Putting a Value on Community

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

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?

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?

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

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

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?

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?

A.Viary First Impressions Review

I have been playing with A.Viary image editor since I got my invitation to take part in the test version. Right up front I have to say I am super impressed with it.

This tool is an online image editor. The idea is not new, we have seen tools before, but unlike those simple “crop and rotate” jobbies we have seen before, this bad boy is comparable to my much used and bulky desktop tool of choice, Photoshop Elements.

In fact, it can do some stuff that software can’t.

Testament to how much I need to do image editing work, despite not being an artist or digital imaging pro, I have a copy of Photoshop Elements for both my Mac and PC. This tool has the potential to make those packages largely redundant. Consider how many people in the world need these tools but not enough to buy a full copy?

A.Viary can do all that I use Elements for but in my web browser, wherever I am in the world. Hook it up to Flickr (there is seems to be an option to do this in future, although the dialog is empty) and my imaging needs will be pretty much sorted.

I look forward to seeing how the tool progresses as they fix bugs and flesh out features. Right now there are some rough edges but I am sure this is going to be fantastic when complete.

Take a look at a feature comparison of online editors at their blog here.

7 Free Software Tools That Save You Time With SEO

Try as you might to avoid it, SEO is an important part of any online businesses marketing arsenal. Think of it this way, if you had a high street store you would want to place it where there was maximum passing trade, right? The same goes online, you want your website to be seen, and that means playing the Search Engine game.

How can we productively keep our SEO hand in, and monitor progress, without it taking over all our time? Enter our friends automation and software tools!

I have only recently started seriously getting back into the search area so let me know of your favorite tools in the comments, I am eager to hear what you recommend! I’m focusing here on online or cross-platform tools seeing as I am a mac user and most desktop tools seem PC based

On with the tools …

Google Webmaster Central - If you are looking at improving your search engine performance you might as well go to the source!

Get diagnostic information to see if you are causing spiders crawling problems, and see where you rank and for what.
Website Grader - Get your site analyzed and see where you are going wrong and what you are doing right.
WordTracker - Find the keywords people are using in your niche.
103Bees - Find the phrases people are finding you with. Great for those long tail searches.
SEO for Firefox - See detailed stats for any page, such as how many links it has pointed to it, all the way through to how old the site is. In fact, check out the rest of the tools at Aaron’s site while you are at it!
Sheer SEO tool - Funny name but very useful. See your ranking progress over time
Link Diagnosis - Find who is linking to your competitors.