April 2007

Dave Taylor notes that Patrick Benny has built an Auto-Save plugin for Movable Type.

It’s about time!

Fast Company’s cover story this month is about Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Obviously, there’s a lot to cover here. I thought reporter Ellen McGirt did a great job covering the rise of Facebook and the reasoning behind Zuckerberg’s decision to keep the company private rather than selling or going public.

The part of the article that stood out for me is when COO Owen Van Natta discussed Facebook’s backend:

“We’re one of the largest MySQL Web sites in production,” says chief operating officer Owen Van Natta, 37. MySQL, a popular open-source software, “has been a revolution for young entrepreneurs,” Van Natta explains, partly because it frees them from paying the licensing fees of, say, an Oracle.

The role of MySQL in the emergence of new Web technologies from WordPress to Facebook has been huge. It’s a free, open source database system that has become an integral part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python).

As boring as they sound, databases are the driving force behind everything that has been happening online. All of the robust content management that has enabled free expression, word of mouth and consumer generated media is due to MySQL and other structured query database programs like it. This blog runs on a MySQL database. So do all the blogs at Wordpress.com.

Blogging platform Movable Type runs on MySQL, although it also works with Microsoft’s SQL Server. But as Van Natta pointed out, MySQL continues to be the dominant force in online entrepreneurship and open source development simply because it is both robust and free.

Companies can expect that as more of these types of technologies become widespread, you’ll see more opportunities for your customers to express themselves in new and powerful ways. After all, when you give smart people robust, inexpensive tools, they’ll create things that people will want to use.

At the last Blog Business Summit, I had a nice chat with Mary Hodder where we commiserated on how we longed for a blog search engine that would let us find posts by authors with little to no formally recognized “authority.”

As experienced bloggers know all too well, Technorati and Google easily help us find posts (and authors) that are linked to frequently, but in my mind that just advances the echo-chamber problem. What I’ve wanted is a way to find authors, articles and posts that are largely “undiscovered.”

We have a blog called bigbusinessjet.com that is sponsored by Greenpoint Technologies and covers the rarified space of owning and operating ultra-expensive business aircraft. Today I found a highly relevant article put forth by Dealmaker Magazine (a site with a PR of zero (?!)) that no one else has blogged about, hence has been ignored completely by Google Blog Search and Technorati.

How did I find it? I used the (thankfully under-appreciated!) Live Search from Microsoft. Live Search has some easily accessed parameters that enable you to find unpopular pages that have been recently been updated — and can even provide an RSS feed for that search. The essential parameters are found under the “Advanced” link, and the key settings are within “Results ranking” which brings up 3 sliders (see below.)

What I asked for was newer results that are relatively unpopular but match closely the search string “bbj3″ — which is the industry term for the Boeing Business Jet Version 3. Note how I could just as easily have entered the parameters as text.

Without Live Search, I don’t know if/when I would have found this article. Probably after some other blogger picked it up I guess…

According to the Economist, Arab bloggers or “pyjamahideen” are exerting pressure on local authorities and affecting political change.

…youthful denizens of the internet are chipping away at the overweening dominance of Arab governments… blogging has evolved within the past year from a narcissistic parlour sport to a shaper of the political agenda. By simply posting embarrassing video footage, small-time bloggers have blown open scandals over such issues as torture and women’s harassment on the streets of Cairo.

Reinforces our long-running assertion that businesses need to understand the difference between content and platform when talking about blogs. Physics papers were not why the Web mattered, and personal diaries are not why blogs matter…

Businesses spend countless hours trying to figure out what their customers want. They conduct surveys and host focus groups to find out what their customers want. So when a company knows exactly what customers want, it would be logical for them to do something about it. Unless, of course, they aren’t paying attention.

Viacom is a great example of a company that isn’t paying too much attention right now. They have three or four dozen incredibly hot children’s television shows that ran on the Nickelodeon network from the late 80’s through the mid 90’s that were utterly fantastic and are in high demand among twenty-somethings.

Yes, you heard right. Twenty-somethings like me are interested in children’s shows. We grew up shows like Noozles, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Secret World of Alex Mack. Our quarterlife crises are making us nostalgic for our favorite childhood programming, and we’re pretty damn vocal about it.

For example, there is a 38,648 member group on Facebook dedicated solely to pestering Viacom to make these shows available to us in some form. There are countless online petitions, organized e-mailing, letter-writing and phone banking campaigns. People in their twenties are practically screaming for these great televisions shows to be resurrected from the Viacom vaults. We’re expressing this demand in our online communities.

We represent a target market with a lot of disposable income. We buy DVDs, and we also buy stuff we see advertised alongside content we consume. With all the competition for our eyeballs, you would think that a company that is sitting on these hot media properties would be eager to re-monetize them.

Unless, of course, they’re not paying attention.

The next person to register for our October September conference gets a free hour of consulting with me during one of the conference lunch periods.

I’ll announce the winner here!

I read today on Scobleizer about the new Blogger and Podcaster magazine.

You can subscribe to its twelve annual issues in one of three ways:

• Online with “magazine-esque” technology.
• Via Podcast
• In print

The print edition costs $79 per year, while the “magazine-esque” online version and podcast are free.

I think this is a bold move on the part of the publishers. A magazine for bloggers and podcasters is definitely an unfulfilled niche. The question is whether or not bloggers will pay attention to a news source that only updates once a month. Of course, the magazine also has its own blog.

The big upside I can see to this is that the magazine is available in print. Why is this an upside when so many paper and ink publications are struggling? Because we bloggy types spend all day every day staring at some varity of computer monitor. I, for one, love to read information on paper sometimes. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time. Sometimes I even use a pen and hi-lighter. You can’t do that with a computer unless you want to mess up your screen bigtime.

In an interview with blogger Joe Wikert, B&P publisher Larry Genkin answered some of those concerns:

Instead of “swimming upstream” we decided to make it easier to succeed by publishing the magazine in 3 formats: Print, Digital and Podcast. I believe we are the first in magazine history to do this (and another reason why my editorial team is about ready to string me up.) Each edition is different too. The digital edition uses cool software that gives our readers a magazine-esque feel with pages flipping on the screen and also allows us to embed audio and video into it to add to the experience beyond what you can get from the printed magazine. Then our podcast edition includes some of the actual interviews we conducted in writing our stories, to give subscribers even more detailed information from the industry experts we interviewed. In addition, we’ve also started a blog, written by our editors, so we can have a more regular and intimat? dialogue with our readers.

In time, I might sign up for the print edition, but for the time being I’m signed up for the online print version. I’m looking forward to seeing what this magazine has to offer. I have a funny feeling that I’ll be linking to some of their content sooner rather than later.

Matt Mullenweg posted today that “Plugin Authors Get No Love”. Its true that while the authors of themes often get link love from the pages that use their work, the authors of plugins get very little. So I’d like to send a shoutout to all the wonderful people who wrote the GPL plugins we’re running on this Wordpress install.

In alphabetical order, they are:

• George Notras, whose Add Meta Tags plugin gives us lots of easily customized SEO love.
• Matt Mullenweg himself for the brilliant Akismet plugin that keeps the evil spammers at bay. (At the time of this posting, Akismet has blocked 525 pieces of pernicious spam.)
• Scott Reilly, for the Customizable Post Listings plugin that generates the lists of random content that sometimes appear on our site.
• Michael Woehrer for the Simple Tagging plugin that generates our tag cloud and the lists of related content in our individual posts.
• Matthew Robinson for his Subscribe2 plugin that manages the folks that subscribe to our blog via e-mail.

Let’s show the awesome people who write these great plugins that we love them. Who wrote the plugins for your Wordpress blog?

The ever-prolific Michael Arrington asks today, “Can PhotoBucket Survive Without MySpace?”

He cites a lot of statistics based on some leaked information about PhotoBucket’s revenue stream. But the gist of what he says is that most of PhotoBucket’s revenue has nothing to do with MySpace. He also makes a pretty bold statement, which is that a non-trivial number of users are going to pick PhotoBucket over MySpace.

It’s a bold statement that I agree with. Here’s why:

1. MySpace acted unilaterally to block the PhotoBucket content, which we all know pisses users off. To compound the problem, they’re not engaging with their pissed-off users in any real way.
2. MySpace turned a symbiont into a competitor when they blocked PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket has loyal, invested users who are now pissed off at MySpace.

This begs the question: can MySpace survive without PhotoBucket? In the short term, the obvious answer is, “of course.” But longer term, I’m not so sure. If MySpace continues the practice of regularly alienating third-party value adds for reasons that they don’t explain clearly, then I think their prospects for survival head south big time.

The future of social networking is in opening the platforms up to interoperability and cross-pollination. Users will gravitate toward sites that allow them to make connections with as many people as possible. The sites that win will embrace that fact and figure out how to monetize it rather than resisting and stonewalling. It’s really that simple.

If you take a look in our right-hand sidebar, you’ll notice that we’ve added a little widget called “Recent Readers.” This is courtesy of MyBlogLog, which combines some key community building features with site statistics.

Basically, MyBlogLog has three parts. The first is the widget you embed in your blog’s sidebar. This tells you and your readers about the people who have come to your blog. Anyone who has a MyBlogLog account registers as having visited. The second part is the cookie they embed in your computer that tells other blogs when you’ve stopped by. The third part is the internal community that allows you to message with your fellow MyBlogLoggers and find new and interesting content to peruse. I’ve found some of my favorite blogs this way.

Why is this a good tool for business? Because if you’re looking to build a community online, MyBlogLog facilitates that organically. People know that you’ve been looking at their blog simply because they see that you’ve come by. This drives traffic back to your blog. If you pay attention to your visitors, you can click through to see where they blog and what they write about. This helps you find great new content that you can link to, and that helps solidify community even further.

In the interests of self-promotion, I should add that community building techniques and tools are going to play a huge roll in our conference this year.

If you’re already a business blogger, I want to know what your goals were when you started blogging. How well has your blog been performing thus far?

If you’re just getting into the game, what do you want out of your blog? What platforms are you considering? Are you looking at hosted vs. self-hosted?

Talk to me, people!

” … the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.” - Captain Barbossa, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

There’s been a lot of talk recently about creating a code of blogging conduct with Tim O’Reilly leading the charge. He’s got a great post up today that deals with a lot of the (not so nice) feedback he’s received for the idea.

One of the issues that I have with any uniform code of blogger conduct is that it gums up the works for individual bloggers who want to retain editorial control. There’s something to be said for developing a loose set of best practices that cover the same basic territory and then allow individual bloggers to work with them as they see fit.

I think the central best practice that we should be working as a community to establish is clearly stating our general attitude towards online behavior and commenting somewhere on our blogs. More generally, I think the blogging community already does a great job of rallying around people who are being treated unfairly, as it did with the recent controversy involving Kathy Sierra.

Obviously, larger cultural change is necessary, but that doesn’t come through creating hard and fast rules. Just as religiously motivated legislation does not do anything to change people’s basic moral compasses, a uniform code of conduct will not address the underlying problems of trollishness and misogyny. A loose set of guidelines and a community that is willing to police itself is probably a better solution.

I was actually really intimidated by the process of migrating this wiki, but I managed to make it happen. Many thanks to the good folks who wrote this supremely helpful article at Media Wiki.

If you see any bugs with the wiki, please leave me a comment here. Otherwise enjoy!

PS: See, Easton! I did it!

In biology, a symbiont is a creature that lives within a host animal in a mutually beneficial relationship. Mitochondria, which are the power plants of our cells originated as separate organisms until they found that they were better off living inside the cells of other organisms. Human civilization would likely be completely different or even nonexistent without our little mitochondria friends.

The same is true of MySpace and Photobucket. Yesterday, MySpace banned users from embedding content they created at Photobucket in their personal pages.

Users are pretty pissed off about the ban. This puts them in the position of having to decide between a social network they love and a photo-sharing service they love. Before, they could use and enjoy both. MySpace and Photobucket had the perfect symbiotic relationship. The services reinforced one another. Now, they’re competing for the same resource: people.

MySpace’s decision to ban Photobucket is a bit like if the human race decided that we were going to extract the mitochondria from all of our cells and make them into a competitor for food and resources. It’s a stupid choice that benefits nobody, least of all MySpace.

Update: Robert Scoble just called Photobucket “parasitic”. I still vehemently disagree. Parasites drain resources from the host without making any contribution. Photobucket made a huge contribution to MySpace’s user base. It didn’t take anything away from MySpace.

Today without warning, MySpace unilaterally turned off its users’ access to PhotoBucket, which is one of the most popular third-party services for photo sharing and display on the Web.

Photobucket users can upload their photos and share them. Or they can create complicated slideshows and embed them using HTML. The most popular place to embed these slideshows and photos used to be MySpace, until the social networking giant unilaterally turned off access to the software.

On it’s blog, the Photobucket team wrote:

We are not happy about this and we’re pretty sure you’re not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you’ve all been really embracing videos at Photobucket — to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

I recently blogged about how Facebook learned its lesson about drastic unilateral changes to its product. In short, they unilaterally launched a very controversial feature known as a “news feed” about six months ago. The feature made users’ activities on the site much more public and transparent, and the uproar was tremendous.

Let’s contrast that with today. This morning, Facebook launched a series of major changes to their user interface. But this time, they were smart enough to engage users in the decision making process months ahead of time. They started a group for users who wanted to share their two cents about the new interface. They posted screenshots and discussed the ramifications of potential actions. They changed course on a few features based heavily on user input. In short, they listened.

I would argue that MySpace’s ban on Photobucket is even worse that last year’s newsfeed fiasco at Facebook. Why? Because on top of unilaterally taking action that profoundly affects their users, they’ve taken away an essential feature rather than adding something new and cool. This really does send the message to MySpace users that the site thinks of them as commodities rather than people who are building a community online.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch believes a conspiracy is afoot:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Today’s shutdown of Photobucket comes suspiciously close to news that Photobucket is up for sale (Fox, MySpace’s parent company, was notoriously rumored to be furious when YouTube sold to Google). It seems that just when a company starts to break out from the pack, MySpace finds a security breach and shuts them down. Even though MySpace has flat out denied it to us, it is our belief that these blockages are meant to send a clear message to widget companies - don’t forget that MySpace is in charge.

If this is true, it represents a mentality that simultaneously devalues the individual user and third-party innovation that enhances the end user’s experience. With this kind of an attitude, MySpace might indeed go over the proverbial hill in a hurry.

Via Techmeme.

As a follow-up to our work with CEA in evaluating bloggers for the 2007 CES show, and in preparation for our 2008 CES blogger bash, we’ve launched an in-depth analysis of blog activity related to the January event.

Using a combination of several Web intelligence engines and human review of over 3,000 individual blog posts, we’ve captured the majority of blog posts made by those in attendance at CES. We’re starting to see clear patterns emerge.

One of the largest data sets we have on hand is extracted post subject lines. We’ve broken those subjects into individual words and have analyzed them for frequency. Below is a chart depicting the top 150 or so words in use–after assignment to companies best aligned with them. The iPod was the single most frequently mentioned product term. Vista, iPhone, and Xbox also were hot topics.

Note that PodTech’s Bloghaus sponsored by Seagate was in the top ten. Heads up that thanks to the data being munched and the services being tapped into, we’ll soon have a comprehensive set of interpreted CES blog-related info. We have a list of the hundreds of individual bloggers who attended CES, and are ranking them now based on influence. We’ve also begun the process to glean product and company mentions (and sentiment) within blog posts.

FYI that Monster Cable is just one of the client companies who have commissioned us to deliver to them the final report we’re preparing. If you are interested in receiving the report based on this data, contact Kim Larsen.

Blog Business Summit ‘07 speaker Kevin O’Keefe has a fantastic quote this morning: “you don’t make money from a blog anymore than you make money from your cell phone.” That’s pretty much true for legal bloggers, who blog in order to establish themselves as thoughtful professionals who can help their clients.

Kevin is responding to a post by ProBlogger’s Chris Garrett this morning. Chris argues that in addition to direct methods like advertising, professional bloggers can monetize their content indirectly. My favorite is his profile of David Krug:

As well as being a means to earn money, blogs also have value as assets which can be sold. I think the best known person who makes money by buying and selling blogs has to be David. You can earn money by building up your own blog and selling it, or you can buy up under-valued blogs and selling them after giving them a little TLC.

He’s got a great list of other ways that professionals have indirectly monetized their blogs.

When we rebuilt this site in Wordpress, one of our hot to-do items was to make it easy for the less HTML savvy members of our team to add bios and photos of our speakers. We accomplished this in three steps:

1. Create a plugin that gives conference speakers an authorship role and has a custom template tag that will display only authors in that group.
2. Create a standard author.php file that displays author bio and photo information.
3. Override the Wordpress function that requires an author to have posts attributed to to them in order to pass the query to the author.php page.

Unfortunately, when you pass the author function in Wordpress and the author in question has no posts, Wordpress returns a 404 error. We originally solved the problem by adding the following PHP to our custom 404 page.


if( function_exists( 'bbs_is_author' ) && bbs_is_author()) {
include (TEMPLATEPATH.'/author.php');
} else {


This allowed the 404 page to pass the query along to the author.php page and display author information for authors (a.k.a. speakers) that have not written any posts in this system.

Unfortunately for us, Internet Explorer threw in a major hurdle. Unlike most browsers, Internet Explorer has friendly HTTP error messages that override our custom 404 page. Since IE users weren’t seeing our custom page, Wordpress didn’t know to pass the query to author.php page. Instead of the speaker information they requested, IE users were seeing a custom HTTP error message.

To rectify this, we modified the /wp-includes/classes.php file to pass the query to the author.php template rather than returning an HTTP error, regardless of whether the author had written any posts or not. If you are interested in learning more about the modification, you can e-mail me.

By the way, we’ll be covering more stuff like this at our next conference.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of building a Wordpress blog for Esther Mira, a friend of mine who recently starred in her first full length motion picture. Some of you may remember her from the blogger party we threw at this year’s CES.

To build this blog, I modified the template from Wordpress’ standard Classic theme. I’m very pleased with it. But if any of you see anything you’d change if you were me, I’m always open to design suggestions and improvements.

One of the things I love about Wordpress is that it’s so easy to design for. Switching templates, playing with styles and trying new things is as easy as an FTP connection and an eye for color.

Man I love building blogs! Happy Friday everyone