Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Blogging | 4 Comments

When we launch a blog, as well as getting people to read what we have to say, we are most of us looking to build a sense of community. While what we say has a big effect, how the blog works can also make a difference. Thankfully WordPress users have a good set of plugins to help:

Make it easier to subscribe or share your blog with Add to Any
This provides dropdowns for social bookmarking sites or feed reading services, making it totally easy for the reader to make a note of your location and keep coming back for more.
Top Commenters plugin and widget will reward your top commenters with a link back. Consider the link a bit of public recognition and a small incentive. Plus, you know how competitive people can be, it’s also kind of a high score table!
Make your comment area friendly with smiling faces - Add Gravatars with this easy plugin. Gravatars are “globally recognised avatars”. Basically anyone can set up a Gravatar picture centrally and any website that supports them will show your face whenever they are available, using your email address as a key. Seeing recognisable faces along with comments really helps build community.
Fire off a thank-you email to new commenters using Comment relish. We all like to feel valued, this email can be a nice touch, and also provides the opportunity to point out your feed or useful introductory content they might have missed.
An essential for creating conversation, bring commenters back with Subscribe to Comments. Just like with popular forum software, this will notify you when someone replies to your message, keeping the conversation flowing.

Have you any suggestions for great community building WordPress plugins? Please share your faves in the comments …

Is Web2.0 Culture Risking Democracy?

Posted on May 6, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Web 2.0 | 5 Comments

Over the weekend I had an opportunity to discuss all things internet with people with varying backgrounds and perspectives. Everyone there was a blogger, but with their own approach and profession, everything from health, business and music to journalism.

A straw poll showed hardly a hand full of people regularly read a newspaper or TV news. Very few read online newspapers routinely, choosing instead to get the information they were interested in from their own sources, such as blogs and Digg.

This is great news for those of us with a vested interest in social media, but what are the negative side effects?

We are increasingly in a self-service and self serving culture. I want, I need, is the order of the day. We don’t want to be told, just consume on our own terms.

Traditionally we have been told what was the news of the day. Told what is important via headlines and front page stories. Journalism was an important check against our elected leaders straying from the path. If we in the mainstream are all tracking the latest Britney/Hilton/Miley Cyrus story and overlooking anything dull or downer like politics, could democracy suffer?

There will always be individuals who hold our politicians accountable, but who will speak for and defend them? As one person pointed out, we say we dislike lawyers and journalists, but when things go bad these are the people we often need most.

You could say Digg and such like are the new newspapers, but as someone who works in social media I know how easy these things can be gamed to promote or bury a story. Also there are only so many times these sites can cry wolf before we ignore those too. We need the journalistic rigor and fact checking (even if this has been failing lately).

What do you think? Am I being overly pessimistic? How will journalism evolve to fit into a web2.0 world?

Imagining the Ultimate Computer for Travellers

Posted on May 1, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Productivity | Leave a Comment

I have mentioned my interest in the Asus Eepc before. It seems it is almost the perfect machine for traveling, but not quite.

My current trip to the USA has made me think about the topic again. It seems all the needs are addressed in different devices, why isn’t there one machine that does it all?

What do I need for travel?

3G for decent internet away from wifi
wifi for high speed internet
at least 1024 pixels wide screen with legible text
Good application support including Firefox or as capable browser
Decent keyboard and mouse action
Enough storage for local document download and editing

Other requirements exist but could probably live without them.

Blackberries are all the rage, often have qwerty keyboards, but software support isn’t quite what you could get with a real desktop operating system.

The iPhone is almost there, but no 3g (yet) and I have doubts that you could do real work on the small screen, even with the funky interface. Apples lock down on apps is a problem too. It seems you still can’t edit documents locally.

Nokias little tablet seemed promising, with linux and a nice wide screen, but was restricted to Wifi and fiddly to operate.

Gadgetry

My old HTC based PDA was almost there but it also had a tiny screen, and crashed a lot due to running pocket pc operating system. The little keyboard was surprisingly good for typing with though once you got used to it, and it could run Skype for both voice chat and text.

Asus seems have the best solution. They have even announced a new model to their tiny notebook with 1024x wide screen. Paired with a bluetooth 3g phone (ok, cheating a little), is this the ultimate traveling machine? Seems to tick all the appropriate boxes.

Putting a Value on Community

Posted on April 29, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Web 2.0 | 2 Comments

Two of the challenges people often talk about with “web2.0″*, are

How do they make money
How do you value a company that makes no money

(* much as we all hate that word, it is here and people use it)

These startups are funded by venture capital. Guys who know where and how to invest. Other than IPO and exit plans, do they actually believe there is value there? The VCs can often make their cash back by selling to a bigger concern, but how often is that the startup equivalent of grifters selling bits of the Golden Gate Bridge?

To give one example, did you see the talk of Twitter raising funds? Much as I love Twitter, I wonder if some of the expectations of the service are artificially high.

Michael Arrington asks How Much Is Twitter Worth?

Valuations range from $60 million on the low end to more than $150 million on the high end. There is, clearly, a bit of salivating going on around Twitter.

I have drunk enough of the social media kool aid to appreciate the benefits of an engaged audience combined with owning the platform and plumbing. I get that.

Some estimates put Twitter at around 1 million users. We must be looking at future growth as a means to estimate the company value. While I would be happy to pay, Flickr style, a small amount for guaranteed service and to avoid ads, how many users doing the same would it take to make that kind of valuation?

Could Twitter make money selling API access to services built on top of their infrastructure? How much?

My worry is we are still valuing eyeballs, which harks back to the dotcom bust. In the current climate is banking on advertising revenue a good business plan? How tolerant will Twitter users be of being targeted with even contextual advertising?

The Growing Threat of DDOS as a Weapon

Posted on April 24, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under IT | 2 Comments

The more we build business and economies on top of internet infrastructure, the more we are vulnerable.

I was reading today about yet more DDOS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) on websites. A DDOS is a lethally effective way to take a website unavailable, and often requires expensive and specialist help to solve if the attackers are determined and skilled.

These latest events may be political, may be grass roots or might even be government sponsored. If anyone knows, nobody is telling. Fact is though it would be naive to think only one group, country or movement is looking at this as a useful tactic. You can bet every government has at least investigated it.

The aim of these attacks could be to knock the site out so it is unavailable, degrade the service, so the users go to a competitor, for example, or to hold the owners to ransom. If the attack is politically motivated a satisfactory outcome could be for the site to be unavailable in the attackers home country, either as an outcome of the attack or due to heavy handed remedial measures.

DDOS works by flooding the host computer with requests. This could be as simple as getting a story to the front page of Digg for weaker hosts, or by getting a large group of people to all descend on the site at an appointed time.

Obviously in the recent cases they were more industrial strength, for example in the TechCrunch report about SlideShare

We’ve been told that the attack reached a peak of 2.5GB/sec and consisted entirely of packets sent from China.

That’s a serious attack. This will have required a large network of computers, a great deal of bandwidth capacity, and lots of separate lines. A common approach is to use “zombie” computers, that is computers infected with malware so the remote operator can use the resources to perform the attack while the unwitting owner is fully unaware.

You can read more on the topic and more sophisticated approaches at Wikipedia.

The concern is not so much that this kind of attack happens, but more how easily it can be done, and that, other than some basic protection, there is not a great deal many companies can do about it.

While a good network security plan can fend off lower level attacks, a seriously funded group could do a huge amount of damage to even the best protected business. Beyond that, Governments around the world are putting their tentacles into ISPs under various guises, overtly and covertly.

How difficult would it be for a government or security service to launch an attack if they wanted to? I expect it has already happened more than once.

Could this be the commerce or political weapon of the future?

Is it Content Theft or Free Distribution?

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Creative Commons | 10 Comments

How do you feel when you see your content on an someone else’s site? Anger? Pleased?

A few people have asked my opinion about the service that is basically built around taking bloggers content and republishing it for their users to read and comment on.

Tony says Shyftr Crosses The Line

Anyway, its not the conversations being hosted somewhere else that bothers me, its that there are a new crop of services which would not otherwise exist without republishing someone else’s content without the original author’s explicit permission. Well, lots of people’s content. And you can dress it up and all kinds of clothing and all kinds of nifty wrappers, but ultimately that’s what this is about.

Scoble takes the opposite view

This is a trend that the best bloggers should embrace. Me? I follow wherever the conversation takes me. As someone else wrote: steal my content please.

Shyftr seem to have seen the feedback and modified their service somewhat

we have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader.

The thing is, they will not be the last. We do need to get our terms right though:

Scraping - Scraping (note, not “scrapping”), is taking content that was not published in a feed but by reading the HTML source. Google scrapes in fact, and really they should provide an opt-in rather than an opt-out via robots.txt. We let Google get away with it because they benefit us with traffic, your scraper+adsense site will not get the same treatment.
Aggregating and re-publishing - Aggregators take feeds and publish them in a central location. This might be full articles or just headlines like at alltop. In general, most content creators like the headline type for the traffic they send, and are suspicious of the full content type because they use the content without any traffic benefit to the creator.
Theft - While publishing full articles is often seen as theft, the worst kind, and where most people would agree, is where the content is not only taken, but modified to remove any ownership, attribution or links for the creator.

How you react to the various types of content reuse depends on your approach to blogging and why you are blogging.

If you make money from page views (CPM ads or network bonuses) or if you make money from ad clicks (adsense, PPC), then you are going to be mightily upset that someone is republishing your work, regardless of intentions.

On the other hand, say you write about photography, gadgets or cigar reviews, you could benefit from the links (providing they are left in unmodified), through search engine boost or directly through product affiliate links.

For myself, much like Scoble, I don’t earn from traffic. I don’t really mind people sharing my stuff, providing my content is reproduced as-is because my blogging is not about traffic but about sharing the content and establishing my “brand”. The more people read my stuff and value it the better for me.

Which leads me to use Creative Commons attribution license on my content. I want it to spread, but I don’t want people mucking around with it or using it to pimp adsense clicks so I use Noncommercial-No Derivative.

How do you feel about your content being re-used?

Is Alexa Relevant Now?

Posted on April 17, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

Alexa have announced a shakeup to their traffic measurement service. While they have always claimed to be able to tell you how much traffic a particular site gets, that has never really been true.

Before they relied on data from their toolbar. Sounds great until you realize that hardly anyone actually had the toolbar installed. The only people likely to have it would be people who had it forced on them, or people who wanted to check their own or competitors rankings.

No surprises then that webmaster-centric sites ranked highly.

Now they are going to take in data from “multiple sources”. For anyone who has been using the service for comparative data, you will be disapointed to learn they have dropped their historical toolbar-only data, with the oldest records only 9 months old. Part of the previous appeal was to see your own traffic increase over time, now even that small morsel of utility is gone.

Hopefully the new methodology will allow for greater accuracy, but that would depend on what these sources are. Unless they are hooking into all the popular analytics programs, or have access to ISP data, this might not turn out to be that radical an improvement. Yes, the data has changed, and some are saying looks more even handed, I think the jury will be out for some time.

Nanaimo, the Capital of Google Earth

Posted on April 15, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Google | 5 Comments

Where would you guess would be the most data-rich place on Google Earth?

I expect you would take a stab at Mountain View California, where the headquarters of Google is located? Silicon Valley, Redmond or perhaps New York?

No, it’s a small port town in British Columbia called Nanaimo!

How Google Earth Ate Our Town - TIME

Beating San Francisco in the e-stakes is a big deal for an old coal mining city of only around 78,000 people, nestled about an hour north of Victoria. What Nanaimo lacks for in size, it has tried to make up in sheer volume of raw electronic data.

I love Canada, and often like to do my virtual tourism using Flickr. Nanaimo was one of the many places we had been eying up on the real estate sites like MLS.ca. This stuff just takes our research to a whole new level.

They have added mapping, terrain, points of interest and even every single business. If you are hunting for a starbucks, never fear!

Many key places have virtual tours so as well as flying over and virtually driving the roads, you can get a sense of being there too.

It’s not just tourism this is useful for either

The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city’s RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city’s gardening staff. And the city’s cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow internet users to find out who is buried in each plot

You can get the Nanaimo date here, and get an idea of what it will be like when your town is wired into the nets.

WordPress 2.5 Versus WordPress.com

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Blogging | 5 Comments

With all the buzz around WordPress 2.5 you might think I would have rushed to upgrade. Yes, I am a geek, and yes I also love playing with the latest shiny gadgets and toys, but hold on, there is more to it than simply installing every update that comes along.

The fact is, whenever there is any significant update to blogging software, inevitably something breaks. To get all the gizmos we desire there are often hacks, template tricks and not-so-standard plugins that we like to cruft our blogs up with. Those are always the first to break.

WordPress are doing their best to help. There is a growing list of plugins and their 2.5 compatibility. If you look down you might find there are a good number that still don’t work.

It’s good to know which plugins work and which do not, but it becomes a pain to keep changing, trying, finding alternatives. Many programmers put out one version of a plugin and then find it is too much trouble to support it. Some of my most used features will have to be sacrificed or I will need to fix them up myself, or hire a programmer.

This is where the lure of fully-hosted solutions like WordPress.com become attractive. They keep the software up to date, they manage the hosting. No more worries about Digg front page stories putting your site offline. No more expensive or cheap and unreliable hosting. Security, stability, features and management are all handled on your behalf.

What you sacrifice of course is control and flexibility. You can pay for a domain, and some amount of visual tweakage, but you can’t put any old plugin or widget in there. And there lies the rub. While I do not need the ability to show advertising, and they do allow business blogs, they are a bit funny about pushing the boundaries of commercial use, plus I need my gizmos.

I don’t want to give up my many wonderful WP toys! Please Matt and Co, give us a geeked-up pro version of the hosted WordPress.com service so I can get off this update cycle for good!

Why Forward Junk Chain Letter Emails?

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Sad | 11 Comments

Every week friends and family members send me junk chain letter emails.

Bill Gates will pay you to forward this.

A fairy will grant your wish if you send to 1,000 friends.

Some kitten’s nose will fall off if you don’t.

Why do people forward these things?

These emails are annoying but I know I am more annoying. I put each one through Snopes and reply. Futile, irritating, and ultimately as much a waste of time as the original.

“There is no harm in it” I hear you cry. Well, probably not much harm over and above spreading potentially dubious information. I imagine harvesting those emails (each email tends to have tons of email addresses right there on the “to” line) is a rich source for spammers.

I don’t know if it is my imagination but these emails tend to arrive just before a bump in the number of spams. Coincidence?

That brings me back to the point, other than the “social gaming” aspect (seeing how far your lie can spread), why do people send these things?

I would really like to know the answer. Anyone know?

Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins

Is Web2.0 Culture Risking Democracy?

Imagining the Ultimate Computer for Travellers

Putting a Value on Community

The Growing Threat of DDOS as a Weapon

Is it Content Theft or Free Distribution?

Is Alexa Relevant Now?

Nanaimo, the Capital of Google Earth

WordPress 2.5 Versus WordPress.com

Why Forward Junk Chain Letter Emails?

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