversations

Fascinating post over on the grokdotcom blog: What Makes You Comment? The comments, naturally, are the fascinating part.  Quite interesting to see the varied reaction from folks there.

As I said in my own comment there, I generally do leave comments on a blog when I find an article interesting, provided that:

• I have the time to write a comment
• I have something to say beyond simply "Great article"
• I can just easily post the comment without any kind of complex registration process

Do you leave comments on blogs?  Why or why not?  The Future Now folks would like your opinions...   (of course, they are required in a comment, so if you are someone who just doesn't leave comments, well... :-)

There are no real words to say in response to the horrible saga confronting Kathy Sierra.  In the 20+ years that I have been using the Internet I've certainly been subjected to abuse in various forms and in various forums (USENET, anyone?), but I have to say that even the worst flame war I was involved with never quite reached the level of personal attacks that she has suffered.  I do wish her all the best in coping with the situation.

Obviously her view is just one side of the story and Chris Locke has written a response to the allegations against him which takes a different view. To his credit, he was one of the people who did identify themselves in their postings.  He speaks of the YOYOW ethos - "You Own Your Own Words" (from the Well days) - and says that he stands by his words... and while I may disagree with parts of his views, I do respect that he at least identifies himself as the author.

It's pretty obvious, though, that there were others who attacked Kathy Sierra from behind the mask of anonymity.  As the old 1993 New Yorker cartoon said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (click the image for a larger view)  Anonymity is a double-edged sword.  It allows people who might not say things (out of fear of reprisal, for instance) to relay their information.  It allows people to be someone that they would like to be.  But it also allows the idiots to spout off and say their horrid things.  In this case, some people seem to have definitely gone too far.

Anonymity makes it easy... you can say whatever hurtful things you want and, at least in theory, no one can trace them back to you.  (And there are technologies out there that help with that.)  Anonymity frees people from the responsiblity and accountability that comes with that YOYOW concept.  They can be whomever they wish to be at that time - and if that means they want to be a mean or rude person, they can do so.  I am sure there has been a time or two when I thought about seeking refuge behind an anonymous comment to speak my true mind... but that I can recall I never did.  While I was never part of the Well, the YOYOW ethos is certainly part of my way, along with a companion mantra:

Never post or send anything online you would not want to appear on the front page of the New York Times.

I try to live by that every day.  I try my absolute best never to put in email... or in any blog posting... or any web forum posting... or even in IM conversations... anything that I wouldn't want to appear on a newspaper/website front page or on something like CNN. Odds are that it will never be an issue, but just in case....  In my opinion, you're crazy if you don't live by that.  Google (and friends) sees all -- and caches all.  Anything committed online has the potential to live on forever in the digital archives, to be found wherever it is... and to haunt you forever. I think it's a better policy just to make sure you don't write or say anything that you might regret later. 

It does seem, though, that in this case a number of folks (the prominent ones Sierra mentions) may have wound up in that situation.  Caught up in some (warped?) view of "fun", they wrote some things on a couple of web sites that seem now rather hurtful and mean-spirited.  No, they probably didn't mean many of them... or in fact any of them... it was "all just in fun"...  but it would appear that they didn't think through the consequences of their actions - and the hurt that they could cause.  It's easy enough to do... caught up in the moment... but it's a strong reminder that words can hurt.

I hope for Kathy Sierra's case that the police can soon get to the bottom of whomever was issuing the death threats and that she can soon resume her normal life activities.

I would also like to hope that the massive blog pile-on currently going on (of which this post is admittedly a part) maybe, just maybe, might make people think a tiny bit more before they hit "Publish" or "Send".   Just because you can write things that are extremely negative or hurtful doesn't mean you should.  Write it if you need to... but then step away from the computer... go for a walk... have a drink... and then come back and look at it again.  Would you want to be on the receiving end of that blog post, comment or email?  Would you find it funny?  or hurtful?  If you wouldn't like to be the recipient, can you please hit delete now?

Will this episode remind us all that a bit of civility goes a long way?  And that we need more of it?   I'd like to hope so... but I guess I'm also jaded enough to question whether it really will...

Oh, the challenges of living on a big round ball with too many of these things called timezones.  Tonight, literally as I am writing this, there are a bunch of great folks about 100 miles away partaking in the Montreal Geek Dinner hosted by Mitch Joel and including Shel Holtz.  I consider both Mitch and Shel as friends and was very much looking forward to joining them tonight.  Michael Seaton, whom I have corresponded with but never met, is going to be there as well... plus some 30 or so others.  All in all it should be a dang good time.  For me, it's about a 2-hour drive, assuming no major delays at either the Canadian border crossing (usually not) or in Montreal rush-hour traffic (almost always).

Timezones nailed me, though.

In two ways.  First, I'm still finding myself seriously jet-lagged from the week in Cairo and the 6-hour difference.  Even though I got home late Friday night (well, really early Saturday morning) and have had the weekend to recover, I'm still dragging in the evenings... kind of after 6pm Eastern which is midnight in Egypt and was about the time I was going to bed over there.  So I had concerns about travelling 2 hours up to Montreal and 2 hours back tonight.

But the kicker was an appointment mixup.  Last week while in Cairo I accepted an appointment for a conference call that I swear was at 2:30pm.  So my plan was to have the call and then drive up to Montreal.  It was the kind of thing that I really had to do from my office, so I couldn't really drive and participate.  Well, today, on my Blackberry it was showing up as at 2:30pm... but on my laptop it was at 3:30pm!  I confirmed with the coordinator that it was 3:30... and that basically shot down the Montreal trip.

Sorry folks in Montreal, but you know the rules... customers have to come first!

Rather a bummer, but in light of my continuing adjustment to being back in VT, it's probably not the worst thing to stay here.  Still, it would have been great to see Shel and Mitch again and to meet Michael and the others.  I'd say that "I hope they have fun", but I know that is pretty much a given with that crowd!  I look forward now to hearing about it on the next episodes of FIR (Shel) and SPOS (Mitch). 

Ah, well, hopefully another time...   (or we'll just have to have folks down to Burlington!)

P.S. It was also another reminder that I don't think I actually upgraded by Blackberry to deal with the changed DST issue. Sigh...

As many readers may know, yesterday (Thursday, March 22) was the day that the "Bum Rush The Charts" campaign was trying to get an independent song up into the iTunes Top 10.

It didn't work... at least in North America according to the latest info in iTunes.

At least, the song didn't make it up into the Top 10.  Right now, iTunes shows me that the song is still at #67 on the US "Rock" list of top songs, which is where it was before I went to bed about 6 hours ago.  Which isn't to say the campaign was a failure, because it actually achieved a great amount.  But it didn't hit the stated goal of landing in the Top 10 in the US iTunes list.

Christopher Penn, one of the primary publicists of the campaign, has already written some excellent reflections about the relative success failure of the campaign and how it could have been done differently.  I think they are actually great thoughts in general about "campaigns" that involve social media.  I would, though, add two more points of my own:

1. Consider the name of the campaign

Maybe it's an age thing, but I found a lot of people (including myself, initially) were rather clueless about what the term "Bum Rush" meant... and that may have been a barrier.  To a degree it's along with Christopher's comment that "edginess" of the campaign may have put some people off... but it's more that I just don't think people initially had any understanding of what it was all about.  If you didn't understand "bum rush", the title meant nothing to you.

2. Ensure a common domain name/website in all publicity

When I was looking through the digg comments, I kept seeing (crude) comments about "the woman in the video".  Yet given that I was looking at this web page, I had no clue what the comments were talking about.  Well it turns out that there were really three URLs in use as part of the campaign:

1. http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/bumrush/
2. http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/
3. http://www.bumrushthecharts.com/  (which redirected to #2 after a few seconds)

Based on Twitter msgs and, I think, some blog entries, I was going to #1, but the video in reference was at #2.  So I think another lesson is to ensure that all references are pointing to the same web site.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.  As I said, I would really suggest reading Christopher's reflections, as they have a much broader applicability than just this campaign.

Logging onto the Internet here at the hotel in Cairo (for the glorious sum of $26 USD/day) had a rather amusing consequence - the main page for Google is entirely in Arabic! (click image for larger image) The text you enter in appears on the right side of the search box, and the results, as shown on the right (click image for larger image) appear on the right side as well.  Google icon on the right... essentially everything the reverse of the way it appears on the English page (as is appropriate for the way it would be in the Arabic language).

Now, there's a link there that allows you to easily get to the English search page... but I did have to say that this was definitely an entertaining side note of connecting to the Internet from an IP address range obviously known to be Egyptian!   No, Toto, I'm very definitely not in Kansas anymore...  :-)

This week, March 19-23, I will be in Cairo, Egypt, to present at a regional conference for Mitel resellers. I expect that I will not be writing much here or on my other blogs during this week.  Of course, if I wind up being stuck in airports that also have WiFi access... or decide that 12-hour airplane flights might be a good place to write... I might wind up posting.  But my expectation is that you won't see much here until next week.  If I post anywhere, I may do what I've done in the past and post a bit of a travelogue to my personal blog and/or my Twitter account.

If any of you reading this happen to be in Cairo this week, do drop me an email as I'm always interested in meeting people in different parts of the world.

Back at you in a week...  I'm off to go sit in planes...

What is OpenID? What are the security issues around it? Should you trust using it? What do you have to be worried about? What are the main security threats to it?

While I've mentioned here why bloggers should care about OpenID (and written more about it over on DisruptiveTelephony), I really wanted to understand more about the security issues around OpenID, so I got together with two other members of the Security Round Table, Michael Santarcangelo and Martin McKeay, to explore the issues around OpenID and security to a far greater degree.

We have shared the resulting conversation as a SRT podcast, and have also published as the show notes the large body of links that we accumulated during our preparation for the show.  I'd encourage you to check out the SRT site purely for the links alone, as I think we pulled together one of the more comprehensive lists of links I've seen related to OpenID.

In the end, the three of us came aware quite impressed with the possibilities of OpenID with regard to the specific piece of the identity puzzle that it is aiming to solve.  We hope this podcast helps people understand both the potential benefits as well as a few potential challenges with regard to security and OpenID.  Comments and feedback are very definitely welcome.

Frustrating night tonight... I was doing the post-production on a Blue Box Special Edition podcast of the 90-minute workshop that I did along with podcast co-host Jonathan Zar and security researcher Shawn Merdinger out at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference last month.  Unfortunately, even though I'd jacked into the mixer provided at ETel (or perhaps because I was connected into the mixer), I wound up with an annoying buzz throughout the recording.   I can only guess that it was something with one of the audio components in the setup for the room out there at ETel.  I've seen a buzz be created by something as simple as a bad wire or a connector not fully inserted into a jack.  In any event, I wound up with a buzz.

Since I had solved (and blogged about) a similar issue before using Audacity, I spent literally a couple of hours trying to kill off the buzz.  I used hi-pass filters.... notch filters... equalizer effects... all sorts of things.  Searched the web, the Audacity wiki and more.  Unfortunately, this particular buzz seemed to be located right down on the end of the frequency spectrum where our voices are also located!  So when I used a high-pass filter to allow through only frequencies over, say, 300 Hertz, you could hear the effect on our voices.  If I moved the high-pass filter down to say 100 Hz, there was no impact on our voices, but the buzz was still at full strength.  Move it up to 500 or 600 Hz and the buzz was reduced... but so was the quality of our voices.

Wanting to get this episode posted today, I finally gave up and ran it as it was recorded, which was not overly appealing to me.  I always strive to have the highest audio quality possible, which is why I spend the time I do on post-production.  But in the end, there was just no way I could figure it out.  Perhaps with better tools... or more time... perhaps not.  Fun, fun, fun...

Working alone in a home office, the walls of your room can start to close in on you, so it's nice to get out now and then to meet with other people locally.  This afternoon I was invited to speak to a class of seniors in the PR program of one of the local colleges about social media.  It's a topic not well covered in their text book (do any cover it?  I don't know.) and while the instructor has been bringing in pieces of it all semester, she'd asked me to come in and do a deeper dive.  Given my lengthy background in teaching/training - and my passion about social media - I was delighted to do so and provided an overview of what's going on out there with regard to social media from a PR point-of-view.  My audience was 25 or so students and one small dog.  (The dog seemed to like it.)  It was quite fun and I enjoyed hearing and answering their questions.

I set up the presentation as "So You Want to Get a Job in PR?  In 2007?"  and provided 14 suggestions for what they might do to learn about social media and potentially differentiate themselves from other candidates for jobs.  In thinking about it, I should probably write that up as a blog entry here.  (Note made to self...) The students were, of course, already into social media in the sense that they pretty much all already had either Facebook or MySpace pages, but outside of that many of them had limited experience, so it was fun.

They turned out to all be seniors, graduating in about 2 months and heading out into the big, wide-open whatever...    they are entering PR at an interesting time.... so much is in chaos... and yet, the opportunities are out there in abundence for those that want to dive in.  I wish them all well - there is so much ahead of them of which they have absolutely no idea...  they'll be in for a fun ride... :-)

Over at Saunderslog, I have been curious about how Alec Saunders was getting a watermark of his URL across the bottom of his blog images, as shown on the right in the quick screenshot I took of the twitter window. I thought he might be using some new feature in Flickr or in some other editing program. In any event, it turns out to be a feature of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer beta which he is using.  The funny thing is that I'm using WLW as well, but had not yet discovered this interesting little feature. (Nor is it clearly mentioned on the WLW information page.)

Using this watermarking capability is remarkably simple. First you insert your image into WLW, which might just be a simple "Paste" from another program.  As shown in the screenshot on the left, when you click on the image to select it, you get a sidebar for the "Image Properties".  I use the first and second tabs all the time, but had never played with the third "Effects" tab.

Ta da... click on the green "+" sign to get a drop-down menu, choose "Overlays" and then "Watermark".  Enter the URL and change the font and sizing and you're done!

What's nice is that WLW is changing the image itself versus using CSS or something like that... which is what I would want it to do, so it's great to see. 

Since I was exploring this third tab, I also now noticed that under the "+" sign there is a "Transformations" menu with a number of image effects, such as "Black&White", "Sepia", "Sharpen", "Blur", etc.  Now I typically do such manipulation in some other program (like Google's Picasa), but it's nice to know these are here if I just want a quick change to an image.

So thanks, Alec, for pointing me to something I already had and just hadn't fully explored.

As to Windows Live Writer, what I don't get is why the WLW blog hasn't been updated since November.  Has Microsoft stopped development on it? Or paused their work?   There does seem to be activity in their forum... it's just curious that there have been no blog posts in, now, almost four months.  Puzzling...