Netizen

Monday, April 27, 2009

Blogging: Monkey Business?

"We feel so smart when we are talking to ourselves!"
- Hillary Clinton at the Kos Convention 2007

Is blogging a solitary act? Can it be a solitary act? Does it have to be a solitary act? As in, is it monk-ey business? Monks go solo. Well, not entirely true. Sangham Sharanam Gachhami is, to the community I go. But I am talking about the stereotypically stereotypical monk.

It can look like it. A guy/gal sitting in front of a computer in pajamas typing it away. It can look like it at first sight.

But think about it. The best bloggers are those who have something to say. And you can not have something to say if all you do is sit in front of a computer screen and type it away.

You must already know from before you started typing it away, through training, a prior job, career, life experiences, education. You must be willing to learn. You must be alive. You must be living. The online consumption of content, or electronic but not really online in the case of Kindle, is the bedrock of ongoing education for many of us. That counts. Consuming content counts.

Learning and teaching happens. They help.

But my question was more to the social aspects. Is blogging a solitary activity? Is it meant to be solitary? Does it end up solitary despite all our intentions to the contrary? Don't confuse me with the facts! Don't disturb me with people!

Photoblogging is social. Videoblogging better be social. I tried to do the camera thing myself a few years back, and I look dead in the water in those video clips, not my proudest moments. My best video clip of me to date is one where someone else is doing the camera work.

Text blogging itself is meant to be social. And for someone with an active blog, that blog gives you a better feel for that person than anything else they might have online, more so than their Twitter and Facebook accounts, more so than their website.

And many friendships get forged in the comments sections of blogs.

Content Is Queen
Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining
Spamming Om Malik
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Friday, April 24, 2009

ROIanalytics: Internet Marketing

So much of advertising is moving online. But unless you can measure progress or lack thereof, where are the smarts in smart advertising? Businesses need to keep track of leads and opportunities generated from their Internet Marketing efforts.

Internet Marketing is more than running banner ads to build up your brand name.

Your ad online is your shop front. You should be able to engage your customers even before they have showed up at your website. For that you need sophisticated tracking, managing tools. That is where ROIanalytics Pro comes in.

ROIanalytics Pro is an industrial scale marketing tool.

Do you know what your return on investment is? Without that rigor internet marketing efforts are futile.

(This is an advertisement.)

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Content Is Queen

I was going to say Content Is King, but then figured it might come across as sexist. It is like my Facebook/Twitter intro blurb has the word BossManPerson. I could not just say boss. That would be boring. Then I was inspired by my memory of comedian Negin's use of the word bosslady to describe herself. So I opted for Bossman. That stayed for a few weeks. A few days back I changed that to BossManPerson. I hope it is both informative and interesting.

Product/content alone will not cut it. Marketing efforts are necessary. And there are times when marketing rules and product/content is secondary. But at the end of the day, it is product that is queen.

Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter

Great blogging is primarily about putting out great blog content. Do you have something to say? Can you have something to say? Can you say it well? The second question is something to do with the fact that that niche that you might be most passionate about might not be the most lucrative.

Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining
Spamming Om Malik
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

And in many cases content creation happened before blogging came along, before Twitter came along. Some of the people with the biggest Twitter followings just so happen to be celebrities, tech and otherwise. You could argue you create better tweets than Ashton Kutcher, but that dude created his content elsewhere, on that big screen, and he established connections with people there. (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher)

Blogging and Tweeting is no substitute for your work, whatever line you might be in, and for that matter Facebooking. If you are a student, spend more time with your textbooks than with your Facebook page. Spend more time with friends in person than with them on Facebook. Social skills are necessary, for work and for pleasure.

So content creation is not just about creating great blog posts, and great tweets, and having smart aleck things to say on other people's Facebook walls. Content creation is about doing the best you can do in your workspace, it is about living the best life you can live. It is about your emotional investments in your family, relationships, friends. Because if you do all that, you will have something to say. Content does not come out of life vacuum. Live. Work. Love. Rejoice. Enjoy.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Cyber Security: Growing Challenges

So much is happening online. There's much behind firewalls, but hackers have ended up everywhere before. Worms come down to your desktop, and if you are lucky you get to retrieve your work. Recently a teen spread a worm on Twitter. What's next? Gmail? So it is not like the cloud is sacred territory. There is no sacred territory.

There are rogue individuals, pranksters, spammers, spam spewing companies. Then there are the evil ones. They want your computer down. They want your system down. They want to steal your password, your credit card number. They show up in your inbox hoping to lure you to click on something or the other. It is a numbers game for them. They are counting on very few people to click, and those very few routinely do.

But what about hostile states and terrorist organizations? If the Al Qaeda wants to explode a dirty bomb, does it not fantasize of cyber attacks? It has recruited smart doctors before. Could it recruit hackers? What could a cyber cold war look like? What about a hot one?

For the most part we are counting on the good people in the information technology sector to stay numerous and to always stay one step ahead of the evil ones. We are counting on the market forces. But when it comes to global law enforcement coordination, we are as ill-prepared as on a host of other global issues. People in finance talk of tax havens. There are hacker havens all over the world. We count on hackers being not smart enough to create and spread the next deadly worm. But they routinely do. We keep building up the immune system, we keep finding cures for diseases, kind of like for the biological types over history.

And safety is not all about technology. It is also about criminals going high tech to commit crimes they were already committing before the internet came along.

Just like for global finance, for global terrorism, for global warming, there is ultimately only a global solution to cyber security. Cyber security has to be approached from many different angles if it is to be meaningfully tackled.

In The News

The Cold War moves to cyberspace CNet shadowy foes that prefer to cloak their identities. the United States is "under cyberattack virtually all the time, every day" ...... The Wall Street Journal reported that cyberspies had breached the DOD's Joint Strike Fighter project and also had penetrated the Air Force's air-traffic-control system. ..... Chinese hackers attacked private and government Web sites in the U.S. in retaliation after NATO accidentally struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis. ....... Russia defines cyberwar as a force multiplier while China views cyber war as a way to get control of an enemy without the need for engaging on a physical field of battle. "It's straight out of Sun Tzu" ........ In March 2007, Estonian Web sites got knocked out after the regime decided to move a Soviet statue from one park to another. Last August, when Russian tanks rolled across the border, Georgia's government ministries also got overwhelmed by a coordinated cyberattack. ....... defenders of Russia attribute the brief cyberwar to nationalists acting independently.
Bill Clinton: Business is the key to climate change
Apple soars during economic gloom
Microsoft opens up its answer to Google AdSense
Would a ratings system improve Craigslist?
IBM puts Oracle to the sword with EnterpriseDB
Report: Kindle 2 costs $185.49 to build
No surprise here: Oprah huge for Twitter
Firefox 3.0.9 targets 12 security vulnerabilities
Security flaw leads Twitter, others to pull OAuth support
Face recognition comes to Flickr
Gates: Cyberattacks a constant threat hackers stole information about $300 billion fighter jet program.
'60 Minutes' video: Cold fusion is hot again

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