Monthly Archives: July 2008

Consolidation in the Blogosphere – Part II

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Yesterday, I posted a video that suggested that perhaps a little consolidation needs to happen in the blogosphere. I was not the first. At the time of that recording, it had slipped my mind that Mike Arrington predicted a roll-up of blogs back in March.

Regardless, the issue has sparked a very interesting discussion around the blogosphere. Duncan Riley took the first major step of actually putting out a call to action on the concept of an advertisement federation.

Steve Hodson complained that he was concerned about the users who read a blog for the blog and might not like editorial restraint that might come from a new “conglomerate”. He did a whole podcast around this. Thanks Steve!

From my perspective, there’s two parts to this equation. There’s a play for advertising dollars where a combined alliance of 5-8 blogs each doing 150k pageviews a month can command a far more significant direct sale interest than any one of those blogs alone.

The second part of that equation is in content, and more importantly, diversity of content. Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins seems to think there is no problem with bunches of bloggers talking about the same things all the time. I disagree, as I think most. But putting that aside, there will always be the echo chamber, regardless of alliances. It’s just that an alliance can present a distributed voice on a wide variety of topics making it more desirable for the combined audience of all member blogs put together as well as the advertisers.

End of the day, this concept still has miles to go before anything actually happens. But I’m happy with the direction of the conversation.

Here’s the second video.

Consolidation in the Blogosphere

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I think we need to see a consolidation of content and advertising.

Everyone’s competing with each other because they don’t know how to give up their individual voice. What happens is we get a clamor for top Techmeme billing.

Instead, I’d like to see more federations of blogs, where content producers work hand in hand to protect the turf of the others while helping to funnel content opportunities to the best source for coverage within that federation. In the advertising arena, five sites at 150k pageviews each can’t get direct-sale advertising by themselves, but as a 750k pageview federation, the tide turns.

We need more consolidation. It’s survival of the fittest.

What's Your Legacy?

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Back in December, the blogging world was struck dumb when Marc Orchant passed away suddenly due to a heart attack. I don’t want to rehash all the details as you can find them elsewhere. Sufficed to say, many tears were shed over his passing.

Time heals all wounds, right? No, not quite.

Today, GigaOm announced the “acquisition” of mobile gadget site jkOnTheRun. To me, an interesting subplot was the post that James Kendrick from jkOnTheRun wrote mourning the fact that Marc was not present to enjoy the excitement of the acquisition. This in turn spurred this FriendFeed conversation.

  • Steve Rubel shared an item on Google Reader – I miss Marc Orchant
  • Aaron Brazell, Andrew Baron, Jason Calacanis, James Hull, paul mooney, Peter Dawson, David Risley, Dave Martin, matt hollingsworth and Dan Liebke liked this
  • I miss Marc too and his writings – Steve Rubel
  • me three. – Robert Scoble
  • Same here. – James Hull
  • Today is dedicated to Marc. He helped get me my first paid blogging gig and now our blog is part of Om’s network. Thanks Marc. – Kevin C. Tofel
  • me 2 – Peter Dawson
  • He would have been proud – James Tenniswood
  • @Kevin he is smiling today. – Steve Rubel
  • Steve, I think you’re right. I hope he knows the profound influence he had on so many people. I’m humbled to call him a friend. – Kevin C. Tofel
  • I miss him too! I was talking about him at dinner tonight. Gnomedex is coming up and I was thinking how great it was to see him last year at the event. I was so lucky to spend time with him. – Betsy Weber
  • Now you know why Marc has a big thumbs-up wherever he might be. :) – James Kendrick
  • yeah…. me too. i think about him when Gnomedex, CES and DEMO conferences roll around. He was a true gentleman and a scholar. still have him on my skype….. every now and then i think of sending him a note. – Jason Calacanis
  • Me too. :( Gnomedex was the last time I ever saw Marc. – Aaron Brazell
  • Aaron: you were the last person he tweeted as well… as I’m sure you know. – Jason Calacanis
  • I remember, Jason… :( – Aaron Brazell
  • I had the good fortune to work with Marc’s daughter Rebecca at PR Newswire. Rebecca and I set at adjacent desks and she was very helpful to me. I never had the good fortune to meet Marc but truly enjoyed working with Rebecca. It’s nice to know that this man who resided in the place I now live is so well remembered. – James
  • Me too. Marc was always a ray of light, always uplifting. Made you feel good about the human race. – Cameron Reilly

Of course, I was the last person Marc ever tweeted when I was in the midst of trying to quit smoking.
Picture 4.png

To this day, I think about Marc and this conversation brought everything flooding back. I more than occasionally wonder how Sue, his wife, is doing and have often thought about looking her up and giving her a call. But, then I think it still might be too soon. I don’t know.

What struck me about this friendfeed conversation is the word “legacy”. Marc had a legacy and it has carried over past his death. Legacy is the effect you have on people when you are gone. Legacy is the weight of your presence when you are not present.

Marc’s legacy lives on as he has positively changed so many lives and those lives remember.

Right now, the conversation in the technology blogging sphere is about relevance. It is hitting a moment where survival of the fittest is kicking into gear. Currently, everyone is fighting over the Techmeme scraps dropped from the plates of a few. Who can get the most pageviews? Who can track into top positions? It’s all very short sighted.

Value is created when you are able to positively affect the lives of those around you. Maybe talking about Seagate drives is not quite as sexy as adopting children in Africa, but it changes the way that a technology manager invests money.

Discussing African American history with a historian, as we will do on Saturday evening has the potential to affect real lives. Talking about how to be like Julia Allison does not.

Legacy is the mark you leave on a society when you are blessed to no longer be a part of it. Marc left his legacy. I hope to leave mine. What are you doing to leave a mark?

Cloud Computing Does Not Spell the End for Common Sense I.T. Management

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Sometimes I think I might be the only one who retains commons sense. Really. At least in the area of I.T. Management. Though we had our share of growing pains at b5media, the knowledge gained from working in an enterprise environment at Northrop Grumman was only accentuated by my tenure as the Director of Technology at b5media.

Unfortunately, some common best-use practices in developing infrastructure are often put aside by those with shiny object syndrome surrounding “cloud computing“.

Let me explain.

You may have noticed a severe hampering of many internet services over the weekend. The culprit was a rare, but yet heavy-duty outage of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) cloud storage. S3 is used by many companies including Twitter, WordPress.com, FriendFeed, and SmugMug to name a few. Even more individuals are using S3 for online data backup or for small projects requiring always-on virtual disk space. Startups often use S3 due to the “always on” storage, defacto CDN and the inexpensive nature of the service… it really is cheap!

And that’s good. I’m a fan of using the cheapest, most reliable service for anything. Whatever gets you to the next level quickest and with as little output of dollars is good in my book, for the same reason I’m a fan of prototyping ideas in Ruby on Rails (but to be clear, after the prototype, build on something more reliable and capable of handling multi-threaded processes, kthxbai.)

However, sound I.T. management practice says that there should never be a single point of failure. Ever. Take a step back and map out the infrastructure. If you see anyplace where there’s only one of those connecting lines between major resource A and major resource B – start looking there for bottlenecks and potential company-sinking aggravation.

Thus was the case for many companies using S3. Depending on the use of S3, and if the companies had failover to other caches, some companies were affected more than others. Twitter for instance, uses S3 for avatar storage but had no other “cold cache” for that data rendering a service without user images – bad, but not deathly.

SmugMug shrugged the whole thing off (which is a far cry from the disastrous admission that “hot cache” was used very little when Amazon went down back in February), which I thought was a bit odd. Their entire company revolves around hosted photos on Amazon S3 and they simply shrugged off an 8 hour outage as “ok because everyone goes down once in awhile”. Yeah, and occasionally people get mugged in dark city streets, but as long as it’s not me it’s okay! Maybe it was the fact that the outage occurred on a Sunday. Who knows? To me, this sort of outage rages as a 9.5/10 on the critical scale. Their entire business is wrapped up in S3 storage with no failover. For perspective, one 8 hour outage in July constitutes 98.9% uptime – a far cry from five 9′s (99.999%) which is minimal mitigation of risk in enterprise, mission-critical services.

WordPress.com, as always, comes through as a shining example of a company who economically benefits from the use of S3 as a cold cache and not primary access or “warm cache”.

Let me stop and provide some definition. Warm (or hot) cache is always preferable to cold cache. It is data that has been loaded into memory or a more reasonably accessible location – but typically memory. Cold cache is a file based storage of cached data. It is less frequently accessed because access only occurs if warm cache data has expired or doesn’t exist.

WordPress.com has multiple levels of caching because they are smart and understand the basic premise of eliminating single point of failure. Image data is primarily accessed over their server cluster via a CDN, however S3 is used as a cold cache. With the collapse of S3 over the weekend, WordPress.com, from my checking, remained unaffected.

This is the basic principle of I.T. enterprise computing that is lost on so much of the “web world”. If companies have built and scaled (particularly if they have scaled!) and rely on S3 with no failover, shame on them. Does it give Amazon a black eye? Absolutely. however, at the end of the day SmugMug, WordPress.com, Friendfeed, Twitter and all the other companies utilizing S3 answer to their customers and do not have the luxury of pointing the finger at Amazon. If their business is negatively affected, they have no one to blame but themselves. The companies who understood this planned accordingly and were not negatively affected by the S3 outage. Those who weren’t were left, well, holding the bag.

Added: GNIP gets it, and they are new to the game. Even startups have no excuse.

Slipstream Intros, Outros and Other Multimedia Into Talkshoe Calls

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So, if you’ve noticed, I’m kind of a perfectionist about podcasts I do. It was one of my downfalls when I did the Suicide Fan sports show awhile ago. I wasted so much time getting details right that I finally gave up as it wasn’t my full time job and I ended up spending hours for little return.

Then, at the beginning of the year, Geoff and I decided to do a Blog Talk Radio show that would eventually become District of Corruption

The sex appeal about doing a BTR show was there was no production. We called in at a set time, the show started automatically and ended when we said it would. BTR would record the show and give us an MP3. If we wanted to do editing, we could, but we rarely did.

Eventually, things started taking more time. We headed over to Talkshoe and started doing the show over there. One of the nice things about Talkshoe was the ability to upload an edited version. The bad part was that, unlike BTR, we couldn’t slip our really cool intro music into the mix.

The OCD in me started going nuts and I started looking for solutions.

Then, I decided to start up The Aaron Brazell Show, an eclectic show that is disjointed from Technosailor.com due to it’s wide variety of subjects (We have some doozys coming in the next few weeks). My new friend, Spam (I’m not even kidding!), works at a local radio station and offered to make a killer intro for the show. I took him up on the offer and it really was killer. Though there has been revisions that I’ll using going forward, you can hear what he originally produced here.

As you can hear, this is an awesome intro and I certainly didn’t want to only include it in post edits after the live show was done. I had to figure out how to slipstream the audio into my live stream.

Here are the steps I took with Mac OS X to handle this. The total cost (USB headset not included) – $61.50.

Requirements

Also needed, for this setup, is a Mac OS X and a USB headset. You can go much better than this with a mixer and a studio mic with a dedicated phone line. This is the poor mans way – my way.

The Concept

The basic premise here is real simple. I have one way to talk to Talkshoe and that is via the phone. Skype is a good phone-to-bridge method and tends to provide the best audio for such a program. Skype provides one way in and one way out for my interaction with Talkshoe. Think Line In/Line Out.

Therefore, if I want to include my intro MP3, I have to get it into my Skype stream. Windows provides some nifty Skype plugins but I have yet to find a decent one for Mac. I do have iTunes though and with that, I can even set a custom “playlist”, should I want to include other pieces of audio throughout the show.

Somehow, I need to merge my iTunes audio with my USB mic audio. Solution.

Cables

In the pro audio world, the way to pass sound around is via cables. Quarter inch cables. XLR cables. Speaker cables. Snakes. There’s a million kinds of cables. In the Mac software digital world, there’s Soundflower. Soundflower is your virtual cables for typing sounds together and shooting them around to other places. Soundflower appears in sound devices as yet another audio device, both input and output.

Audio Hijack Pro

AHP is a fantastic little utility that wrangles sound in the Mac world. Though I’m quite convinced that I have no clue what all it is capable of, needless to say, it can do just about anything sound related. In my little setup, I’ve opted to “hijack” my Logitech USB headset and send it to Soundflower. Screenshot.

If I were to click the Hijack button, this rerouting of audio would begin happening. However, I’m not done yet. You see, one of the powerfully hidden things about AHP is it’s ability to hijack an applications audio and piggy-back it on the back of another hijacked audio stream.

Enter Application Mixer.

Under the effects tab, there’s a grid. Click on one of the empty grid boxes and a context menu will appear. Lots of options, but the key one is 4FX Effect -> Application Mixer. This will prompt another dialog box where I select iTunes and click the relevant Hijack button. iTunes needs to be relaunched – this is okay.

Now, I’ve merged my iTunes audio (where I’ll play my intro MP3) with my USB mic and sent the combined signal out over Soundflower. To where, though?

Skype

I recommend the SkypeOut purchase as I do a lot of these. I paid for a year. You can pay a $2.95/mo fee if you’d like. Whatever works. Unfortunately, the Skypers haven’t figured out that both Windows and Mac have built in audio device controls so they have recreated the wheel by providing separate audio control from the Operating System.

Nifty.

In preferences, I’ve set my Audio Output to be my USB Headset (allowing me to hear Talkshoe) and my Audio Input to be Soundflower 2ch. The beauty here being that I can call in to my Talkshoe show and play whatever audio files I want from iTunes directly into the show.

Eliminating after-event post-production. For. The. Win. You can hear the final result of the slipstreamed audio here.

Enjoy.

Confirmed: Livingston Communications Acquired by Social Media Group

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smglc.pngThere’s been a few rumors floating around the past few days and over the weekend. We can confirm that Livingston Communications, a boutique social PR firm based in the DC-area and owned by Geoff Livingston (also my cohost on The District of Corruption), has been acquired by Toronto-based Social Media Group headed by rockstar CEO Maggie Fox. The financial terms have not been disclosed.

Notably, as part of this acquisition, SMG is also acquiring the property rights for Blog Potomac driving those of us who are looking for community events free of Public Relations batty, and not in a Christian Bale sort of way.

Geoff will become the Executive Vice President, Americas for SMG and continue to run operations out of Washington D.C.

As a past frequent traveller, I can make recommendations for hotels in the Toronto area. I’m presuming, Geoff, you’ll be making many trips.