Disruptive Conversations

You are in an airport at dinner time. You are hungry. Do you:

1. Grab some food from a fast food vendor/pushcart, go to your gate area, put your music player headphones on and tune out everyone around you while you eat.
2. Grab some food from a fast food vendor/pushcart, go to your gate area and start talking to the people around you while you eat.
3. Go to an airport restaurant, sit down alone at a table, bury your nose in a book and/or put your music player headphones on and zone out while eating.
4. Go to an airport restaurant, sit down alone at a table and attempt to strike up random conversations with the people sitting next to you, who are also dining alone (and who aren't buried in their book or music player)

Given that on any personality test like Myers-Briggs, I pretty much max out the Extrovert scale (big surprise, eh?), you can imagine that my choices are usually either #2 or #4. I've learned over the years (painfully, sometimes) that extroverts like myself can be sheer horror for our polar opposites, the extremely introverted. And even the extroverted sometimes want to just zone out or have some peace (there are times when I want that!).... so I won't intrude if someone looks adamant that they want their space. But if someone is open to a conversation, I'm usually more than happy to join in... for one basic reason:

Everyone has a story to tell and you can always learn interesting things from random conversations.

Take last week. I was travelling home from Atlanta and was stuck in Newark for a couple of hours. I went into ...

 Per a post in the Google blog, Google is launching a "Build Your Campus in 3D" competition to encourage students to create a 3D version of their campus using Google's SketchUp tool... that are then linked in with Google Earth, of course.

As a guy who used to play around with creating 3D objects in the now ancient era of VRML in the mid-1990s, it's intriguing to see how far the tools have come.

It also makes me wonder... while many folks are experimenting with building 3D objects in virtual worlds like Second Life, is Google evolving its own 3D world that might have a similarity to our own real world?  (Right here they will be getting, I am sure, a good number of campuses submitted...)

Another interesting question - could SecondLife someday import things created by Google's Sketchup?  (Well, it seems people are working on exactly that here and here.)

Note to self: add Google SketchUp to the already insanely long list of things to check out sometime...

When you die, what happens to your blog(s)?  What happens to all that writing?  Think about how things have changed... traditional "writers" have always left behind their writings.  On paper, in journals/diaries, in printed books and magazines.  Perhaps out in public view or perhaps in the "box up in the attic".  However they are stored, the writings survive the death of the writer and then are seen some day by family or perhaps by researchers.  Indeed, historians relish finding old caches of (snail-mail) letters, diaries, unfinished books or poems. Famous (or wealthy) people have bequeathed their "papers" to a library, often at the university they attended.  Families pass down the "family bible" through generations. It's all part and parcel of how we have accounted for - and preserved - our history as a culture.   Often the historians prize most the "everyday" writings... the letters... the postcards... the brief notes... as they offer a glimpse into a distant era.

Fast forward to today... while we still generate printed books by the millions and while people still do write in paper diaries/journals/etc., so much of our writing has moved online.  Yet let's think about what happens when you die:

1. Sooner or later, the registration for your domain(s) will expire and people won't be able to find your material at the regular URL.
2. Likewise, sooner or later your subscription at your hosting provider expires. (whether that is a true hosting provider where you are running your own software or a hosted blogging provider like TypePad)
3. Because of #2, your files are eventually purged from the hosting provider.
4. Your writing disappears... except, perhaps, to maybe live on in the Way Back Machine if your site was included in one of its snapshots.

Now, #1 and #2 might be delayed a bit if you set your subscriptions/registrations to "auto-renew".  They would keep auto-renewing at least until the credit card they have listed expired. (Which, one might think, might be relatively soon if your bank cancels it.) Perhaps you could tie it to a bank account that might live longer... but the point is that sooner or later it runs out.

What about the "free" blogging sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com, etc?  Good question.  Blogs that are created there do seem to stay around for a very long time after they've been updated.  But still, you'd have to think that after some (potentially lengthy) period of inactivity, eventually the system admins are going to archive off inactive accounts.  Odds are that some historian 20 years from now won't see your pages on LiveJournal (if, indeed, LiveJournal is even still around in its current form).

So what does happen?  Do your entries... just... stop?  Does someone else go in and put in a final entry? (as was done for Dave Ross in "Oh Crap. I have Cancer.")  Who has your username(s) and password(s) to be able to go and do this?  Does someone else pay for your domain name?  Or print it all out?  Do you have instructions for someone?  (Is this a new area to be added to wills?)

Or do you even care?  Are your online writings not worth saving?  Do you want them all to die out with you?

(I got on this train of thought because of recent conversations on FIR and in other places about "what happens to your corporate blog when you leave the company?"  Should it stay up?  Or should it be removed? (as email addresses would be removed for employees who left the company) It just occurred to me that the argument begged the follow-on question raised here.)

If you have not read Michael Seaton's post "Plagarism hits The Client Side a.k.a. Scott gets caught", I'd recommend it as a warning for the kind of thing that can happen to any of us.  In it, Michael details the fact that another blogger out there took one of Michael's posts, made a few minor changes to it and then posted it as the blogger's own post without any kind of attribution.  Michael noted another post that was a plagarized version of a TechCrunch post, and as you'll see in the comments, I found that one of the blogger's other posts was also a duplicate - this time of a post from another blog back in June 2006. 

I didn't note it on my comment in Michael's blog, but in the post I found to be a duplicate, the blogger had been rather dumb in that the image (of DropSend usage) that he pulls in is actually pulled from the blog where he copied the text!  I mean, if you are going to steal someone's content, you might want to put the images up on your server so that it can't be tracked back to the source!

But seriously, it's a shame to see this kind of thing.  As noted by Michael, the blogger in question seems to be a senior marketing person at a well known company in Washington, DC.  And here he is posting other people's content as his own.  Michael has asked for an explanation, but so far there has been no word publicly from the blogger.  (Although I'll note his blog hasn't been updated since January 18th, which I think was when Bryper commented on his re-post of Michael's text and that post suddenly came down.)

Time was that unethical people could do this type of thing... "can I copy your essay?"  But in the age of Google, Technorati and friends, you will eventually be found out.  You may have a good run... maybe even a long run... but eventually you will be discovered.  And guess what, courtesy of both Google's caches and sites like the WayBackMachine, your content lives forever. So even if you take down the posts, they are still out.  (And of course, people like me can help in that, as I just used "wget" to grab a copy of the blogger's website.)

There's a very simple solution of, course, which can be summarized in this:

Write your own <insert-favorite-expletive> content!

Need we say more?

Okay, so if you have a brand ("Skype") that has a tremendous amount of recognition, what makes you wake up one day and decide that you are going to change your main tag line from:

The whole world can talk for free

to... wait for it... yes... they actually do appear to be serious:

Take a deep breath

Huh?  Jaanus explains it a bit on the Share Skype blog and hints at a longer post to come about the whole brand transition.  I'll have to say that will be interesting to read, because this move seems a bit puzzling.  I personally won't miss the conversation bubbles (although their story is interesting), but the change in the tag line seems puzzling at best.  Obviously we have to stay tuned...

Last week, John Unger over at TypePadHacks.org dropped me a note to let me know that I was given an "AHA" award for my blog redesign.  It actually mentions "Disruptive Telephony", but I'll note the award here since this blog shares the same design and I write about blogging here.  He notes my use of the three-column hack and also the menu bar hack.  I do definitely appreciate the notice and feedback, so thanks, John, but I'll really say thanks back to John and all the other members of the TypePad Hacks community who have put together the various "hacks".  The site does make it very easy for someone to learn how to tweak their blog in different ways.  I've learned a good bit from the site and have more ideas for things I'll do to these blogs once I can find some more of that mythical thing called free time...

P.S. Also check out the "landing page" of the other award winner, David Alexander. It's nicely done and something I've been thinking about doing with another page (Hint... you'll notice that I'm missing an "About" link here.  Stay tuned...)

Given that I know some of the folks reading here are interested in SecondLife, you may be interested in my post over on my DisruptiveTelephony blog about how SecondTalk will apparently let you easily use Skype from within SecondLife.  I could have really written it in either blog, but chose to post it there.  Anyway, check it out... and if you decide to try out SecondTalk and get it to work for you, I'd be interested in hearing about that.

Thanks to spammers, there are definitely some days that I do wonder whether I have the stamina to continue to engage in the "conversation" that is so much a part of social media.  Take today... I get the standard email that someone has submitted a comment to the "Voice of VOIPSA" weblog and I need to moderate it.  So I go and find that just in the last day there are 10 comments awaiting moderation... one of which is real and the other 9 are comment spam.  And not just quick spam but rather these big giant link dumps that I have to scroll down through, hoping that I don't miss a "real" comment in all scrolling through the crap.  VoV is a WordPress blog, so I do the quick "Mark all as spam" and then find the 1 that isn't and mark it for approval. 

Now note that this is with the wonderful Akismet Spam protection module installed! In fact, Akismet helpfully tells me that there are 3,108 spam comments that it has caught since I hit "Delete all" just a couple of weeks ago.  It tells me that 18,311 spam comments have been caught since we installed Akismet on the VoV blog sometime back in the fall.

 A quick trip to Akismet's home page will show you this nice graphic to the right, along with a page with more stats.  Now, of course, they are a vendor of blog comment/trackback spam prevention software, so naturally it is in their interest to show a high number of spam comments. (Just as it is in the interest of anti-virus vendors to talk about how many viruses are out there in the wild.)    But whether or not their stats are indeed accurate and 94% of all comments are spam, I think we can all agree that it's a problem.  As I wrote earlier, fellow VoIP blogger Alec Saunders wrote back in December about how spammers were outgunning him 275-to-1.   Shel Holtz writes of having to deal with 100+ trackback spam messages each day.  Any search of Technorati or Google for "trackback spam" will show you the many pages and articles that are talking about the issue.  Even black hats are talking about the issue.

And the level of spam is definitely changing the openness and speed of the conversation.  As I noted, Voice of VOIPSA is using both Akismet and moderation.  On TypePad, I've implemented CAPTCHAs to reduce automated blog comment spam, and it's seemed to work okay, although occasionally one gets through.  I've also moderated trackbacks... which is fine, but does obviously introduce latency in the conversation and requires more work for me.   Shel Holtz can't moderate trackbacks on his platform, so he's turned them off completely:  "Farewell, trackbacks; screw you, spammers".  He's not alone as I know of others doing the same. I've seen some bloggers turn off comments completely. 

I don't blame them.  Who has the time to deal with sorting through all the junk?  And if you don't moderate or somehow deal with the issue, who wants their blog to turn into a pure spam site?  And each time someone turns off trackbacks or comments, the global "conversation" of which we are all a part dies a little bit more.  Even turning on moderation huts the conversation... others don't see comments quickly and can't reply to those comments - and it's more work for the blog author. I submitted a comment to a blog last week and because it said comments were moderated, I knew I wouldn't see my comment right away, but when it never appeared I contacted the author and found out the comment never showed up in his moderation queue!  It was a software error, apparently, but I had no way to check.  Now, almost a week later, is my comment even still relevant?  Do I really have the time to go post it again?

What's the solution?  It's not entirely clear to me.  Part of the solution is obviously back-end tools like Akismet and the other similar services.  Part of it may be the CAPTCHA tools that we use (although that's really a bit of an arms race against spammers developing tools to overcome the CAPTCHAs... such tools are out there with varying levels of effectiveness).  Part of it may be identity assertion - things like TypeKey or OpenID (although note that there is nothing preventing spammers from creating OpenIDs).  Part of it may involve a retreat into gated "communities", i.e. you have to register and be approved by the blog author before commenting (some sites do this now) or be added to the authors known and trusted "friends" list.  I could, if I chose, do this on my LiveJournal blog right now and restrict comments to only my LiveJournal "friends".

But each one of those solutions throw up barriers and potentially diminish the openness of the conversation.  What about the comments from random readers that sometimes can lead you to other very interesting topics?  (Or might simply make your day in their praise?)  If everyone must be registered or moderated, how "real-time" can the conversation be? (unless it is within the walls of trusted users?)

Will spam kill the "conversation" of social media just as that medium emerges so strongly?  Or will we find the ways or create the tools to allow the conversation to continue?

Listening to FIR #207 this morning, I was pleased to hear Terry Fallis on the show talking about his new novel, The Best Laid Plans, that he is releasing first as a series of podcasts. While Terry is best known within social media circles as one half of the Inside PR podcast and also as the president/co-founder of Thornley Fallis Communications in Toronto and Ottawa, when I met him out at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo in California last year he turned out to be a major politicial junkie.  Given that I, too, share that interest/passion (although obviously more with US politics), we clicked rather well and had some interesting conversations.  He mentioned he was working on a novel about Canadian politics and I'm delighted to see it come to light.

It's also an interesting approach.  Here he is putting out podcasts of the book chapters before it's in print.  In fact, one of the goals he mentioned on his FIR promo is to actually attract a suitable publisher!  Now, he's not the first author to do this... Scott Sigler has certainly garnered a good bit of fame (and, now, a publisher) with his sci-fi-focused books, but it's still very cool to see and I will be curious to watch how it works out for him.

And Terry, I did download your prologue and first chapter... I'm getting on a plane to Atlanta in a few hours so the timing was perfect.  :-)

P.S. Wonderful music you used in your FIR promo!

There's a very twisted irony in the fact that I don't use the Levelator very often at all... but after I wrote the post early this morning about the Levelator, it would wind up being a key tool for me to use this day.  I had an interview scheduled in the early afternoon for an prototype of an internal podcast we're working on.  Just minutes before I was to do the interview, I determined that something was wacky on my laptop and my normal route of using a softphone on the laptop with a mix-minus from my condenser mic was not going to work.   Not having the time to diagnose the problem and not wanting to lose the interview window, I went to Plan B (well, it should be Plan Z, as in "just don't do it", but it was B) and grabbed my JK Audio QuickTap from the closet, inserted it inline between the handset and one of my teleworker phones, and ran a cable over to an input on my mixer. As I did this, I was dearly hoping the Levelator could help out... or I was going to be re-recording another day.

You see, the problem with the QuickTap is this - you get both sides of the conversation on a single track, and I'm right there talking into the handset microphone, and the other person is on the other end of a phone connection.  The result is almost always: I'm loud and the other person is soft.  Maybe others have different results, but that's almost always how it is for me.

However, the Levelator did save the day.  Dumped the recording to a WAV file, dropped it on the Levelator and opened up the levelated file.  Ta da... the levels were at least much nearer to each other.  Not the quality that I'd get out of my regular audio rig (because of the handset microphones and QuickTap), but certainly acceptable and a decent way to recover.

Just very ironic given my post this morning...