Paul O'Flaherty

Baby Megatron Will Have Revenge

I wonder if Megatron will smile about this?

It’s good to see that the idiots are out in full force. If you haven’t heard about it, the online world is buzzing about “Baby Megatron” or at least the baby who may be called Megatron now that more than 1,000,000 (1 million) people have joined the Facebook fan page called:

Lets Call A Spade A Spade: It’s Influence Media

Spade or shovel?

I woke up Saturday morning with a number of things floating around my mind, such as the amount of time until I next see Sara, how I was going to get all my work done before the Ireland Vs England rugby match and a nagging, scraping feeling in the back of my mind about relationships.

As the caffeine from my first cup of coffee began to work it’s way into my system it hit me that relationships are about 1:1 communication.

Okay, admittedly that’s a fairly obvious to most people and not exactly a revelation. It’s something that we all know and many of us have been advocating online for years. If you want to grow your brand or blog you have to foster 1:1 relationships with your readers/followers/fans in order to develop loyalty.

I’ve always thought that social media was about developing and nurturing those relationships. I thought it was about communicating with your fans and followers, about growing that 1:1 connection that would allow organic growth as those you’ve developed relationships with will feel comfortable enough with you or your brand to recommend you to their peers, thus introducing you to a new social circle where you can again begin to develop the 1:1 relationships.

That, in a nutshell is what social media is to me.

What I see happening online today, being pimped and pushed by “those in the know” is not social media, it’s influence media.

In order to get ahead today we are still being told to foster relationships but not with our followers (or at least not so much).  The prevailing school of thought, at least to my cynical eyes, is that in order to grow you must foster relationships with just a handful of influencers and allow them do the work of communicating your message or spreading the word.

That’s a smart marketing tactic (to some degree, it still lacks 1:1 familiarity with the people you want to reach) but it’s by no means social media. It’s influence media.

It’s a numbers game where we use services or look at the follower numbers in order to find people like Scoble or Chris Brogan, suck up to them and hope that they will spread your word to the people you want to reach. Obviously the more of these influencers you can grease up then then the more people you can reach and the quicker you can reach them.

Which leads me to ask why are people promoting this process of finding these influencers and soliciting them to spread the word rather than fostering the actual relationship/social media approach?

The answer oddly enough is that these influencers are actually good at the social media side of things (that’s how they became influencers) but they are also very smart people. They know that by promoting the “influnce media” model they are setting themselves up as hubs.

Promoting social media as being the practice of finding influencers to spread the word for you actually encourages others not to become influencers, which removes competition and removing the competition is key when being an influence hub is a lucrative business.

Why I’m Not PC In This Online World

Definitely Laughable

I received an email earlier today because someone felt that I had been more than a little unfair towards redhead people in my commentary on this post on Daily Shite.

Subject: Gratuitous Abuse

So Paul, why pick on redheads?  That seems gratuitous.  They get enough shit without clever folks like you stooping to that kind of abuse.  Leave it to the morons.
All due respect,

Tom

I feel that the reply I emailed to Tom is worth posting here and speaks for itself:

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your email. I get where you are coming from but with all due respect we do *not* pick on redheads.

Picking on somebody would imply that we single them out. We don’t. We make fun out of every race, color and creed. White or black, blond, brunette, redhead, male, female, skinny, fat, emo, goth, American, Irish, Chinese, Canadian or Darth Vader, we don’t pick on anybody, if there’s a joke or comment to be made, we make it.

You see Tom, I hate political correctness. I believe it will be the downfall of society because eventually there will be nothing left that you could possibly say that wouldn’t offend someone. Those who abide by PC rules are looking to be molly coddled through life and that is, unfortunatley, not the way real life works.

I’ve known and know plenty of redheads. One of my best mates is of the ginger fraternity and has a serious carrot top for a brother. Hell, one of my own brothers is a member. None of these people were offended by the post.

Throughout the 1300+ posts on the site we have made commentary about just about every race, sex, color, creed and hair color. Even the Irish have been given shit by the authors of the site and you wouldn’t think that would happen when I (one of the co-owners) is Irish. Not only that, but I have personally been slagged off in a few posts.

I’m sorry Tom, but if we stop making comments about any one type of person deliberately then it becomes favoritism and then it does become *picking on people* because we are actively discriminating.

If people can’t take a joke, then I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to stop making jokes just because they might offend a handful of people.

I know the world has gotten so arse backwards lately (because of the PC movement) that the will of the outspoken minority dictates what happens to the silent majority but that is not they way things should be and not the way I will live my life or run Daily Shite.

We make no bones about what kind of site we are. We make no apologies for our content. We have our guidelines we work within (no porn, no T&A etc…), but I am not going to censor myself or the other Daily Shite authors just because a handfull of people get offended.

Where does it stop Tom? Do we see a repeat of Denmark and the Mohammad cartoon scandal? Do we limit every bodies right to free speech because a handful of people can’t handle it?

As far as I see it it’s a very black and white thing. Either everybody is fair game to be poked fun at, or nobody is. I’ll bet that red headed folk poke fun at blonds. Will they stop? I doubt it! Should they? Never!

Thanks for the email.

Paul

Thoughts and opinions are welcome as always.

Lights In The Sky Over Cobh

Chinese Lanterns being lit

My sister Jenny, among other people have reported that they’ve heard, on Cork local radio (96.fm Red FM), people discussing strange lights in the sky over Cobh during the night of Saturday the 20th of February.

Apparently there has been a heck of a lot of speculation including people saying that the lights, which apparently were moving in formation, where part of some sort of military maneuvers.

I’ve been finding this all a little more than amusing, as I’m sure my sister and almost every member of family does. Why? Well we known the true explanation for the lights and it’s nothing as sinister as military maneuvers or little green men buzzing Great Island looking for cows to abduct and mutilate, or the unwary to anal probe.

The truth is that the lights “moving in formation” were nothing more than a bunch of randomly set off Chinese lanterns, which were set off around 23:30 (or there about) from the Cobh Ramblers grounds in the midst of celebrations my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary.

So happy anniversary Nan & Grandad, it looks like your celebrations brought a lot more attention than just those of us who were there to share it with you

Has Social Media Legitimized Hotlinking in Web 2.0?

Okay, Maybe Not!

Hotlinking used to be a bad thing. Essentially bandwidth theft, hotlinking is the practice of displaying and image (or video, audio file etc… ) on your site but actually having the file served by someone else’s server. In other words you use their bandwidth to display the file on your site. (This is not the same as content theft, taking someone else work and presenting it as your own. That’s another discussion for another post).

We all know that bandwidth isn’t free.

Last night, as Daily Shite clicked over it’s 1 millionth page view for February, I was looking at our bandwidth usage and wondering where did all of the 423 Gigs we’ve transferred over the past 15 days go?

Obviously on a humor site like ours that aggregates the best content from around the web, hotlinking can be  an issue.

We don’t hotlink. We makes sure that all images and files are hosted on our own server and even go as far as having measures in place to ensure that anything that might accidentally get hotlinked is automatically cached on our server and the link rewritten.

Yet so many people hotlink today and I feel that with the rise of sites like Digg, Facebook, Reddit and even my beloved Google Reader are to blame.  They’ve taken hotlinking and instead of supporting the idea that is unacceptable have played a major hand in making hotlinking acceptable.

There are way and means to prevent hotlinking. It’s easy actually, but the problem comes not with the prevention, but the fact that oft times it is necessary not to prevent it  in order to actually be able to promote your content on the web.

If hotlinking is prevented then the images won’t show in Google Reader. Facebook, Reddit and Digg won’t be able to show thumbnails for the posts. This is a negative thing for most publishers regardless of whether or not they are aggregators (like we do on Daily Shite) or content creators like I do on this blog.

No thumbnails means less incentive for users to click through and people can be such very visual creatures.

I suppose measures could be taken to ensure I had a separate directory of thumbnails outside of the “protected directories” of my site that could be used by other sites but that is quite frankly a huge pain in the backside to organize and something that 99% of people will neither do, think about or have the ability to do if they did.

To be honest I don’t begrudge Facebook or Reddit using my images when someone promotes one of our posts, in fact I encourage it. It’s promotion for us.

But what I do have an issue with is that sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit allow linking to an image directly outside of the structure of the site hosting it and that is a problem for me.

When 20,000 or 50,000 people stumble an image on your site and all they see is the image itself, none of your content or the advertising that pays for the bandwidth that is used to serve that image 50,000 or even 100,000 times then there is an issue.

For some sites 50,000 or 100,000 views of a reasonably sized image could eat their entire bandwidth cap and result in them having to shell out money because the major media sharing sites are too lazy to implement a simple bit of code that could ensure that the page an image is on must be linked to rather than stealing some poor sods bandwidth.

Sharing on sites like Digg, Facebook and Stumbleupon is a partnership. They may promote our content for us when it is submitted, but we also provide them with content for their community to view and to discuss. Without our content these sites are nothing and we get considerably less traffic without them.

It’s a partnership, or at least it’s supposed to be. When it comes to images and hotlinking, the partnership is sorely one sided.

Has Google Gone A Step Too Far By Forcing Buzz On Users?

I know Google desperately want people to use Google Buzz, but as Steven Hodson pointed out, growth of the network will always be limited by the fact that you have to have a Gmail account in order to use the service.

Google Buzz is a clever trap, but a trap all the same. It is the hunk of cheese to get more people using Gmail which in turn locks users into Google even more.

Google, in it’s attempts to ensure adoption have taken the kind of  step that hasn’t been seen since the Microsoft of the 90’s and actually forced all Gmail account holders into being users regardless of whether they want to or not.

As Mark Davidson said on Facebook earlier tonight:

I’m not sure why but I’m bothered by Buzz. I don’t like it, I don’t want it. But I have it. Sure I don’t have to us it. I think maybe it’s because for the first time, Google has forced a web tool on me. I’ve been using Gmail since 2004. If I love Gmail, and I do, I’m forced to have Buzz. I’m about 10 minutes away from …re-installing MS Office so I can use Gmail as a relay for Outlook again. You know what I like? Choice. That’s what got me using Google web tools in the first place. Today is the first day, I’ve ever viewed Google in the same light as I viewed Microsoft in the mid-nineties.

It’s this kind of move that could result in a temporary boost for Gmail and Googles other services, but as I’ve already seen tonight people are complaining about things like unremoveable messages in their inbox, and of course the pre-existing faults caused by Googles need to have a universal address book and not allow you to delete contacts from one Google service without deleting them on all.

This forced use could ultimately be detrimental to Gmail as users who don’t want an intrusive social network clogging up their inbox choose to go to less crowded and more traditional email systems. Yes, you can stop Buzz features from appearing in your inbox after the fact but once you are in, you’re in.

As I’ve said before, the right tool for the right job, and morphing Gmail into a full featured social network may stop it being a tool of productivity and turn it into another Facebook/Twitter timewaster.

FYI Inquistr: Auto Refresh Is Intrusive, Makes You Look Shady

Trust me the numbers are fine!

It’s a rare occasion that I break away from reading an excellent post to write a post of my own. Usually I wait until I am finished, have digested it and then put fingers to keyboard.

My friend, Steven Hodson, wrote what has so far, been an excellent post called “The return of the LP and the future of book publishing” for the Inquisitr, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read it all because I was rudely interrupted by The Inqusitrs need to auto refresh their pages.

I don’t run into this problem too often and normally Inquisitr posts aren’t lengthy enough for me to ever encounter it but I have to ask why sites make their pages auto refresh?

For those of you who don’t know you can make any web page automatically reload after a set period of time by putting a small piece of code in the header like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />

Inserting code like this is good for only two things:

1. Updating a page that pulls some sort of dynamic content and would otherwise require the user to hit refresh.
2. Artificially inflating your page view numbers.

FYI: Unless it’s for point number 1 all it does is piss people off.

SourceForge: Nobody Is Asking Why Now?

Bound by the law?

Sourceforge is now blocking access to sites from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

In all the commentary I am seeing, nobody has asked the very simplest and perhaps most obvious of questions: Why now?

These terms have been in place for nearly 7 years now. (The Entities list has existed since 1997)

Lets forget for the minute that one hell of a lot of the software hosted by Sourceforge is developed with the help of, or even entirely by, people living outside the U.S.

Lets also bear in mind that SourceForge has claimed that this is because of the “transfer and export of certain technology” to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list, yet doesn’t give any details about what this technology is?

Surely everything on SourceForge can’t contain dangerous technology? Why not just restrict the programs which contain those technologies?

Not to mention the fact that everybody knows that any idiot, never mind some evil axis human overlord wannabe wouldn’t be able to use a proxy or Tor to get past the IP filtering!

Or is there something more at play here?

Google and China perhaps? Did the U.S. government pay SourceForge a call and “politely” remind them that these laws exist? Maybe because the government wants to show that it is willing to enforce it’s laws and send a subtle hint to China that the hacking of U.S. companies and theft of their I.P. might get them added to these lists?

I find it very hard to believe that the guys at SourceForge have had a sudden moment of conscience and, out of the blue, decided to comply with laws that have existed for almost 12 years and to their own terms and conditions which they have ignored for the past 7 years.

When Will The Web Stop Being U.S. Centric?

I’ve given out before about the fact that America and American internet users are not the end all and be all of the web.

In fact, if every single internet user in North America were to shuffle off this mortal coil simultaneously then the internet would loose less than 1/7th (one seventh) of its user base.

Just compare the numbers for 2009 as posted by Royal Pingdom and ask yourself why people look to America and the U.S. market for everything when even the European market has almost double the users?

1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).

18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.

418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.

252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.

179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.

67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.

57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.

20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Privacy Isn’t Binary. It Isn’t Yes Or No

Tell or Don't!

You’ve got  real life friends so you know that privacy is never a simple “yes or no”, “tell or don’t tell” matter.

There are things that you tell your spouse or best friend that you wouldn’t tell anybody else. There are things you would say to some friends and not to others. When you are out a party there may be pictures that you would let your friends and your brothers see, but would result in a serious ear bashing from your mother.

I’ve always been a strong proponent that our online activity is an extension of our offline activity. That online relationships mirror the dynamic and complex relationships that exist in our offline lives.

Believing that, I find it counter-intuitive to have social networks like Facebook push us further and further into a binary way of thinking about privacy. Essentially boiling privacy down to a “post it or don’t” issue. Forcing us to treat all of our online “friends” as equals.

As much as we may not like to admit it in front of our friends, we know that even our offline, real life, friends are not equal in our eyes. That is why the terms “best friend” and acquaintance exists.

Instant messaging clients, with the exception of ICQ (or at least it used to be when I actually used it), do the same thing. We are either online or off. Visible or invisible. Not a case of  visible to some and not to others. We’ve all put our phone on silent from time to time to “ignore” that call from a friend or family member. Or simply turned it off. While we might not want one person to know we are online, or available to talk, we might and sometimes do desperately need other people to know we are available to talk and that we want to talk. Skype are you listening?

With social networks, instant messaging and almost every other form of online communication pushing us into a binary way of thinking about privacy, we have to ask ourselves if that is what we really want? Would we stand for it, or be able even to successfully get through our lives if privacy in real life was dual choice only?

Tell everyone, or tell no one?

Shouldn’t we be pushing for finer grained control and groups rather than simply eradicating privacy? Or do we want  everyone to be burdened with a lot more secrets and worries that they would never be able to get off their chest and for confidentiality to cease to exist?

A Good Place To Host Podcast MP3’s

That’s all I’m missing to start podcasting again.

With a little help from Sara, I spent tonight getting my podcasting rig working and set up for properly recording podcats over Skype (or any input) and it looks a heck of a lot better than it does in the picture below now that I’ve tidied all the cables away.

Once I’ve located a good place to host the MP3’s for the show, then I’ll start cranking out the podcasts again.

Any recommendations for a good host?

Getting the gear set up