What becomes a conversation most

Lately, I have been noticing a lot more talk about “enabling conversations” with the use of various communications tools such as blogs, podcasts and the like. Let me take a moment to dissect this trendlet and give you my thoughts.  Back in the day, we used the phone to have conversations when we weren’t physically in the same place. Few of us have that luxury anymore. So what would you consider second best – maybe an email exchange? But we all get too many emails, and besides, it might go into my spam bucket for some reason, so you can’t be sure that I will get your message. This is especially true when I send out my Web Informant, not that there is anything wrong with sending it out. It is just that a lot of newsletters get caught by the filters and trashed, so you can never be sure that someone actually got them.  Another issue with newsletters is that they are one way. Sure a lot of readers will respond and I enjoy your responses, but then the others don’t get to read these responses. I can post these to another newsletter (and sometimes I have in the past), but that still is a cumbersome process and far from the natural conversation of a phone call.  Another choice is Instant Messaging. I have taken to using IM for those critical conversations where I need to locate a source or a PR person Right Now, and that works relatively well — for those people that I have their IM address, and are available during the day, or at least deem to say to me that they are available.  

Perhaps better than IM is the blog. Our readers can post at will, or at least, when we approve the postings to weed out comment spam. But not every reader is going to take the time to read our blogs every day/week/month. That is where RSS was invented, to alert people when new comments or content arrives. But many PR people still don’t know what RSS is or how to use it. Shameless plug: I am giving a talk next week in Vegas on this very subject at the New Communications Forum, you can find the information on the conference here:.

 Then how about podcasts? Some podcasts are recordings of actual conversations between two or more people — and some of the best ones like Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcasts are just that, him and Leo Laporte just talking for 45 minutes or so. Is this “better” than reading comments in a blog? It could be — and in the particular case of Gibson, you can learn a lot about security tech in those 45 minutes, and much better use of your time (especially if you listen while driving or flying) than reading a transcript or an article.  And finally we have video blogs, where you would think this would be the height of conversation since we are talking to a camera, not just recording audio. But to make an engaging video isn’t as easy as it seems, and I’d rather watch those pirated Colbert/Stewart clips than some of the things that I have seen posted on You Tube. Plus, finding the more relevant ones isn’t easy either.  So many of us have gone full circle on this conversation thing and are back to just calling people on the phone — perhaps first after IMing them to make sure that they are actually available. Gee, isn’t this tech stuff wonderful?  

How to link to NY Times articles

One of the most annoying things about the NY Times Web site is that most of its content becomes gated after a few weeks of being out in the open, so that URLs that you post on your site become stale and unworkable. Sure, you can register for free, but Adam Engst has come up with a better way, by appending a short bit at the end of the URL can get around the gate. I am sure that this is only a temporary fix, but for now, check out his solution here on his TIDBits site.

Lessons learned from enterprise wikis

In preparation for a speech that I am giving next month at the New Communications Forum conference  in Las Vegas about how Web 2.0 works for public relations, I came across what Razorfish is doing. The company, which now reaches across 16 offices and more than 1,000 staffers, is an interactive advertising and digital marketing agency that has grown through acquisitions since the early days before we even knew enough about Web 1.0.

Razorfish has developed their own enterprise wiki that combines things from a corporate blog, mailing lists, and other collaborative technologies. I had a chat with Ray Velez, who works in the Razorfish New York office. Ray gave me a brief tour and spoke about some of their lessons learned. The wiki is useful for spreading their knowledge across their wide network, and keeping people up-to-date on best practices, or even, previous work that they have done for their clients. For example, Ray mentioned a weather feed that one client wanted to incorporate into their Web site. Using the wiki, a staffer was able to track down three previous feed projects that had been developed in the past and present their client with this work in a matter of a few minutes. Without the wiki, it would have taken numerous phone calls and emails to track this information down within the corporation, or the staffer might have had to build it from scratch without the benefit of this knowledge.

You can get a taste for what they have developed by reading their case study published last year by Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

Based on my conversation with Ray, here are some of the lessons that they have learned with living with this project.

Lesson #1: Open source is great, but you can’t just slap the code in your organization without some modifications. Razorfish has one full-time intern and two part-time developers that maintain their code. They make use of MediaWiki (the open source code that powers Wikipedia) as well as WordPress’s blog software, among other things that they have developed themselves. Ray told me that the integration process is “constant” and taken them over 18 months to get to where they are today. While open source gave them a leg up on development, there is always more to be done.

We have grown up understanding that because the Web makes it really easy to fix little things, you end up making lots of small, incremental changes to your site. With open source projects, you want to do the same thing and make small tweaks, so they become living entities.

Lesson #2: You can only be so open — authentication matters. Razorfish put in place some code that pulls information from their Active Directory servers. This enables single sign-on and also makes sure that their users could be held accountable and identifiable. Obviously, this is part of their corporate practices, but it wasn’t easy. The MediaWiki code didn’t have any simple mechanisms for AD integration, and even had a commented out a non-working section of code. Ray plans on giving back the fruits of their efforts at some point in the near future, in the grand spirit of the open source tradition.

Lesson #3: Security matters a lot. Razorfish’s wiki is behind its corporate firewall and just for employee-to-employee communications. In the olden days of the Web, say 1997, we would have called this an intranet. This might be at cross purposes with the idea of open collaboration, and there are suitable warnings placed around the site to remind users not to post highly confidential information that shouldn’t be shared across the corporation. Still, being open source doesn’t mean being lax about security.

Lesson #4: Search matters, too. Part of the custom code they wrote was to enable search across all wiki and blog content, to make it easier for employees to identify and find something of interest. Like any Web site, you can never spend too much time investing in a better search routine.

Razorfish has developed a very interesting application, to be sure. If you have a similar project you would like to tell me about, drop me a line.

Comparing the leading server virtualization products

Server virtualization has become a great tool for the data center, helped by the leading virtual server software vendors literally giving away their product. And as more IT shops are consolidating their servers using virtual machines (VMs), they are finding an active marketplace and plenty of choices for how to implement the concept.

In this story for Datamation, I compare VMware with Microsoft and Xensource’s offerings.

Encrypting your hard drive

Data security has been in the news a lot lately, as a result of some high-profile corporate losses and thefts of laptops. As more corporate users rely on laptops for their main computer, the chances are higher that these laptops will be lost, stolen, or damaged as they are moved about. And this means that the potential for data loss or abuse is high and continues to be higher.

In this story, called How To Protect Your Precious PC Data: From Physical Security To Encryption for Techweb/Information Week.com, I talk about a wide array of encryption and security tools that can mitigate this potential disaster, include some inexpensive ways that corporate IT managers can protect themselves.

Online video still has issues

Inspired with the launch of Bud.tv, I took a quick tour of what is available in online video. And the results are a frustrating mixed bag to say the least. It is certainly more complicated than the video programming that I can get from my DirecTV dish. How any normal person is expected to make this technology work is beyond me. After looking at a couple of video sites, I have come up with eight different issues:

First off, my expectation is to be as close to the YouTube user experience as possible: you search for the video content on the home page, click on what you want, and the video starts playing inside the existing browser frame. I don’t want to download any special media player, thank you very much – I already have a truckload of them running around my hard disk. I don’t want to hunt around looking for the video either – it should be easy to find whatever it is that I want to watch.

Second, it should just work with my configuration. I don’t want any secondary window to pop-up, because I may have pop-ups blocked, and don’t feel like letting your video site into my whitelist. I don’t want to make any other changes to my browser configuration to allow your video to start up, because that might break something else or open me up to other exploits.

Third, I want this to work in just about any browser and OS that I happen to use, but certainly more than the Windows/IE combination (and while we are checking, let’s make sure that IE 7 doesn’t break when I use it to browse your site too). A lot of us use multiple browsers on multiple platforms, and we don’t want to have to boot up a particular PC just to watch something. This of course goes against just about everything that Microsoft and Apple are doing.

Fourth, I want an easy and simple way to “email this video to a friend.” Part of the fun of watching videos online is sharing them with 100 of your closest pals. Having said that, I want some element of trust that you as the site owner won’t take all those emails and sell them to some spammer in Moldova.

Fifth, I don’t want to go to extreme measures to deal with your registration system just to get your video. Life is too short, I already have far too many passwords to deal with, and I can go elsewhere to get video content anyway, so why mess with trying to pass through whatever gate you place in my way?

Sixth, I don’t care whether or not the content is copyrighted. I know, this is heresy for someone who makes one’s living creating content, but I think a short three-minute clip comes under fair use. Get over it, you mainstream media moguls, and be happy that someone cares enough to record and post a clip that promotes your show. Now, certainly there are different issues involved when you download an entire two-hour feature film, but I am talking about consuming short pieces of content here.

Seventh, if you are going to stream, then do so with the right amount of caching so the audio doesn’t cut out and the picture doesn’t jerk around. And if you are going to have me download something, the download shouldn’t take longer than watching the actual clip. But I would prefer streaming, just because I don’t want to clutter up my hard disk with videos that I won’t watch more than once.

Finally, I want more than a postage-stamp sized window to watch. I don’t have to have full screen, DVD-quality, but it sure would be nice to at least see something that comes close to filling my screen. Right now that is more of a bandwidth issue, and most sites – including YouTube – don’t display a big enough image.

Taking all these issues together makes for a tall order for most Web video today. YouTube just about satisfies all criteria, more or less, which is why the site has gathered such a following and why it has gotten plenty of GoogleBucks. Let’s look at a few others and see where they are lacking.

Netflix announced they will start streaming videos to their customers soon, and I have yet to see it firsthand. But as a very satisfied customer, I wish them well. They have the best video search in the business, and they have the right idea for the rest of the user experience. I hope they live up to the hype.

Bud.tv, the new venture from our hometown industry here in St. Louis, uses a special player in a pop-up that they got from Akamai/Nine Systems. (One demerit for that.) It has quite the registration system that actually checks my birth date against a national database (no more using Jan 1 as my default entry, which is something I recommend to confound ID theft). They do this to make sure that you are over 21, but I didn’t see any content that I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with my teenaged daughter on the site. There are already people complaining of problems, and I would predict that they will scrap this system before long.

Bud.tv also falls down in search – you scroll through a horizontal channel bar that now is fairly short but once the site gets going won’t be very workable. I don’t imagine that many users will tolerate this method for very long, and either not return or just go back to one or two channels that resonate with them (the short films from TriggerStreet.com were big hits for me). They stream all their videos, and the sound cut out several times on my DSL connection. Given that the site just launched this week, I can’t say whether I will be a frequent visitor.

An example of a video site that I won’t be returning to is CinemaNow. They require IE, download their own player, and generally make it painful for me.

One video series that I have been really enjoying is Amanda Congdon, on ABCnews.com. I have been watching her in iTunes, because it was too hard to find the content using a Web bookmark. So right away I am breaking a few of my the rules, but I consider my iTunes a pre-existing software condition. The weekly videos are about five minutes, and Congdon is cute, funny, and informative all rolled up in one.  The downloads happen in the background (one of the advantages of having iTunes as your player) and the quality is first-rate, what you would expect from a TV network.

So as you can see we have a ways to go before online video can be as easily as punching a couple of buttons on a remote and watching ordinary TV. Well, maybe we are about to cross over — getting my DirecTV remote to turn on and off all of my living room entertainment devices isn’t easy, and I still don’t have it all working the way my wife wants. Maybe those browser video plug-ins aren’t all that bad after all.

Think about this the next time you do any online banking

This just in, and very scary for those of us that do online banking. A Harvard/MIT study by Stuart Schechter and Rachna Dhamija asked 67 customers of a single bank to conduct common online banking tasks. As they logged in, the researchers presented them with increasingly conspicuous visual clues that indicated a site-forgery attack. They were interested in finding out:

• Will customers of an online bank (in this case, Bank of America) enter their passwords even if their browsers’ HTTPS indicators are missing?
• Will customers of an online bank enter their passwords even if their site-authentication images (using RSA’s PassMark SiteKeys) are missing?
• Will customers of an online bank enter their passwords even if they are presented with an IE7 warning page?

The depressing answers are yes, yes, and yes. You can download a preprint of the study, which will appear in an IEEE proceedings later this year here.

And people think the tech trade press gets all the goodies

When I tell people that I get to try out lots of new techie toys for a living, most are envious and think that I have it made, with the latest gadget showing up on my doorstep to play with. Well, this article by Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post gave me pause. She highlights the recent Boston city madness related to a new cartoon show’s promo materials, and recaps the stuff that TV press reviewers have to deal with. Redrum! Redrum! Yikes.

Mio 610 Portable Navigation device

When I first got my Mio H610, I was intrigued. Here was one of those “kitchen sink” devices that seemed to do a solid job in serving many needs. It is a portable GPS receiver, along with an MP3/video player and a photo viewer, and includes some other utilities. It comes in a package slightly bigger than one of the more modern Palms, and is even designed to look very similar to them.

You can read more of my review for the new GearDigest, one of the Tom’sHardware-related family of Web sites.

Getting the most out of RSS

Really Simple Syndication is everywhere. RSS has been incorporated into online news portals and the latest version of Internet Explorer. It’s how the blogosphere has grown so quickly, and lies at the core of popular new media sites like MySpace and YouTube. Yet this technology still seems foreign to many media professionals. I will be doing a session at the New Communications Forum on March 8th in Vegas. The session is geared towards journalists and PR professionals, and I will cover such topics as:

• Understand the media’s use of RSS
• Use RSS feeds to provide real value to you and your audience
• Set up an RSS newsreader and customize feeds to track news on your industry, clients and competitors
• Use RSS to become a better PR resource to media