October 2011 archive

Oct 25

Sorry, Klout, But I Don’t Care At All About Your "Game"!

In one image, this is perhaps what annoys me most about Klout's Klout Score metric:

Klout

Yes, even more than the fact that Beyonce can have a Klout Score of 50 without ever having tweeted (or even knowing if that Twitter account is, in fact, actually Beyonce's). Even more than that, this bothers me:

Your Klout Score fell -1 points in the past day. Share more content and engage with your network to increase your score!

Not that my score fell. As you might have guessed, I really don't care about what my score is.

What bothers me is the implication by the second sentence that you should care about your score and that you should take actions to increase your score.

Now... DUH!... I do understand why Klout does this. They of course want you to care about your score so that you can nurture it and further buy into all their programs so that they can someday attain their motto of being "the standard of influence".

I get that.

But it doesn't mean I have to like the attempts at psychological manipulation.

What annoys me is that this attitude feeds right into those people who want to "game the system"... to figure out ways to influence the influence measurement so that they can rise higher.

It's a game to some people.

And that's fine.

Farmville is a game, too... and some people enjoy playing that.

The issue is that those of us out here in the PR/marketing space would like influence measurement metrics that we could use ... and that we can grow to trust as having some value. (In the sense of being part of the equation of assessing someone's influence online.)

But it's annoying when the company behind the metric tries to get people to play that game... to try to get them to take actions to increase their score. If history has shown us anything, it is that some people out there will ALWAYS try to game the system... it's just part of human nature.

But does the company behind the metric need to encourage that behavior?

Why not just truly rate people based on the content they produce and the interaction they have with other people online?

This is what annoys me most about Klout. Influence measurement shouldn't be treated as a game.

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Oct 24

5 Years of Using Twitter – Some Thoughts on That Anniversary…

Twitter

It was five years ago today that I started using Twitter as what would come to be known as "@danyork". October 24, 2006. I remember the date purely because "10/24" in the US way of writing dates is an über-geeky number (1 Kilobyte or 210). Yes, I remember things like this.

My recollection is that Chris Brogan sent out invites to a whole bunch of us bright-shiny-object-chasers and we all joined this new service called Twitter. This was before Chris became the rock star that he is today[1] and in a much simpler time when all of us who were exploring this new world of "social media" were reading each other's blogs, listening to each other's podcasts, commenting on each other's content and generally interacting in a community of people seeking to understand where we could take all these technologies and tools. Anyway, Chris invited a bunch of us... my Mac Twitter client tells me Chris was Twitter user #10,202, I was #10,312, Doug Haslam was #10,396 and Jim Long (newmediajim) was #10,496. (Just some of the names I remember from that time.) It was a playground where all of us were trying to figure it all out.

The explosion was to come shortly thereafter.

After all these years, though, I still stand by what I wrote in some posts way back in 2007 and 2008:

A friend asked me on Twitter today: "Is Twitter really worth it, or a distraction?"

I still say that I find value in Twitter pretty much every day.

It has become part and parcel of my daily routine and how I interact with people on the Internet. It has become how I distribute info about content I write. It's how I learn of new things to pay attention to.

I still follow my general policy I laid out back in 2008 about whether or not I follow someone... and I'm still finding new and interesting people that I follow pretty regularly.

I do not though read the main feed very diligently... I may dip in from time to time... but most of my focused reading comes from various searches that I run on keywords of interest. I also use FlipBoard now and then on my iPad to browse when I just want to see what's going on.

It's been fascinating as the boundaries of our lives continue to blur to see who we use Twitter and all of these tools.

We're all collectively engaged in a grand experiment in openness. And brevity. What becomes of it none of us know.

All I can say is that I'm very much looking forward to seeing where Twitter and all of these services go over the next five years!

P.S. And yes, Twitter remains my daily practice with "brevity". Certainly a challenge for a writer like me ;-)

[1] And I mean this in a good way. Chris is a great guy and I'm glad we got to become friends over the years. His path has taken him to some pretty great heights and it's been great to see!

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Oct 24

150 Years Ago Today, the USA Got Wired!

A great article in the San Francisco Examiner today about the completion, 150 years ago today, of the transcontinental telegraph here in the United States:
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA

I think "a primitive Internet" might be a bit of a stretch... but then again I'm one of those network people who think of the "Internet" as a "network of networks"... and this first interconnection was really just creating that initial network!

Nuances aside, it's an enjoyable article to read...

Telegraph

I found this an interesting commentary on the disruption of the communication channels that came before:

Indeed, the Pony Express, which boasted it could deliver a letter from Sacramento to St. Joseph, Mo., in the unheard of time of 10 days when it began operations on April 3, 1860, shut down 19 months later — on the same day the transcontinental telegraph went live.

Though dramatic, that was a short-term effect. "But the longer-term effect was we connected the nation in real time. ...," says Fischer. "For the first time, businesses could do business nationally. The government could communicate nationally in almost real time."

Well worth a read to understand the challenges that went into the first physical infrastructure for what would become "telecommunications".

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Oct 24

The Incredibly Tedious Monotony of Chemotherapy

Cladribine (2-CdA). This poison is going to help me

Today is my wife's second (of four) chemotherapy appointments. She is sitting right now at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at the Cheshire Medical Center here in Keene, NH, with an IV of toxic drugs flowing in to her.

Many friends have contacted us/her wishing her all the best today... hoping it all goes well... relaying that they are thinking/hoping/praying all the best for her.

All of which is VERY much appreciated.

The truth, though, is that today is really not bad.

Today is really just incredibly... well... monotonous.

Boring. Tedious. Whatever word you want to pick.

This has been a fascinating revelation to me who knew nothing about chemotherapy before this all began.

Here is the snapshot of our day...

We arrived at the hospital at 9:30am. A little before 10am we were brought back into the chemo treatment area were she sat down in a comfortable recliner-type chair. A nurse drew some blood samples that were sent off to the lab and then proceeded to get some vital signs and other normal tests... and then we waited for the lab work to come back.

Once the lab results came back fine, they set up the IV with some anti-nausea medicine, some saline, etc, etc, and give that to my wife for a while. There was some other medication my wife had to take an hour before the actual chemotherapy chemicals began, so she had to take that and wait.

Sometime after noon, they administered the first of the two chemicals that make up my wife's "cocktail". It ran for over an hour dripping into her bloodstream through the IV line.

After that was all finished, they hooked up the second of the two chemicals... and that will run for 45 minutes. After that she may be done... I don't quite honestly remember if they did something else. She'll probably be ready to go home somewhere around 2:30 or 3pm.

But this is what "a day of chemotherapy" is like.

Sitting. Waiting. Sitting. Waiting. Sitting. Waiting.

For hours.

They have individual TVs there, of course. And she and I talk now and then. The anti-nausea medication makes her kind of tired, and so many of the patients, her included, take a nap for a bit... or just don't feel overly talkative. Friends have stopped by for a visit, which is a nice distraction. You can get (or bring in) food and drinks. A volunteer came by offering Reiki massage. They have free WiFi so you can use the Internet with your computer (which is what usually I do... sitting there doing work while my wife rests).

But overall it's just a long tedious day of sitting and waiting.

If her experience this time is like the last time - and like what we understand from others in the process - this afternoon/evening she may be a bit tired from the drugs but overall okay. Tomorrow she will probably be fine. Wednesday morning she may be fine.

And then sometime on Wednesday the hell will start.

The chemicals will be doing their deed of killing cells and the body will be reacting. And then will come the pain, the sickness, the fatigue...

... which will pretty much continue straight through the weekend and on into next week...

We're hopeful with some new medication that this time around it won't be quite so severe, but time will tell.

Today, though, is all about the monotony of the injection of the drugs.

Sitting. Waiting.

Sitting. Waiting.

Image credit: drhenkenstein on Flickr

Oct 24

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

huh
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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Oct 21

Roger Ebert’s Scary Examples of Writing From Current Journalism Students

Um, this is SCARY... (the writing, not the politicians, although admittedly I find some of their ideas scary, too...)

Futurejournos

Can we please have some grammar? ... and maybe some coherent sentences? Please?

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Oct 20

My Rant: Who Are We Building RTCWEB/WebRTC For? Telephony Developers or Web Developers?

IetflogoYesterday morning I did something I haven't done in eons. Many years, probably. (I can't remember.) I fired off a "rant" on an IETF mailing list.

I've been a huge proponent of the "RTCWEB/WebRTC" work going on in the "RTCWEB" Working of the IETF and the "WebRTC" of the W3C. I've mentioned it in many of my presentations. I've advocated for people to join the mailing lists. I've written about it a good bit on Voxeo's standards blog when I was at Voxeo.

We have an opportunity to make it easy for web developers to add "real-time communications" via voice, video, IM, etc., to web applications. We can make that work from directly within the browser.

Think of it... HTML5 with the ability to quickly add voice, video, chat... and without the need for a browser plugin or extension in Flash, Java, etc. (the limitation of all of today's proprietary options).

It's the opportunity to move real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web.

Awesome potential!

The work has been moving along quite rapidly in both the IETF and the W3C. Extremely active (high-volume!) mailing lists. Many Internet-Draft documents being created. Regular conference calls, interim meetings, face-to-face meetings. Some truly brilliant - and passionate - people involved. (Read the RTCWEB overview Internet-Draft for more background.)

But I still can't escape the feeling that the direction isn't quite right... as a friend said to me:

my feeling is that this is being appoached as SIP 5.6.2 - a minor tweak on an established standard - not WebRTC 0.9 - a new dawn in a new world.

I haven't honestly had the time to read all the messages with the crazy amount of traffic (which is good - shows people are passionate about the topic!), but I've felt increasingly frustrated with reading the messages that I have read that we're collectively in the midst of developing something that few developers will actually use.

So I ranted. Will it do any good? Maybe. Maybe not.

What the rant really needs is to be backed up by people who have the time to join in the process and contribute suggestions for how a RTC API that would appeal to "web developers" would look like.

Care to help out? The mailing list is open to anyone to join.

Anyway here's the rant... (and yes, for the truly pedantic, I am very aware that I ended with a </rant> but did not start with a <rant>)...

Folks,

I need to rant. I've been lurking on this list from the beginning but with a new job I haven't been able to really keep up with the volume of messages... and every time I get ready to reply I find that others like Hadriel, Tim, Neil, Tolga or others have made the points I was going to make...

But I find myself increasingly frustrated with the ongoing discussions and want to ask a fundamental question:

- WHO ARE WE BUILDING RTCWEB/WEBRTC FOR?

Is it for:

1. Telephony developers who are tired of writing code in traditional languages and want to do things in new web ways;

2. Web developers who want to add real-time comms (as in voice, video and chat) to their existing or new web applications;

3. Both 1 and 2.

If the answer is #1, then I think everything is going along just wonderfully. We can go ahead and use the SIP/SDP/etc. stuff that we all in the RAI area are all used to and understand just fine. Heck, let's just all end the discussions about a signalling protocol and agree on SIP... get the browser vendors to agree on baking a SIP UA into their browsers... and call it a day and go have a beer. Simple. Easy. Done.

And the only people who will ever use it will be people who work for RTC/UC/VoIP vendors and random other programmers who actually care about telephony, etc.

But that's okay, because the people who do use it (and their employers) will be really happy and life will be good.

If the answer is #2, then I think we need to step back and ask -

HOW DO "WEB DEVELOPERS" REALLY WANT TO WORK?

Here's the thing... in my experience...

99% OF WEB DEVELOPERS DON'T GIVE A ______ ABOUT TELEPHONY!

Never have. Never will. (In fact, I may be understating that. It may actually be 99.99999%.)

If they are with startups, they want to build nice bright shiny objects that people will chase and use. They want to make the next Twitter or FourSquare or (pick your cool service that everyone salivates over). If they are with more established companies, they want to create easy-to-use interfaces that expose data or information in new and interesting ways or allow users to interact with their web apps in new and useful ways.

And they want to do all this using the "languages of the web"... JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.

They want "easily consumable" APIs where they can just look at a web page of documentation and understand in a few minutes how they can add functionality to their app using simple REST calls or adding snippets of code to their web page. Their interaction with telephony is more along these lines:

"Wow, dude, all I have to do is get an authorization token and curl this URL with my token and a phone number and I can create a phone call!"

And the thing is... they can do this **TODAY** with existing proprietary products and services. You can code it all up in Flex/Flash. You can write it in Java. You can use Voxeo's Phono. You could probably do it in Microsoft's Silverlight. I seem to recall Twilio having a web browser client. A bunch of the carriers/operators are starting to offer their own ways of doing this. On any given week there are probably a dozen new startups out there with their own ideas for a new proprietary, locked-in way of doing RTC via web browsers.

Web developers don't *NEED* this RTCWEB/WebRTC work to do real-time communications between browsers.

It can be done today. Now.

The drawback is that today you need to have some kind of applet/plugin/extension downloaded to the browser to allow access to the mic and speakers and make the RTC actually work. So you have to use some Flash or Java or something. AND... you are locked into some particular vendor's way of doing things and are reliant on that vendor being around.

THAT is what RTCWEB can overcome. Make it so that web developers can easily add RTC to their web apps without requiring any downloads, etc. Make it do-able in open standards that don't lock developers in to a specific product or vendor.

But if we are targeting "web developers", that is who we need to satisfy... and we need to understand that they *already* have ways to do what we are allowing them to do.

If we come out with something that is so "different" from what "web developers" are used to... that requires someone to, for instance, understand all of what SIP is about... that requires a whole bunch of lines of code, etc.... well...

... the web developers out there will NOT launch an "Occupy RTCWEB" movement claiming that they are the "99% who don't care about telephony"... they will simply... not... use.... RTCWEB!

They will continue to use proprietary products and services because those work in the ways that web developers are used to and they make it simple for a web developer to go add voice, video and chat to a web app. Sure... they will still require the dreaded plugin/extension, but so be it... the "open standard" way is far too complicated for them to look at.

And all the work and the zillions of hours of writing emails and I-Ds that this group has done will all be for nothing. Well, not nothing... some of the telephony-centric developers will use them. But the majority of the web developers out there may not because there are other simpler, easier ways to do what they need to do.

So I go back to the question - who are we building RTCWEB for?

Is the goal to enable the zillions of web developers out to be able to use real-time communications in new and innovative ways? Or is it solely to make it so that VoIP/UC/RTC vendors can make a softphone in the browser that calls into their call center software?

RTCWEB *can* enable both... but to me it's a question of where the priority is.

The question is - will the RTCWEB/WEBRTC API/protocol/whatever be so simple and easy that web developers will choose to use it over Flash/Phono/Twilio/Java/whatever to add RTC functions to their web apps?

If the answer is yes, we win. Open standards win. Maybe we upgrade from having a beer to having champagne.

If the answer is no, what are spending all this time for?

</rant>

Dan

NOTE: And, as I suppose must be the case with any good rant, mine was not entirely accurate. As multiple people pointed out (one example), my ending where I ask about whether people would choose the RTCWEB/WebRTC API over Flash/Phono/Twilio/Java/whatever is not entirely on target. The question is really... will vendors creating libraries like Phono choose to use the RTCWEB/WebRTC protocols/APIs or will they continue to use their own proprietary solutions?

As people pointed out, there will be a hundred different JavaScript libraries created (like Phono) that will consume the RTCWEB work... and most web developers will use those libraries and not program directly with the RTWEB/WebRTC APIs and protocols.

Fair enough... but the question remains - will the RTCWEB work make it easy enough for all those JavaScript libraries to blossom?

Others pointed out that I'm really talking about the web API that would be exposed via the W3C's work versus the low-level API coming out of the IETF. And yes, that is perhaps technically true... but the reality is that it is the same set of people working in two different mailing lists... and both efforts are contributing to the end result.

In the end, I want to see a result of all this RTCWEB/WebRTC work that developers will actually deploy and use!

I want open standards to win.

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Oct 20

The Hardest Part of Podcasting Is…

Podcasting
... probably not what you think it is.

It's not the technology... as that is in so many cases the easiest aspect. Download a tool like Audacity to your computer and start talking into your built-in mic. Boom. You're done. Or point your phone's video camera at someone and press the record button. We've got a zillion different devices that will record audio or video.

It's not the post-production... although that can take some time depending upon the level of "professionalism" you want to give to your podcasts. Some people are fine with just posting raw "(wo)man-on-the-street" interviews up with little or no post-production. Some people want to do some editing, add intros and outros, etc.

It's not the on-air voice (the "talent")... as there are many podcasts out there that demonstrate that you don't need to have the proverbial "radio voice" to still have a show that builds a community of listeners. Of course, having (or developing) a good voice does help, but it's not the hardest part.

It's not the marketing of your podcast... the world of social media has made it so much easier to get the word out. Good shows will spread virally and people will learn about what you are doing. MANY tools out there to help spread the word.

It's not the story or the outline of what you will talk about... although admittedly this CAN be one of the harder aspects - to craft the outline of what you are going to do over a period of time, to think about the audiences, to figure out what story you are going to tell.

No, the absolute hardest part of podcasting is none of those, although all of them can be challenging in different ways.

Instead the hardest part of podcasting is...

... keeping the podcast going!

It's easy to start a podcast... it's far harder to maintain a podcast.

To keep doing it... week after week after week after week after week after...

For every podcast like For Immediate Release that has been diligently going on week after week for over five years now (just passed episode #621) or the VoIP Users Conference that has been going on for 4+ years, there are a hundred other podcasts where the hosts had brilliant ideas, the best of intentions... yet didn't keep the podcast going.

The Internet is littered with the remains of thousands of podcasts that started... (and yes, the same could be said of blogs).

One of my own is amidst those remains... from 2005 to 2008 I produced and co-hosted Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast. It was great to do and we built up quite a strong community of listeners. But then jobs changed... life changed... new kids came into the world... and so we ended the show's run. I keep thinking about bringing it back... but I'm conscious of this "hardest part" of podcasting. If I do bring it back, I have to be ready to commit to bringing it back on a regular basis.

THAT is the hardest part of "podcasting".

Keeping the podcast going.

IF, of course, you are trying to create a "show" that is ongoing. If you are just putting up some audio interviews... well, those might just be "downloadable audio files" and not really a "podcast", per se. Or they might be a "podcast" that has a predetermined lifespan... such as for an event or conference. There are many such podcasts around an event or date - or for a set series of topics - and they are great for what they are: a "body of work" with a defined beginning and end.

But if you are trying to create an ongoing show that attracts a community of listeners... then this "hardest part" comes into play. When I've been consulting with clients about starting up a podcast, I stress this fact again: it's easy to start a podcast, but far harder to keep it going.

Are you ready to commit to the long-term run of the show?

To do it week after week after week after week?

THAT is the hardest part of podcasting.

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Oct 19

When Did Facebook Start Letting You Unfollow Posts?

When did Facebook copy Google+ and add the feature that you could stop receiving notifications for a specific post? As the image shows, I just noticed it yesterday:

Unfollowingapost

Very nice to see as there are certainly times when I have "Liked" or commented on a post and then not really wanted to see the zillion other comments that people have left on a popular post.

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Oct 18

Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?

Can he do it? Can he get developers to actually care enough about the Blackberry / Playbook platform to come and build apps?

Today my friend Alec Saunders, RIM's newly minted "VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development", took to the stage of the Blackberry "DevCon Americas" event in San Francisco to make the case to the assembled crowd. Jim Courtney passed along to me the link to the livecast of the event and I did take a moment to tune in and check it out. (Apparently a recording will be available at some point.)

Alec has a theatre background and is always fun to watch present... he has a certain dynamic energy that is good to see. In the few minutes I watched he seemed very much in his element:

Blackberrydevcon2

Alecsaunders 1

Now, whether he will actually have any success is another question... despite his stats that the BlackBerry AppStore is more profitable for developers than the Android Marketplace, I don't know if the broader world of developers will really notice. From what I see the momentum seems to be elsewhere...

I wish him the best, though... and Alec, when you read this, you can know that some of your friends did enjoy watching the live stream! :-)

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