I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love
- MAKE YOU FEEL MY LOVE

In order to understand the social media douchebaggery that happens on our interwebs, you need to hold your nose and dive in some times. I try most things, but get bored of them pretty quickly. So I figured I had to try Empire Avenue (EAv), the stock trading game in which the stocks are people, and the bigger the douchebag the higher the value. Fortunately you don’t need to piss off invite your friends to get started.

First thing to say about this is, unlike most others, it is actually quite fun and quite addictive. By this I mean in the same way a stock market simulation game is fun and addictive. So I can recommend giving it a try by wasting an evening. Your value is based on the usual supply/demand/market forces, but also on your “score” on various social networks – currently Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Flickr and YouTube. I spent longer on it than I did on SecondLife (in which I spent all my money on poker and whoring and was destitude in about two hours) and it’s more fun than Quora ever got (which was probably when it was down due to the recent EC2 fiasco).

For me the best thing about the 4 hours of my life I’ve so far wasted was randomly bumping into and having a chat with Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang / (e)JOWYANG). At the time I was broke so could only buy 1 share in what is likely to become one of the biggest stocks on EAv. And he unwisely invested in (e)BOOF. It was interesting talking with all these big cheeses discussing the potential impact of EAv. There are theories that this’ll be the next big thing and that the social currency may even have some real world value in the long run. I’m rather skeptical on that. Although if you’re a moron you can by Eaves (the game currency) with your hard earned real cash.

If Jowyang thinks I'm a good investment ... Click to Enlarge

I made some pretty dumb-ass investments in (e)IANT, (e)BLOEM, (e)PIEW, (e)BIGBLUEMOOSE and (e)SLWR who were all overvalued already and, seeing as they’re not douches, probably aren’t going to rise much. I bought some (e)IRI seeing she’s responsible for me trying this thing. And in a fit of madness I bought me a piece of (e)PMONKS, which is surely going to be worthless pretty soon. I’ll dump that after this post I think.

I wasn’t very surprised to see quite a few of my Twitter followers on EAv already, but only two of my FaceBook friends were on. Good thing too, ’cause my real friends are a worthless bunch that wouldn’t be worth shit to a shrewd Empire Avenue investor like me.

I have no idea about the strategy of this thing. A good way to make a bit of cash seems to be to monitor the “Recent Arrivals” section, and speculatively buy shares in most of them. If you’re quick, maybe a Google search, in particular to see if they’re rich in Twitter followers. People with a lot of followers seem to double in value as soon as they link their Twitter account to their profile, so you have to be fast. Price hikes from activity on the other network take much longer as, because they’re not public like Twitter, EAv has to run off and index them only once they’ve got your details. I’m told the algorithms value LinkedIn recommendations. Which I, for one, don’t.

Finally, a few strategy tips from me, which I sure to be excellent seeing as I’ve got about 4 hours experience:
- Unlocking achievements gets you cash. So link everything like your blog, FaceBook, LinkedIn and join a few communities
- People seem to search the Recent Arrivals section and buy people cheap if they look cool, before they manage to link their Twitter profiles and share prices rise
- Buy (e)BOOF

Have fun out there.

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
- SAD-EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS

Short version: I drew a picture while watching crap on TV. Scroll to the bottom to see it.

I seem to be bumping into Google absolutely everywhere these days. When you take a step back and think about it, it really is astonishing how many areas they play in, and how many competitors they have. And it changes fast. In the last few days, they’ve ditched Google Video, acquired PushLife (their 94th acquisition) and are rumoured to be building a FlipBoard killer.

I also recently read a wonderful article, The Freight Train That Is Android by VC Bill Gurley (@bgurley – follow him now). He introduces his article with a famous quote from investor-extraordinaire Warren Buffet, who said:

In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats

In Google’s case, the economic castle is search and ads. That is the cash cow. Gurley then go on to say:

Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy. In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.

Click for large image. High Res available below.

So, inspired by all of this, I drew a picture to give myself a birds-eye view of everything I know that Google is involved in as of 20:00 GMT on Monday 18th April 2011. They’re not winning on all fronts but they’re doing pretty well. “Social” is their weak point at the moment, which is why Larry P just announced that 25% of all Googlers bonuses depend on their social success.

Now I am sure I didn’t waste hours of my life on this beast and you’re all going to stick it on your wall at work and home. Here are the big versions:

Download Hi-Res PDF: 1.3 MB
Download Hi-Res JPG:  4.2 MB

And feel free to point out all my cock-ups in the comments and I’ll update this next time my wife watches another shitty romcom.

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
- LIKE A ROLLING STONE

End of the decade again. Everyone is writing the Obligatory Reflection and/or Prediction stuff again. So I ain’t going to write one of those. However, being a blogging newbie, I learnt a shitload this year which, it transpires, was well understood by the Social Media gurus I’ve loved for years. So, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you their wisdom from 1965 – 1970, the years I should have lived in. I’ll take my lessons from Lennon, Dylan, Hendrix, Page, Jagger or Morrison over social media whore @GuyKawasaki or ego-blogger @Scobleizer any day of the week.

Lesson #1: It’s Noisy Out There, So Make a Bigger Noise

The Beatles, New York, NY, August 15 1965

The Beatles concert at Shea Stadium broke records all over the place, with over 55,000 people attending. And Beatlemania was at its peak, so the crowd was going mental. The noise in the stadium was, according to Lennon, “louder than God”. No-one in the stadium could really hear any of the music. And, as it turned out, nor could the band. So eventually Lennon just started banging the keyboard with his elbows just to make some sound that people could actually hear.

It’s noisy as hell in the blogosphere too. Most blogs don’t get read. If you want people to notice you, you need to make a noise. Start banging your keyboard with your elbows.

Lesson #2: Experiment, but Don’t Pander to the Crowds

Bob Dylan, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, RI, July 25 1965

As some of you might know, I’ve got a soft spot for Bob. I love his older acoustic gems. So I might have been one of the sheep who were upset when, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan plugged in his guitar and backing band, and mixed it up a bit. At a concert in Manchester the following year, we had the famous Judas Incident. Details are still sketchy, but let’s go with the romantic version. Dylan starts playing some electric tunes, and during a gap between songs someone shouts “Judas”. Dylan replied with the rather cryptic “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar“, before turning to his band instructing them to “play it fucking loud!” And they did, belting out an awesome version of Like A Rolling Stone. The “rock” albums which followed (Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde) are two of my favourites, and they both went platinum nice and quickly.

So, like Bob, I’ve tried to experiment. Do different things, and see what your readers like. Don’t just keep doing what you think they like. Branch out a bit for potential new readers. Sometimes you can go a bit far, though. I’m really struggling to understand a world in which Bob could release such an embarrassing Christmas album. Maybe time will prove everyone wrong here too.

Lesson #3: Controversy Breeds Traffic

Jimi Hendrix, Monterey, CA, 16 June 1967

When The Jimi Hendrix Experience were booked at the Monterey Pop Festival, they were huge in England, but largely unknown in the US.  Some of the biggest names in pop at the time were performing – The Animals, Beach Boys, The Mamas & Papas and more. However, it’s Hendrix that is remembered. He closed his set with an insane version of “Wild Thing”, which ended with Jimi dousing his guitar in lighter fluid, setting it on fire and smashing the shit out of it. Surprise, surprise – people remembered that and the buzz helped propel him to stardom in the USA too.

In the blogosphere, more controversial posts generate far more interest. It can be really boring reading the same things over and over again where everyone agrees with each other. Have (or make up) strong opinions, play Devil’s Advocate and encourage debate around your posts. If these debates prove that you were completely wrong, admit you were an idiot, thank the crowds for teaching you something, and buy another guitar.

Lesson #4: Talk About What You Know, Your Way

Led Zeppelin, Boston, MA, 23 January 1969

The famous Boston Tea Party concert. The birth of head banging. Zeppelin only had one 70-minute album under their belt at the time , but they played for over 4.5 hours. In the words of bassist John Paul Jones:

There were kids actually banging their heads against the stage. I’ve never seen that at a gig before or since, and when we finally left the stage we’d played for four and a half hours … I suppose it was then that we realized just what Led Zeppelin was going to become.

Most of the concert was rambling, brilliant improvisation. They mashed up their existing songs, mixed in some covers and generally went with the flow. The band knew each other, they knew their craft, and just kept making shit up.

For bloggers, there’s nothing wrong with rambling and improvising. I’ve discovered that I can’t really plan blog posts, and I can’t write short ones. If Led Zep can get away with it, so can I. And I prefer reading posts that have a little personality thrown in.

Lesson #5: Shit Happens, Live With It

Rolling Stones, Hyde Park, England, 5 July 1969

The Hyde Park Free Concerts are legendary. As are the Rolling Stones. Two days before their scheduled appearance, band mate Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool, another victim of “death by misadventure”. Admittedly Jones hadn’t been playing with the band for a month, but the Hyde Park Concert was scheduled to be his replacement’s first live gig. So the concert turned into a Brian Jones memorial. Jagger opened the set by reading a section from Adonais, a poem by Shelley. Over 250,000 people were there.

By all accounts, the performance itself was pretty crap. But the lesson here is that bad things happen, and you need to be flexible and deal with them. I’ve written some blog posts that are ridiculously bad and I’ve been tempted to delete the bastard things. BJ Fogg said on Twitter “I regret 20% of what I tweet“. I’m probably about the same. But you can’t do anything about it. Get over it, learn, and move on.

Lesson #6: A Network is About Quality, not Quantity

Jim Morrison, Miami, FL, 1969

Aaah, the Miami Incident. Now this didn’t actually happen exactly like it did in the movie, but I prefer that version. The story goes something like this. Morrison was really struggling with his self-created sex-symbol rocker image. He arrived at the concert much more drunk than usual (and usual was pretty damn drunk). He stumbled to the mic, and started rambling – a few versus of his poetry, but mostly utter nonsense. The crowd was getting uneasy, and Jim was getting annoyed with his followers that didn’t understand him. He started calling them idiots, culminating in the often quoted (though not 100% accurate) “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!”

What am I getting at here? Well, Morrison had been collecting “followers” for years, and then decided he didn’t like them. Hordes of people hanging on his every word, but completely useless to him. They no longer understood what he thought he was. It’s a bit like Twitter really. The important thing is not how many followers you have – an army of SEO spammers or porn bots or follow-me-follow-you-gurus is no use to man or beast. You want people that care. Jim said it far better a year later in one of his poems – A Feast Of Friends a.k.a The Severed Garden. Admittedly he’s talking about death, but it works for Twitter too:

I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family.

You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows
- SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been getting some criticism. “Your posts are too long”, some people cried. “Lose the Twitterfeed”, shouted someone else. “Your Southpark Avatar is so 15 year old” claimed an anonymous coward. Hey man, I made that avatar myself. That hurts. But seeing as I work for an agency that prides itself on its insight and user research, I decided it was time to do some user research of my own. As the budget I assign to run this blog is three fifths of fuck-all, Survey Monkey was the logical choice. Thanks so much to the 37 people that answered it.

Firstly, let’s talk about the Bob Dylan blog introductions that I’ve been pouring my heart and soul in to. As the chart below shows, more than a third of the respondents don’t read them. And another bunch want a change of theme.

So I thought about this. Granted, some of the quotes are, at best, very tenuously linked to the topic at hand – I need to improve the relevance. But Bob’s got so much more to give. I’m going to try not to repeat songs yet, but again, some tunes have so many classic lyrics that I might have to. If I do a new a brand theme, it’ll be in 2010. After deciding this, I tweeted my new found conviction:

To which someone responded:He has a ridiculous avatar, and what kind of  name is @golansleepweed? What does that mean, anyway? Nevertheless, this clown also happens to be the Head of LBi Intergalatic Creative Domination so I feel obliged to listen. I know which way the wind is blowing, so Bob is staying on the blog. After all, if he’s good enough for sat-nav, he’s good enough for me. Thanks, Chris, for the vote of confidence.

Some other findings of the so-called “research”:

• 19% of you actually want links to open in new windows. 64% agree with the no-new-window policy. 19% don’t care. Sweet.
• Only 13% of you found the survey annoying. 87% of my readers are all round nice guys. The web is about giving, man.
• This one surprised me. 76% like the automated Twitterfeed announcements.  13% don’t care and only 11% want them dead. So they’re staying, giving me less reason to retweet my own posts and feel like a douchebag.
• Only 12% think I should tweet with my real name instead of @McBoof. 41% don’t care, and 47%, for some reason, like my dumb-ass name.
• On the other hand, more people think my beautiful South Park avatar is lame (29%) than like it (24%). Most don’t care
• 56% don’t care about my WordPress theme, 44% think it rocks, and 0% (yes, zero) think it sucks. Woot.

And the highlights of the comments:

• Most people want me to swear more. There was a wee bit of concern of kids reading over shoulders and evil corporate firewall traffic snoopers. There was far more swearing on the survey than on my blog.
• I need a proof reader. Badly.
• My posts are too long and ramble a bit. This is because it’s quite difficult to write a well-constructed, thought out post that actually has a point.
• Someone wants me to write more about Kas Thomas.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I’ve been involved in more than a few projects on which the client commissioned my agency to perform high quality user research and then chose to ignore the results. They’re idiots. I guess that makes me an idiot too.

P.S. @Ivanka, I hope you aren’t reading this. See what happens to User Research here after you leave …

Don't worry, Bob. I'm not ditching you just because the crowds are baying for blood

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
- BALLAD OF A THIN MAN

It’s official. The geeks still pwn Twitter. Just when one started to think the normal people were taking over, #songsincode enters the fray. Now this is without doubt the geekiest hashtag to trend. Yes, you heard me. #songsincode is trending.

So what is it all about. In summary, people are writing song lyrics using a variety of programming languages. I’ve seen Java, C#, Perl, Ruby, Python, SQL, .htaccess and nonsensical hybrids. I tried to do an XSLT one but was snookered by the verbosity.  However, @bdelacretaz and @4dz managed. If you’ve seen other languages, please leave a link in the comments.

I’m not going to compile my list of favourites. There are far too many. The sitepoint blog has started a list. I’m sure many more will follow. However, below are the attempts of the people in my little Twitter network.

@McBoof
!( !( !( !( !( !( !( !( !( !( !( !( !limit) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ; if (!limit) { sky.reachFor(); } #songsincode

@umbraco
namespace Nelly {public class House() {if (this.temp > 30) {foreach(Person p in this.People) {p.Strip();}} }} #songsincode

@kasthomas
OK @McBoof, if (myFriend!=null && isBlowing(Weather.TYPE_WIND)) return (answer(question,Question.TYPE_PHILOSOPHICAL) in Wind); #songsincode

@bdelacretaz
if(bottle.hasMessage()) throw new SosToTheWorldException; #songsincode

@puf
var I = !you; var me = feel(Color.fromRGB(#0000FF)); I = lost(!Color.of(you)); #songsincode

@athraen
Submarine sub=new Submarine(){color=Colors.Yellow}; #songsincode

@darrenferguson
@McBoof or alternatively sub no { my $n = shift; if($n <= 10) { no($n+1); } else { no_limit(); } }

@rossbruniges
money++ cash++ hoes++ #songsincode

This kind of thing couldn’t happen on MySpace or FaceBook. Another reasons why Twitter still rocks.

Now I gotta friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife
- I SHALL BE FREE NO. 10

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Our involvement started after I saw this:

How To Get A Free Venue

Darren and I hooked up, and the rest is history. So Twitter can get you free stuff too. The 20 people was a bit conservative – turned out that nearly 60 people signed up. Even CMSWire covered the event which makes it famous. According to Darren, the biggest cock-up of the event was the live coding demo which, true to form, failed spectacularly. I never trust a live coding demo which works properly so maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Waiting near the barista before the start

For me the highlight was a chat with Niels Hartvig (@umbraco), Umbraco founder and guru. We talked mainly about XSLT which, I think, he likes. W00t! Turns out that he’s presenting later in the year at the Best Conference in the World. Yours truly is speaking there too. Come along – you know you want to. He flew over from Norway to be at the Umbraco Day, which kept all the groupies very happy.

Niels reveals the bonus features in the upcoming Umbraco version

I also really enjoyed chatting to Gregory Roekens (@roekens), CTO of Wunderman. It’s great to have a couple of beers with someone that works for another big agency and has to deal with the same kind of issues that I do. Hoping we’ll be able to do it again soon and, in his words, become good frenemies.

Thanks to Darren for organising, Marcus for doing all the logistics at LBi and Percipient Studios for taking a whole load of cool photos that I’ve stolen. You can also read more about the day on the LBiQ blog by @bijeshtank and @mobragauk. If anyone else knows of any other blogs or photos, please add links in the comments.

And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’.
- WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN

So, you want to follow the CMS world on Twitter. How about the ability to follow the creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati in a couple of clicks. Well, my friend, you’ve struck gold. [UPDATE: Even more gold than promised. The list is growing. More than 40]

First, here’s is my list. I’m sure I’ve forgotten people so many apologies and DM me to get added or if I’ve spelt something wrong. I’m not including any CMS vendors here. I am including people who work for vendors but don’t use Twitter to sell. You can get a list of vendors on Twitter on the Gilbane blog. For those that are impatient, I’m recommending Twitterator to follow all the users in one go. All of these folk are engaging on Twitter and active in the blogosphere. You can filter them first if you’d like. In no particular order:

1. cmswatch – My favourite CMS analysts
2. cmswire – My favourite CMS news source
3. cmsreport – More CMS news and chatter
4. jboye – Organises the best CMS conference in the world
5. TonyByrne – CMS Watch, Founder
6. theresaregli – CMS Watch, Search and DAM
7. jarrodgingras – CMS Watch, Content and Usability
8. kasthomas – CMS Watch, Geek, Web CMS
9. adriaanbloem – CMS Watch, Search and SoCo
10. janusboye – The man behind jboye
11. lwelchman – WelchmanPierpoint, Web CMS and Operations Guru
12. cpierpoint – WelchmanPierpoint, Coffee Addict
13. jdavidhobbs – WelchmanPierpoint, CMS Consultant
14. dkonizeski – WelchmanPierpoint, Web Operations
15. apoorv – Wipro Guru – Portals and Web CMS
16. irina_guseva – CMS Wire writer, says it as it is
17. barbmosher – CMS Wire writer, SharePoint junkie
18. fgilbane – COE of Gilbane Group, Content and Web
19. billtrippe – Gilbane Analyst
20. lehawes – Gilbane, Collaboration and KM
21. lciarlone – Gilbane, Content Globalisation
22. tim_walters – Info and Knowledge Mgmt., Forrester
23. kreidy – 451 Group Analyst, CMS and Collab
24. jmancini77 – President of AIIM
25. skjekkeland – Vice President of AIIM
26. sggottlieb – Content Guru and Open Source Analyst
27. halvorson – Content Strategist, Author
28. rahelab – Content Strategist, Intentional Design
29. StepTwoDesigns – Intranet Talk from Down Under
30. jimmurphyamr – Knowledge and Content Management, AMR Research
31. netjmc – Intranet and Portal Strategy
32. ldallasBMOC – Big Men on Content
33. dankeldsen – Co-founder of Information Architected
34. McBoof – Compiler of useless info and lists.
35. jameshoskins – Wise CMS man
36. jamesurquhart – The Cloud Myth Buster
37. piewords – ECM/CMIS techie/blogger
38. pierotintori – CEO of TERMINALFOUR. CMS Techie.
39. jessewilkins – ECM, ERM, Former USMC drill instructor
40. julesdw – SDL Tridion – blogger
41. puf – SDL Tridion Developer Ubergeek
42. davidnuescheler – Day Blogger, CMS Guru
43. kevinc2003 – And the Day CMO
44. IanTruscott – Alterian Blogger
45. yuvalararat – Vignette Blogger
46. johnnewton – Founder of Alfresco and Documentum
47. dcaruana – Alfresco Chief Architect, CMIS, Open Source
48. jeffpotts01 – Optaros ECM practice lead, Open Source fan
49. bdelacretaz – Open Source, Apache Foundation and Day R&D
50. trieloff – Day DAM and SoCo expert
51. dirkmshaw – Vignette Social Media Strategy
52. ebarroca – CEO at Nuxeo
53. sfermigier – Yet another Nuxeo ECM man
54. efge – Nuxeo R&D, Architect. CMIS man.
55. MartinSS – Open Text ECM architect
56. pmonks – Alfresco consultant. CMS visionary
57. justincormack – Squiz Tech Guru. CMS visionary
58. darrenferguson – Interwoven and Umbraco CMS Dude
59. cherylmckinnon – Open Text, Enterprise 2.0
60. twentworth12 – Web Solutions Evangelist, ex-Autonomy>/li>
61. craighepburn – RedDot (Open Text) Social Media Strategy
62. adrianmateljan – RedDot (Open Text) CMS Blogger
63. jeanmariepascal – Open Source ECM Consultant
64. erikmhartman – Independent Consultant, Writer, Speaker
65. LuisSala – Alfresco Big Gun
66. scroisier – Jahia Strategy
67. OlegR – Content and Text Mining Evangelist
68. athraen – EPiServer R&D Developer, Blogger, CMIS.NET
69. danielchalef – KnowledgeTree CEO, fellow Saffa
70. tony_bailey – Gin Drinking CMS consultant at Acquity Group
71. tednyberg – Agency side EPiServer MVP, Umbraco and more.
72. proops – Independent, CMS Blogger
73. izahoor – Independent, Public Sector CMS Dude
74. daponovich – CMS Myth blogger
75. jeffcram – CMS Myth blogger

So, next step is to copy the nicely formatted list at the bottom of this post, and paste them into Twitterator as shown in the screenshot below. You need to give them your Twitter creds, sadly. James promised he’ll write me a bulk following program that uses OAuth. Don’t worry if you’re already following some of the users. It handles these pretty well.

[UPDATE: Forget Twitterator! TweetML is far better. Use this link: http://tweepml.org/McBoof-s-CMS-Gurus/]

And here is the list in a nice cut and paste format. Stick them into your clipboard, and off to Twitterator. That’s it. Happy following. Don’t forget to delete me if you only like serious CMS chatter. Finally, if you want some of these people’s blogs, have a look at the OPML Feed of my blogroll, or the large list compiled by @proops.

cmswatch
cmswire
cmsreport
jboye
TonyByrne
theresaregli
jarrodgingras
kasthomas
adriaanbloem
janusboye
lwelchman
cpierpoint
jdavidhobbs
dkonizeski
apoorv
irina_guseva
barbmosher
fgilbane
billtrippe
lehawes
lciarlone
tim_walters
kreidy
jmancini77
skjekkeland
sggottlieb
halvorson
rahelab
StepTwoDesigns
jimmurphyamr
netjmc
ldallasBMOC
dankeldsen
McBoof
jameshoskins
jamesurquhart
piewords
pierotintori
jessewilkins
julesdw
puf
davidnuescheler
kevinc2003
IanTruscott
yuvalararat
johnnewton
dcaruana
jeffpotts01
bdelacretaz
trieloff
dirkmshaw
ebarroca
sfermigier
efge
MartinSS
pmonks
justincormack
darrenferguson
cherylmckinnon
twentworth12
craighepburn
adrianmateljan
jeanmariepascal
erikmhartman
LuisSala
scroisier
OlegR
athraen
danielchalef
tony_bailey
tednyberg
proops
izahoor
daponovich
jeffcram

When I’m gone
You will remember my name
I’m gonna win my way
To wealth and fame
- ‘TIL I FELL IN LOVE WITH YOU

I’ve now been live for about 100 days. Initially, my main focus was building the blog nicely. You can read about my theme, plugins, feeds and mobile version in My First 50 Days of WordPress – Part I. The focus of the this post is further validation, authoring, SEO and traffic driving. I don’t like buttons and badges on sites as they slow things down, but I decided I’d keep a separate page with all of them – Tools, Buttons and Badgers. This page will be a continuous work in progress.

New Plugins

Firstly, I’ve added a few more plugins and painlessly upgraded to WordPress 2.8.1:

• BackUpWordPress - a useful plugin to ensure you don’t lose anything. It even emails you your backups.
• GZippy - enables GZIP HTTP Compression to your pages (not static files like .js or .css which can’t be done by a plugin as it is an Apache level thing) which reduces bandwidth and latency significantly
• Robots Meta – I’ve used this to stop search engines indexing my archive, category and tag pages. I only want my home page and posts in their indexes. Also a good place to store your verification codes for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft WebMaster tools.

WordPress for iPhone App

I’m a huge iPhone fan, and use the free WordPress for iPhone app to write my posts on the underground. One warning – the Mofuse plugin breaks this and you get the dreaded NSXMLParserErrorDomain rubbish. The short explanation: Mofuse detects the user agent of a request to decide if it should redirect a user to the mobile site. Unfortunately, it uses quite a blunt search for this, so any user agent with “mobile” or “iphone” in it becomes a mobile version. WordPress for iPhone has a user agent that includes “wp-iphone”, so Mofuse redirects the XML-RPC requests to your mobile domain which doesn’t do XML-RPC. I’ve mailed the creators of the plugin so hopefuly they’ll fix this soon. In the mean time, you’ll need to change the code of your plugin yourself by adding this at line 95 of mofuse.php (I’m on version 0.9o):

94: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘iphone’)!==false || stripos($ua, ‘ipod’)!==false) { $mf_isiphone=1; }
95: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘wp-iphone’)!==false) { $mf_isiphone=0; } // ADDED THIS LINE
96: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘android’)!==false) { $mf_isandroid=1; }

Twitter for Traffic Driving

I’ve posted about this earlier in Twigger Happy Self Promotion. I get more traffic from Twitter than from organic search, which is why I’m mentioning it here before SEO. As mentioned in the previous post too, I’ve stopped being a douchebag and only tweet about a blog posting once, unless I have real updates. Flogging the same horse gets you unfollowed. The most important thing is to engage people, and follow people that talk about your areas of interest. Hopefully some will follow you back, and give you the much needed retweets to expand your audience. Here are the Twitter tools I use:

• TweetDeck (and Tweetdeck for iPhone) – you need a good client to keep on top of the game. I like running a few searches for topics of interest so that I can keep up with the breaking news and meet folk that have similar interests to me. I also love the grouping functionality so you can make sure you don’t miss tweets from the most important Tweeple you’re stalking.
• Twitterfeed - this is hooked up to my RSS feed and posts a Tweet once, normally about 30 minutes after I publish a post. I’m thinking about turning it off.
• Twilerts - can run a search and email you daily which the results. I used it to track the results of my stupid CMS quiz. It turns out it’ll only do 100 results per day though.
• BackTweets - Great site. I use it to send me an email whenever someone links to my domain. It understands all the URL shorteners out there so does something a simple seach can’t

The Twitterverse - Click for Large Image (cc) www.briansolis.com + www.jess3.com

WebMaster Tools

When it comes to SEO, these should be your first point of call. The three big players all have their own, and it is well worth getting account with all of them and fixing all errors. They each tell you different things. They’re still indexing more than I want them to.

• Google Webmaster Tools – I mentioned this in the previous post as it is super important. I’ve got no errors and no warnings on my site. Use your GMail account for this. This site doesn’t tell your your PageRank – more on that later. Google still has my tag pages indexed even though they have a noindex – http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:jonontech.com
• Bing Webmaster Tools -You need a Windows Live ID for this, and validate your site in a similar way to Google. Again, no errors or warnings here either. Strangely, my site gets 5 / 5 “Green Bars”, which sounds good but I don’t know what it means. Bing has my category, tag and archive pages – http://www.bing.com/results.aspx?q=site:jonontech.com
• Yahoo Site Explorer -Yahoo! ID this time. Similar site validation required. Also has tag pages – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/search?p=jonontech.com

SEO Checkers and Directories

I use the following sites to check if all is well – I probably run them about once a week. Between them, I think they check most things:

• Multipage Validator – Recently found this site, which checks multiple URLs using the W3C HTML Validator. Only does about 200 pages but stil useful
• WebSite Grader – Checks all manner of things, including entries into various directories
• Web Optimisation Web Page Analyser – checks things related to the download speed
• popuri.us – quickly checks your rankings, postions in a few places – see image below
• Technorati - I’ve added my blog and check the positions there. I only have one fan. Me.
• Alexa - The daddy of ranking sites. I’m only just in the top million
• Cacheability Engine – Check how well your site caches. I need to do work here still

In closing

This post has been a bit of a brain dump of the tools I’m using. Probably as much for me to remember them as for others. I hope some people find it vaguely useful and I’d love to hear from you if there other things I’m missing out on.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.
- IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY BLEEDING)

So here’s a question. How many times is one meant to announce the arrival of their latest and greatest blog post on Twitter before they look like a knob head?

Twitter is a good traffic source for clowns like me that have just started a blog. It isn’t like millions of people know you exist, so you’ve got to advertise somewhere. Have a look at my Google Analytics Traffic Sources graph:

Try to ignore the grey piece of pie. That’s all the “other” sources aggregated together. Direct traffic is biggest.  I get slightly more visitors via the Twitter web site than Google. And I have a feeling a large chunk of the direct traffic is from desktop Twitter clients such as TweetDeck or Seesmic. I’d estimate at least a third of my traffic is Twaffic. As an aside, if anyone has a good way to track a) how many clicks came via each Twitter client (which is probably impossible) or b) which tweets actually generated the traffic (which is possible if you encode more things into your shortened URL) I’d love to here about it. 

So, tweeting about blog post at least once seems sensible. But the problem with Twitter is that it is a bit too real-time, and unless someone a) is following very few people, b) likes to scroll back through their history or c) is running clever notification tools, the chances are that your lone tweet will go unnoticed.

When I started, I thought I’d let the all important first blog post Tweet come automatically via Twitterfeed. That way I didn’t feel like I was blowing my own trumpet. After all, the machines were sending the Tweets, not me. For those that don’t know about it, you simply point Twitterfeed at an RSS feed and it does the shouting for you. Some people think any automatic Tweetbots (such as Twitterfeed) are a lame violation of the Twitter ethic. After all, if someone wants to know when I post something, they can subscribe to my RSS feed. I don’t agree with this – many people tend to use Twitter as their uber-aggregator at the moment. My RSS feed stats are sad proof of this.

So, with Twitterfeed rearing to go, I published my first post. After 45 mins of silence and feverishly waiting for my first blog visitor, I couldn’t take the suspense any longer. I manually tweeted my arrival on the blogosphere to my slavering hordes of followers. About an hour later, Twitterfeed finally kicked in and did its thing. That’s become my pattern now. When I publish a post, I tweet about it once myself as soon as I’m done, and the bot spews something about about an hour later. Job done. The world knows about it.

Or does it? I tend to publish my posts between 23:00 and 01:00 UK time. Most of my sensible followers are in bed, or at least not sad enough to be scrutinising their feeds. And as the Google Analytics map above shows, I’ve got 75 other countries who depend on my wisdom for their blog reading fix. So, as much as I hate the douche bags that repeatly tweet the same link to their blog posts, I’m becoming one of them. I normally unfollow the stuck record tweeters quite quickly. My current theory is to tweet my post again at about 10:00 UK time, and then again at about 15:00 UK time for my adoring fans in the US of A. Is that reasonable? Or is three manual tweets and one Bot tweet per blog post also flagrant douchebaggery?

Of course the answer to all of this is to harness the real power of Twitter – the retweet. These are waves of publicitly goodness that spread beyond your usual audiences into brave new worlds. Grovelling with a “Pls RT” at the end of a tweet is out of the question, though. So you have to desparately hope that the lovely people will retweet your plug because they really really like your article, or because they just feel sorry for you.

I think what this all means is that if your content is crap, no amount of self-promotion is going to get you anywhere. But create content that is interesting and it can spread across the interwebs like wildfire. Then you can sell out and put ads on your site, make lots of money and live in Bermuda.

In closing, I’d just like to get on to my knees and beg you all to tweet about this blog post. Retweet anything you see about it. Use the social networking links at the bottom of this post to Digg It, add it to Delicious, Technorati Rate it and everything else. Link to it from your esteemed sites. Send a mail to the EVERYONE mailing list in your company. Add it to your student’s coursework. If you are an editor of Slashdot, El Reg or Mashable, can we do a link exchange? Please. I’ve got a young son to feed. He wants his Daddy to make the big time. He wants to live in Bermuda. Tweet this. Please.

Pretty Please.

Black crows in the meadow
Across a broad highway.
Though it’s funny, honey,
I just don’t feel much like a
Scarecrow today.
- BLACK CROW BLUES

It’s been yet another busy April Fool’s day. Sites like Techcrunch and Slashdot have enormous lists of tech related scams, but my favourite are listed below. There isn’t any particular order.

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just love those guys at The Pirate Bay. Following the lawsuit has been pretty funny, and I seriously hope nothing happens to them. Their home page now has a “Warner Brothers Heart Pirate Bay” image on it. And if any of you have some downtime, reading the letters on their Legal Page is quite possibly the best way to fill it. Be sure to read their response to the various takedown notices.
Introducing Joopal Finally, the difficult decision for Open Source CMS implementers is over. Drupal and Joomla! have finally decided to collaborate and have brought us Joopal. It has “the power of Joomla! with Drupal configurability”. Some of the comments on the thread are also pretty fun, with fans of both CMS systems having digs at one another. Now I’m eagerly awaiting Tridignette and Docuwoven.
Pay and Get Back your Original Facebook I’m one of the many that really doesn’t like the way FaceBook keeps changing things. It’s like supermarkets that keep moving products around to make you buy more. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on FaceBook now. While I appreciate the fact that they’re extremely agile, it is also annoying as hell if you’re an old dude like me that fears change. Not only that, their last API change broke my first FaceBook App! But the good news is that “beginning today Facebook users will have an option to pay a yearly sum of $24.99 and get back their favorite Facebook“.
Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink Now this is something that could actually happen one day. This time last year, we could have had an April Fool’s joke saying “Skittles Ditches Corporate Site For Twitter”. Anyway, not only are The Guardian becoming a Twitter-only publication, they’re also converting their entire archive into Tweets. My favourite is probably “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?“. Read the article, and the history at the bottom. A classic.
Gmail Autopilot by CADIE – The easiest email could possibly be. This one got a lot of publicity of course. The world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) has been released, and Google are kind enough to let you use it for free to automatically reply to emails. Looks extremely useful, and will make you rich by automatically closing multi-million dollar deals with Nigerian bankers.
Introducing Opera Face Gestures The browser wars are hotting up. Using Face Observation Opera Language (FOOL!), they are able to “recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser.” The video of the idiot operating the browser is awesome, and the handy guide to the gestures is pretty fun too. Nice one.
Internet Explorer 8.1 Eagle Eyes Leaked Maybe spurred on by Opera’s announced, Smashing Magazine have leaked news of Microsoft’s new browser – IE 8.1. aka “Eagle Eyes”. They actually did this quite early yesterday, and I know a few people that fell for it. It unveils a host of new features that actually look quite real. Eagle Eyes will even support Mozilla based add-ons and those tested “worked flawlessly (some of the developers even claim that – in terms of performance – they work much better under IE 8.1 versus Firefox 3).“
ECM Vendors Throw in the Towel at Philadelphia Summit Love this. And maybe even a hint of truth in it. Combining April Fool’s and the G20 summit, the guys at CMS Watch announce the death of ECM. The twenty main ECM vendors (the E20) declare the whole concept a waste of time. My favourite quote: “I can totally understand it,” says CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, “hell, we can’t even manage our own documents.” CMS Watch recently reverted to its f: drive after a failed, four-year effort to implement a commercial document management system.
Up, Up, and Away – Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky If, like me, you’re sick to death of hearing about Cloud Computing, this is the one for you. I’m just going to re-quote the intro and hope you’ll read the rest: For a while the cloud was simply a metaphor meaning “a bunch of computers somewhere else.” Until now, somewhere else meant good old terra firma, the Earth itself. After extensive customer research we found that this rigid, antiquated way of thinking just won’t cut it in today’s post-capitalist world. They need locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it.
SlideShare Rockstars Let’s end on a slightly controversial one. To summarise, SlideShare made every presentation look like it had been viewed 100 more times than it had in reality. They then mailed users telling them that “they must have done something right” and that they should tweet their success to #bestofslideshare. They’ve had a bit of a backlash from users that didn’t find it funny. They say on their blog: “We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.” Personally, I think it is hilarious. It’s April Fool’s people. Live with it. People still falling for it too.

Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf,
Ring them bells for all of us who are left,
Ring them bells for the chosen few
Who will judge the many when the game is through.
- RING THEM BELLS

It seems Top 10 lists are all the rage these days, so before the month ends, I figured I’d jump onto the bandwagon and present my Top 10 Tech Lists of the Month. As far as I can tell, all these lists were first published in March 2009.

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS

Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.

Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"

You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.

So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?

I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.

So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).

I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.

Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.

Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.

In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.

P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:

• 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)

P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.

Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken
- EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

Well, the dawn of IE8 is upon us. My favourite feature has got to be “Automatic Crash Recovery” or ACR. It sounds pretty scary. Will I even know it crashed? Will it ask me to send an error report? Okay, okay, it actually is going to be a useful feature. But I’d still prefer it if it didn’t crash.

To be honest, I’ve got no idea just how bad it is going to be, but a Twitter search for “IE8 broken” is starting to return results. We have done some testing against our sites on the beta versions, and maybe things won’t be too catastrophic. Things will break, but hopefully only little cracks. It isn’t going to be fun for the front end developers who have yet another browser against which to test, but it doesn’t look like the world will end. Someone has reported this it breaks WordPress, which I don’t think I believe. And as I write this, Twitter is over capacity and dead again. IE8′s fault perhaps?

As for me, I’ve turned into a bit of a coward since I became an early adopter of Vista. That wasn’t fun, so I’m in no hurry to install IE8 until the blogosphere decides it works properly. My plan for the next few weeks is to install this toolkit to ensure I don’t get auto updated. grab some canned food and a fridge full of beer, and hide in the basement until the smoke clears.

P.S. If you want to read an article that actually has a lot of useful insights into IE8, I would suggest CMSWire’s IE8 8 Released, Already Obsolete?