Dealing with an unreliable Internet

The recent unfortunate doings in Libya have made an example of how the Internet works around problem areas. And it reminded me that if you are going to put your content in the hands of a dictator, it is nice to know whom you are dealing with.

Let me explain. Many of us, including myself, use the URL shortening service Bit.ly, for promoting our content on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places. Aside from conserving on character counts, it has a nice dashboard that shows you how many people open that link and other tracking data.

But the Bit.ly domain uses the Libyan country code .LY. So if some crazies decide to remove Libya from the Internet, does that mean that all your shortened links will die? Not necessarily.

To understand the reason why you need to know more about the Internet domain name system and how it is structured. While I don’t want to get into a tutorial here, an easy way to figure out where Libyan domains are cared for is to look here.

This is the international registry by IANA that keeps track of these sorts of things. Who made them in charge? (Jon Postel originally but getting into that is another story.) You can see by looking at this page that there are five different “name servers” where Libyan domains are kept. This doesn’t mean that these five places host any content – in fact, I am sure that they host no Libyan content whatsoever. It just means that when you type in a .LY URL, these five places keep the master directory of where those domains actually live.

If you want to see the actual physical locations where these directory servers are connected to the Internet, bring up the following site and cut and paste the IP addresses.

You’ll see that there are two servers in Oregon of all places, and another one in Holland. This means that if you want to have your content elsewhere – outside of the country that the two-letter code domain indicates such as Bit.ly — chances are good that you will still get connectivity.

Now try to track down the servers for Bahrain (country code BH) and you will see all four of them are on the same subnet 193.188.97.x that is inside the country and controlled by the national telecom authority. That means if you have a .BH site, you might have more trouble getting connected if the country pulled the plug.

I am sure there is a story why the University of Oregon is a name server for Libya (and I am sure that someone seeing this will post a reason why), this is just one of many such instances where seemingly random places and people house servers in the greater good of the overall Internet. Poking around the IANA name directory I found psg.com as the name server for a few country domains.

What this little exercise brings up is how dependent we are on the kindness of others when it comes to the Internet. In the case of using Bit.ly, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or even Twitter to promote our content or provide links to our own servers, we think we know whom we are dealing with. But we still trust these businesses to act responsively and stay in business. Look at how many times Twitter’s Fail Whale appears, and there have been plenty of outages with other sites.

I admit that I haven’t given this a lot of thought. For the past several years, I have owned the domain Webinformant.tv to host my screencast video reviews. Until this week, I never even looked at where the Tuvalu country code .TV domain names were being served – turns out I don’t have to worry, Verisign  has it under control from several locations around the world. And while I think they aren’t plotting to takeover the .TV namespace, or the many other domain names that they provide service from, it is an interesting piece of information to know.

Many of the Internet Irregulars like psg.com operate outside of any real recognition for their efforts – in some cases it is just a couple of guys that have been involved early on in the Internet infrastructure and just through inertia still are involved.

I remember many years when I got to actually visit the location for one of the lettered root domain servers in Silicon Valley. My friend had to replace one of his servers that was co-located there – this was back before the concept even was given a name. It was in some nondescript warehouse and the level of security wasn’t even near Defcon status. Now these servers have multiple backups and locations, and indeed most of them are located outside of the US to make the Internet naming system more resilient.

So, think about this the next time you are tempted to purchase an oddball domain name, or rely on a service to link to your content. And hopefully we’ll see some relief and a better situation to what is happening in Libya too.

CMO.com: Dell Lends its Ear to Social Media

Rule #1 for any social media initiative is: Be a good listener. These days, probably no one is listening as intently as Dell. The computer giant has been slowly improving its listening abilities, and late last year formally opened its Social Media Listening Command Center at Dell headquarters outside of Austin, Texas.

Read more: http://www.cmo.com/social-media/listen-dell-lends-its-ear-social-media#ixzz1EnobMEaa

You can read the full story over on CMO.com here.

What becomes a blog legend most?

The days of blogs are either numbered (according to the NY Times) or becoming more important (according to Steve Rubel). Gen X is either all on Twitter or Facebook (according to just about everyone) or moving beyond them using their cell phones (ditto). Never in the short history of the Web have so many people interpreted data so widely with so many contradictory conclusions.

So when it comes time to divvy up your communications budget and pick your corporate strategy, do you:

1. Rebuild your Web site, adding blogging-like features (threads, comments, trackbacks, tags)?
2. Train a bunch of people how to use Twitter and start initiating and following conversations?
3. Split your efforts between Facebook and LinkedIn to attract and keep your talented social networkers?
4. Use email and instant messaging for customer outreach?

The correct answer is all of the above, it depends, or go back to doing trade shows and taking out print ads in the IT pubs. What, there aren’t any print IT pubs anymore? Oops, scratch that last one. (Just kidding, somewhat.)

Still, it is getting harder to figure out what constitutes a great blog. My favorite Rubel bon mot (he now works for Edelman Digital): Think of your web site (including your blog) as your homeland, and your presence on social media services as embassies. You need both to build and sustain relationships.

Here is one example: I think most of us will recognize the name Andrew Sullivan as one of the A-list political bloggers (he currently works at the Atlantic). Yet he doesn’t take comments on his Daily Dish blog, and he doesn’t Tweet. You can get to him via old-fashioned email quite easily, though. Is this an outlier or an omen of the future?

Then there are those Twitter darlings who have gotten book and TV deals as a result of their Tweets who don’t have much in the way of blogs, at least not initially. Outlier or omen?

There are companies that are building Facebook landing pages, such as Delta, to replace or augment their Web reservations site. You can understand that Delta wants those fliers who live in Facebook to stay there when the time comes to book flights. But is it outlier or omen of what other businesses are doing?

In my last post/email blast, I asked you to send me your comments. I got them via Twitter, Facebook, email, and as blog comments. All were solid suggestions, although the emails started almost immediately after I sent out my request. Does that mean that you, my dear readers, are more email-centric, older, or wiser? (I would like to think at least the last one.) Who knows?

And that is exactly my point. With apologies to Blackglama, what becomes a blog legend most is up for grabs. Blogs should have comments and a rich interplay of ideas and tons of page views, but they don’t have to: they can be authoritative go-to sources of content in a particular niche. And yes, a healthy company does need a balanced diet of social media efforts, just like you need for your own nutrition and health.

How to suck at social media

I have a confession to make: I suck at social media. Yes, your humble servant (maybe that is one reason why) who advises thousands of IT workers how to implement the fanciest technologies can’t do squat when it comes to FaceTwitLinkbooking. Or whatever.

Yes, I have a blog, and a Twitter account, and do all sorts of stuff on LinkedIn and Facebook. And I have even learned how to tie them together, so one blog post proliferates the Twitterverse et naseum. But I fail when it comes to something that is so basic, so un-tech, so easy, that is almost embarrassing.

I am not a good listener.

I realized this the other day when I was interviewing one of Dell’s big honchos in social media, who was talking about how he (and by extension, the greater Dell) has become better at listening. To social media. And interacting with its customers.

By and large, I don’t interact with my readers. Yes, I get some emails, Tweets, comments on my blogs and Facebook and other messages. Sometimes I respond, if they ask me a direct question that has a reasonable answer. (Unreasonable question: I am doing a report for my class on firewalls, can you tell me how to evaluate their features? Yup, I sure can: go find some other sap.)

But most of the time, I don’t really listen. Sure, I do a lot of listening when I am on the phone with a source, typing madly as I try to record for posterity their words of wisdom for all ITkind. But that is a very selective form of listening, reserved for when I am doing the research phase of whatever it is that I am assigned to write that particular day or week.

I even subscribe to a few different email listservs, that traditional form of group grope before we got that kid from Harvard unbelievably rich (and on stock options that he can’t even sell for real hard cash money either). But do I post and engage the audiences there? Nope: most of the time, I just lurk and read whatever is going down on the ‘boards (dating myself here, I know).

Sure, I tune in to the Twitstream and check my Facebook wall to see what is happening. And sometimes I even scroll down a few screens to see what my peeps are up to. But that isn’t what this social media thing is all about.

At a lecture today by another professional speaker, he spoke about how he uses Facebook for positioning – meaning he lets his followers/friends know what he is working on. I usually don’t do that – if you look at my posts, they are links to when the articles and other good stuff that I have produced is actually in a finished state. By then, the listening room has moved on to something else.

So my moral for today is this: spend some time listening to your clients, customers, partners, colleagues.

Okay, time to practice (a little) of what I am preaching. What do you want me to write about next week? I am all ears.

The hopeful end of Captcha

One of the more annoying things about using the Web is those little confirmation boxes called Captchas that you have to type in some words to prove that you are a carbon life form and not some computer program scanning a site. I don’t know about you, but I have to try two or three different code words before I can complete whatever task it was at the time. I used to think it was just old age, bad eyesight or memory, or fumble fingers but now I realize that it is a more systemic issue.

And the problem isn’t just folks like me that can’t figure out the message in the box: hackers have developed code to do so or companies pay actual people to defeat them for their evil marketing purposes. This makes for another arms race as the Captcha people make even more difficult to read codes for us to interpret. This isn’t what we had in mind when we started using the Web back in the early days.

Of course, there are companies that are innovating in this space, trying to make a better mousetrap, or bot-trap. They are NuCaptcha.com and SolveMedia.com. Both have developed new algorithms that make it easier for people to use but not for machines or gangs of low-paid keyboarders. They are now being used on a number of Web sites, such as Microsoft and Toyota and so forth.

How do they work? You have to watch a short video where a marketing message – like “oh what a feeling” is presented on the final frame. Then you are asked to type this message into the box to confirm that you are you. By putting the information inside the video, you make it more odious for the human keyboard gangs to enter the information, because they have to wait for the magic letters. It is also more difficult to program any machine recognition too.

You can see a simple example here.

Personally, as long as they don’t blast some audio clip along with the video, I am ok with this approach. And perhaps there will be other companies that will have other innovations in this area.

ITworld: TechSoup Global connects non-profits with critical technology

Supporting remote users is never easy, but when you have a population spread across more than 30 countries and in some very out-of-the-way places, it can become a nightmare. Luckily, this isn’t the case thanks to some careful planning by the back office provider for numerous non-profits called TechSoup Global.

You can read the entire case study, along with links to some of the organizations they have helped over the years, on ITworld here.

Super Bowl XLV edition

I have two efforts surrounding the Super Bowl that I am particularly proud of that were posted this week. Not being anything of a sports fan, it is quite ironic.

Here is a report published by MarkMonitor on the fraud and abuse around sports branded apparel. It is an area rife with counterfeit merchandise, as you will see from my BrandJacking report.  (need to register)

And an article that I wrote for ITworld includes video shot on media day prior to the Super Bowl at the Cowboy’s stadium. This is my second visit to this sports palace (my first can be found here when it was still under construction). For IT folks, there is a lot going on there that is worth a look.