Category Archives: Tools

Pondering All The Strange (Chinese?) Accounts Joining My Email Newsletter List…

Has anyone else operating an email mailing list noticed subscriptions pouring in over the past few months from strange email accounts?

I have been amazed – and I can’t for the life of me understand WHY this is going on.

For my VERY infrequently issued email newsletter, A View From The Crow’s Nest, I’ve seen probably 50 subscriptions over the last month from email accounts with very bizarre names – both names of email address and also the first and last names of the users. They pretty much all have come from accounts at:

hotmail.com
tom.com
163.com
sohu.com
yeah.net

Now, in looking at those sites… outside of hotmail.com, they are all Chinese-language sites.

Did my (English-only!) blogs get on some list for people to read in China?

… and some % of those people decided to actually subscribe to my (again, English-only) email newsletter?

I find this hard to believe, particularly when Google Analytics shows NO increased visitation to any of my sites from China or Chinese-language browsers.

Is something else going on here? The IT security part of my brain was spiked into high paranoia by the patterns in the last names that were entered into the subscription form. The vast majority of these “last names” were either:

andeson
aifseng
billaa
John

And the “first names” make no sense as an English name. Here’s a screenshot showing some recent subscriptions (with, yes, some info deliberately hidden):

Strangeaddresses

This pattern continues for several more pages.

Now, I have no real knowledge of the Chinese language. Is this perhaps a translation of Chinese characters into Roman letters by the iContact email service I use? i.e. are these perhaps legitimate subscription requests where the info is getting lost in translation?

My first thought before I realized all the sites (sans hotmail.com) were Chinese was that this was spammers subscribing to my newsletter from free email services.

But why?

I couldn’t (and still can’t) figure that out. What good would it do for a spammer (or other attacker) to subscribe to my email newsletter list?

Or are the subscription records bogus anyway? Are they the byproduct of attackers trying to probe the security of the signup forms? To see if they could exploit a SQL injection attack or something like that?

Or is something more widespread going on? A Google search on “aifseng”, for instance, shows that “word” paired with other nonsensical (in English) “words” on a host of other sites.

Did I miss a memo about some security issue going on? Or is this the case where something is getting lost in translation?

Any ideas or info out there?

Image credit: maddercarmine on Flickr

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Amazon and the Incredible Disruption of The Publishing Industry

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Have you been tracking the insane degree to which Amazon.com is utterly disrupting the traditional publishing industry? Have you been paying attention to how incredibly the business models and the players are changing?

As an author of multiple books who has been published through the traditional publishing industry (ex. O’Reilly, Syngress, Sybex, QUE) and who still has a zillion book ideas in my head, I’ve obviously been paying close attention. For those of us who write, it’s an incredible time of opportunity… and choices.

The 800-Pound Gorilla

Amazon.com is at the heart of the disruption and the opportunity. I first started watching Amazon closely about 5 years ago or so when I learned of CreateSpace, Amazon’s “do-it-yourself” publishing site where basically anyone can upload a PDF, choose a cover (or create your own) and… publish your book into Amazon.com! The cool thing is that your book shows up in Amazon listings just like those from the traditional publishers.

Write your book.
Export to PDF.
Upload to CreateSpace.
Start Selling!

Boom!

That’s the sound of the traditional publishing industry business model going up in smoke…

In the years since, CreateSpace has of course expanded into ebooks and Amazon’s rolled out many other services helping authors get their content out.

Now, of course, to do it on your own is not quite that simple. Traditional publishers provide some key assistance to authors:

Editing – a critical piece of writing a book
Design – of the cover, the book, graphics, the typefaces, etc.
Marketing – promoting the book across many different channels, advertising, etc.
Distribution – getting the book out to where people will buy it

Editing, design and marketing are all areas where you can find people to help you… and the distribution is the whole point of what Amazon.com, Smashwords, Lulu and a zillion other sites will now help you with. Sure, the traditional publishers can help you with distribution out to brick-and-mortar bookstores… but how are those doing these days? (The sad subject of another blog post at some point.) For some authors those bookstores may be a market… and for them the traditional publishers may be necessary. For other authors starting out – or writing for more niche audiences, the “indie publishing” route may work better.

Amazon’s Latest Move

This month brings news that Amazon is signing authors to its own publishing imprint and there are two great articles out analyzing what this means:

GigaOm: Publishers: What are you doing while Amazon eats your lunch?
New York Times: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

Mathew Ingram’s GigaOm piece, in particular, is useful for all the links he includes to other articles and information. The NY Times piece also had this great quote from Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti:

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

The time has never been better for authors to be able to get their content published. We’ve had this world of “blogging” now for over a decade which has let anyone publish their thoughts online… and services from Amazon and the others have let you get into “print-on-demand” so easily.

And ebooks! Look at how the way people consume books have changed just in the last few years….

But of course there is an entire industry that was used to being the gatekeepers of that content: publishers, agents, bookstores…

Some Traditional Publishers Get It

I should note that some publishers certainly “get it”, have seen the disruption and are doing what they can to both survive and thrive in this new world. The primary reason why I signed with O’Reilly for my latest book, Migrating Applications to IPv6, was because the entire idea behind the the book was for it to be an “ebook” that could be constantly updated as we as an industry learn more about IPv6 application migration.[1] O’Reilly has long been paying attention… they brought out Safari Books Online many years ago… they have their excellent Radar blog/site that indeed includes ongoing commentary about the disruption in the industry… and they sponsor the annual excellent Tools of Change for Publishing conference. I wrote earlier about how O’Reilly makes it so easy to get ebooks onto your mobile devices.

O’Reilly is a stellar example of publishers who see the changes and are looking at how to be part of that wave. There are others, too. The smart ones are evolving.

Some Traditional Publishers Don’t

Others aren’t. As both the GigaOm and NYT piece mention, some of the traditional publishers are instead fighting tooth and nail to hang on to some relevance.

I loved Mathew’s ending paragraph:

Here’s a hint for book publishers: take a lesson from the music industry, and don’t spend all your time suing people for misusing what you believe is your content — think instead about why they are doing this, and what it says about how your business is changing, and then try to adapt to that. Amazon is giving authors what they want, and as long as it continues to do so, you will be at a disadvantage. Wake up and smell the disruption.

Wake up and smell the disruption, indeed!

If you are an author, have you been following what Amazon is doing? Have you self-published any work? Or are you considering it?

Image credit: babblingdweeb on Flickr

[1] To be entirely clear, another HUGE reason for signing with O’Reilly was because of the marketing they could do on my behalf to their existing channel of techies, early adopters, etc.

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The MomsLikeMe.com Debacle and the Need For the Open Internet And To Control Your Content

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A ton of online communities of moms are dying this week. After three years, the “MomsLikeMe.com” websites are shutting down on Friday. From the FAQ:

All of the MomsLikeMe sites will permanently shut down on Friday, October 14, 2011. At that time, everything that currently appears on the site, locally or nationally, will no longer be accessible.

Why? The standard lame corporate-speak:

The market has evolved substantially since we launched three years ago and there are many new and different ways for people to connect and engage. We feel we can better serve this community through the many new and exciting digital initiatives we will be developing and rolling out in the future.

The reality is that the site is entirely owned by Gannett (publishers of USA Today and many other newspapers and sites) and for whatever reasons they have decided that it no longer makes sense to operate this site. Perhaps they weren’t seeing enough ad revenue. Perhaps it wasn’t hitting whatever “metrics” they wanted to hit.

Regardless, it is shutting down – permanently – in 2 days. Finished. Over. Done. Gone.

And you can see in the comments to the blog post announcing the shutdown the collective “WTF?” of all the moms who had participated in the site. (Note, of course, that you can only see these comments until Friday, at which point they will be gone, too.)

We’ve seen this movie before. Remember back in April 2010 when Ning shuttered all its free communities? Or in September 2010 when the Vox blogging service shut its doors?

This is not a new story…

People invest hours and hours of time in a service operated by a company.
Company decides to shut down service… or goes bankrupt… or gets acquired.
People lose the community and/or the content they created.

At least Vox provided a way to export your content and Ning provided an upgrade path (for a fee).

Gannett says the site is dead… and THEY OWN ALL YOUR CONTENT. Again from the FAQ:

Can I take posts or other data posted on MomsLikeMe and use if for other purposes (e.g., post it on a blog, elsewhere on the web or publish it in a book)?

As outlined in the Terms of Service, the information that has been posted on MomsLikeMe is the property of Gannett.

Translation: You lose. We own it all.

Of course, just to rub salt in the wounds, the FAQ answer right below that is:

Can Gannett take posts or other data posted on MomsLikeMe and use it for other purposes (e.g., post it on a blog, elsewhere on the web or publish it in a book)?

Yes, as outlined in the Terms of Service, Gannett has the legal rights to re-use public information posted on the site for other purposes.

Translation: You lose. We own it all.

Unfortunately, the good folks who invested their time in the communities of the MomsLikeMe.com sites are learning a harsh lesson in the realities of the NOT-Open Internet. When companies control the platforms and services – and don’t provide a way to export or move your content/data – you are entirely in their control. And if they decide to shut the service down…

… you lose.

The same issue can be said of Facebook (which itself has an insanely onerous Terms of Service), Twitter and so many other services. Google+ is also that way… but right from the start they have provided ways for you to get your data out of the service should you want to do so.

This is why we need to be concerned about issues around the “openness” of the Internet and about “data portability”. If we choose to host our content – or a “community” – on a particular service:

Who owns the content?
Can you move the content if necessary?

We need to be looking at ways to ensure that we are in control of our own content and our own destiny… and not the companies and organizations that may run the services we use.

It’s too bad Gannett couldn’t have done more to help all these folks who have invested so much time to move their content elsewhere… that would have been the charitable and “right” thing to do.

Alas, they did not… and the moms who invested all their time lose…

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Watching Live Blogs FAIL During Apple’s iOS 5 Event

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Today was a fascinating day to watch live-blogging services fail in a rather dramatic way.

Engadget… Gizmodo… MacRumors… ArsTechnica… and more…

Unless you were under a rock or otherwise hiding offline, you know that today was the big, huge, ginormous “iPhone 5” announcement event from Apple. (It turned out, of course, that there was no iPhone 5, but that didn’t stop the media frenzy.)

As you probably also know, Apple does NOT live-stream these events. I think Robert Scoble nails their reasons – it’s all about control. The PR folks at Apple are also masters at “creating spectacle”. These “events” become the huge media events they are precisely because there is scarcity… you can’t get the info unless you are in the room.

And so, the “media” get to be gatekeepers to the knowledge again.

Lacking a live video or audio stream, all the interested techies, media and fanboys must turn to live blogs and to Twitter (and Facebook and Google+) to get their updates.

But boy did those live blogs fail today!

Now, don’t get me wrong..

I DO understand that providing live updates to an unknown – but very HIGH – number of visitors is hard to do.

I get that… but still it was interesting to see who survived and who didn’t (and I mention both below).

Live Blogs That Struggled

One of the first I saw go was MacRumors, who was originally using a service that embedded “live blogging” directly into their web page. That seemed to fail under the load and they dropped back to simply providing bullet updat es on their live page.

I was watching Engadget’s coverage for a while and it was great … until it wasn’t:

Engadgetliveblog

Even worse, the entire Engadget site seemed to be down at times:

Engadget2

The site went in and out during the course of the coverage but was mostly out for the latter half of the coverage.

Gizmodo’s live blog didn’t give the same kind of errors, but simply stopped updating for long periods … and then had problems loading display elements (which I missed capturing):

Gizmodo

Ars Technica did better with their coverage up until about 40 minutes into the event when they stopped updating the site and pointed people over to Twitter:

Arstechnicaliveblog

Their coverage came back… and then froze again several more times.

I would have loved to be watching the stats on the traffic these sites were getting as it had to have been a TON of traffic.

Live Blogs That Worked

Still, some sites seemed to work well through it all. And while I have no insight into how much traffic these sites had versus the ones above, it could also be the architecture they chose to use as well as their choice of content.

Ryan Block’s gdgt live gave the best experience I found, integrating both text and pictures to provide a great way to know what was going on:

Gdgtlive

They had a couple of momentary hiccups, but overall they seemed to consistently be publishing more and more content.

Mashable’s live coverage was also consistently available, although they went with a more Twitter-esque series of mostly text updates. They added in polls for some more interactivity and also had links to other posts and info. They had a few photos, but not all that many compared to others. However, the coverage was consistent and always there:

Mashablelive

Finally, GigaOm’s coverage was noteworthy in that they started out from the beginning to just provide simple text updates to a blog post that you had to manually refresh. No auto-updates… no embedded widgets… just a straight-up blog post with a mixture of text and pictures. Not as sexy as other sites, but every time I refreshed it the content was there with updates.

Sometimes, simplicity can win.

(Now, in fairness, because there was no auto-updating and because I wasn’t sitting there hitting the refresh (this was all running in the background on my computer while I ate lunch and was doing some other work), the GigaOm site could have gone down several times between my refreshes.)

Again, I do realize that providing this kind of large-scale coverage is hard, but in the era of “web-scale” and with the availability of content delivery networks, caching services, etc., there are certainly options available to companies providing “live blogs” of events.

Now maybe some of the sites that “struggled” had all that kind of stuff in place and still succumbed to the overwhelming traffic.

Regardless, today was an interesting experiment in seeing what worked and what didn’t work. Personally, I’d love it if some of the services that had technical difficulties would write up a bit about what happened and how they were hit.

It would help all of us learn how to scale our sites.

And help people get ready for the NEXT Apple event 😉

P.S. And yes, there were undoubtedly other sites that were offering live blogs of the event… these were just the ones that I happened to know of or find.

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WordTwit Pro Gives You Excellent Controls for Auto-Tweeting of Posts

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I’ve long been a fan of the WordTwit plugin from BraveNewCode and used it on both Voxeo’s blogs as well as my own to auto-tweet out new blog posts. Given that I write 99% of my blog posts offline (using MarsEdit) and send them to the blog site for posting, the fact that I couldn’t configure the resulting auto-tweet in WordTwit was never really a big deal to me. Some of my Voxeo colleagues who used the WordPress editor, though, really wanted to be able to modify the auto-tweet.

Primarily they wanted to add hashtags, although sometimes they wanted to change the tweet to be different from the title of the post.

The BraveNewCode folks came out with WordTwit Pro back in June and with my chaotic summer I’d never really taken a look at it… but now that I have I admit to being quite impressed! This video gives a great tour:

I admit that what I personally find most interesting is the ability to automatically schedule multiple tweets. I know from my own reading of my Twitter stream that there is no way I can even remotely keep up with the stream… and so I only see things that happen to come by at any given time. I’ve often thought about auto-tweeting a blog post… and then tweeting it again maybe 8 or 12 hours later when a different group of people may be monitoring Twitter. This plugin now helps automate that.

I haven’t installed it yet on my own site… but I’m definitely thinking of doing so…

Why The “Nym Wars” Matter – Preserving Pseudonymity On An Open Internet

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There’s an identity war going on out on the Internet right now… there are multiple aspects to it… but the key is that:

it is a battle for control of YOUR identity!

Think of any website you’ve visited lately that has offered you the ability to “Login with Facebook” or “Sign in with Twitter“.

It’s simple. Easy. Convenient.

And dangerous.

Because in embracing the convenience of such services (and I am certainly guilty of this myself), we surrender control of our identity to the identity provider.

But that is a broader topic for a much longer piece I want to write…

Right now I want to touch on the point:

What if the “identity provider” won’t let you use what you consider your “real” identity?

What if the identity provider requires you to use your “birth name” (or “real name”) instead of the name that everyone knows you as?

What if you are an entertainer and can’t use your “stage name” such as “Ice-T“, “Elton John” or “Lady Gaga“?
What if you are an author and can’t use your “pen name” such as “Mark Twain” or “Lewis Carroll“?
What if you are a developer or hacker and can’t use the “handle” or “nick” that you’ve been using for 15 or 20 years?

Welcome to the world of pseudonyms… persistent identities used by people instead of the names they were given at birth.

Pseudonyms have been with us for eons… as noted above, authors and entertainers have long used them. In fact, a pseudonym was involved with the founding of the United States.

And this pseudonymity is exactly what is at stake in what is being tagged as the “#nymwars” on Twitter.

This latest battle in the much larger war really began back on July 22nd, when Kirrily Robert, a developer (and former co-worker of mine) who has gone by the pseudonym “Skud” for many years, was suspended from Google+ for not using her real name and took to her blog to publicize this fact. There have been literally hundreds (and maybe thousands) of articles on the topic posted between then and now… with the most recent wave being about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments that Google wants you to use your real name because they want to be an identity provider… and do things with that “real identity” of yours.

This battle isn’t just about Google+, though. Facebook would also like you to only use your “real name” and to have you assert only your “real” identity.

I could go on at great length about why this is a bad idea, but would instead point you to this excellent but lengthy piece:

On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+

Read it… and then go back and read it again. A powerful piece laying out so many of the reasons why pseudonymity is important.

And a key point is:

Pseudonymity is NOT anonymity.

There is an entirely separate discussion to be had around true anonymity… and the value therein – or not.

But that is entirely different from the idea of a persistent identity that one uses as a replacement for one’s “real name”.

Should we not have the right to use the name that people know us by on these services?

The response, of course, is that using these services is optional and you can, of course, choose NOT to participate in Google+… or Facebook… or whatever other service requires you to use your “real name”.

And obviously that is an option.

But what if many of the conversations I want to participate in have moved to one of those services? What if all my friends are sharing photos using some new service… and I can’t because I’m forced to use a different identity than what I want to use?

What if I am an author or entertainer and want to engage on that service with my fans through the persona I use?

What if that service is the only way to communicate out of my country or region and using my real name may get me killed?

Pseudonymity matters.

Control over our identity matters.

The ability to control the identity we choose to use on services on the Internet matters.

The war for our identity will continue to rage… will the victor be the organizations who control the services we want to use? or will we retain the right to control our identity?

Your choice…

MarsEdit Offline Blog Editor For Mac OS X Has a New (Minor) Version Out

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Yesterday Daniel Jalkut released a minor update to MarsEdit, my favorite offline blogging tool, and while the 3.3.2 release itself was really just about bug fixes, I thought I’d mention the tool again here on this blog for those who may have recently moved to Mac OS X and are looking for an offline blog editor. I’ve written about MarsEdit a number of times before and continue to find it probably the program I use the most on my Mac outside of email and web browsers.

Granted, I write across a lot of blogs… but that’s the point! MarsEdit gives me a consistent editing interface across all the blogs, no matter what platform they are running on. I also never have to login to any sites because I’m doing all the editing on my local Mac. For the same reason, it’s very fast to get in and start editing… and I can easily drop in graphics… and everything else I want to do to write posts.

If you are on a Mac and write blogs posts, do check out MarsEdit. Yes, it’s NOT free software… but I’ve found it well worth the price.

Marsedit332

P.S. I have no financial relationship with Red Sweater Software other than being a happy customer, i.e. I am not getting any compensation or anything else if you buy the software.

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Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press – See The TED Video To Understand

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Is Facebook going to get into eBook publishing? That was the first question I had when I saw the news that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, developers of a very cool eBook technology that was used mainly by Al Gore for his latest “Our Choice” book. The announcement on Push Pop Press’ site said this:

Now we’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.

Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it’s going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.

Which was similarly confirmed in a statement from Facebook that was published on All Things D (and other sites):

Facebook isn’t planning to get into the digital book business, but some of the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook

I’d not seen their book myself prior to this news, but to understand how cool Push Pop Press’ “publishing technology” is, check out the video of co-founder Mike Matas’ demoing the technology at TED:

It will be fascinating to see how Facebook adds Push Pop Press’ technology into the Facebook user experience… could be fun!

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Disruptive Conversations

Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…

Category Archives: Tools

Pondering All The Strange (Chinese?) Accounts Joining My Email Newsletter List…

Amazon and the Incredible Disruption of The Publishing Industry

The 800-Pound Gorilla

Amazon’s Latest Move

Some Traditional Publishers Get It

Some Traditional Publishers Don’t

Watching Live Blogs FAIL During Apple’s iOS 5 Event

Live Blogs That Struggled

Live Blogs That Worked

WordTwit Pro Gives You Excellent Controls for Auto-Tweeting of Posts

Why The “Nym Wars” Matter – Preserving Pseudonymity On An Open Internet

MarsEdit Offline Blog Editor For Mac OS X Has a New (Minor) Version Out

Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press – See The TED Video To Understand