Informed Networker Blog

Here’s a little insight into what we did today:

• Continued, as usual, submitting numerous stories to IN and commenting upon stories as appropriate.
• Testing a trial version of webYog’s monYog which monitors MySQL databases for statistical anomalies indicating problems in performance or security.
• Dave is training himself more in-depth on Google’s Ad Manager using the video tutorials and documentation.
• Work on developing mTurk integration is continuing. The developer has familiarized himself with sample code and the api and is preparing for actual project implementation.
• Offered up a beta of our new Akismet anti-spam module for SWCMS/Pligg.
• Ongoing coordination with the SWCMS team.

In my last post I discussed the great challenge IN is currently facing - so many stories even in our core bundle that its overwhelming for the editorial staff (though they have been amazing!). With this I mentioned that one of the ways we intend to counter this problem is by integrating with mTurk. Development on this project will begin tonight! For those who are interested I’ve created a rough diagram of our current workflow with mTurk integrated into the mix. My goal is to have this functionality operating within 5 business days - so expect to see this functionality sometime late next week.

Additionally, we’ve hired a developer full-time for the month of September. Previously he had been working for us 2-4 hours a day, several days a week - now we have him for a full eight every day. We hope to renew his contract long-term at the end of this month, meaning we will have two full-time employees - myself and the developer.

Well, without further ado, here is the workflow diagram:

P.S. Thanks to Gliffy for their excellent web 2.0 diagramming application alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office Visio.

So here is the great challenge Informed Networker (IN) currently faces. There are many, but this by far is the largest: Quite simply, the body of articles concerning IT is larger than we could possibly have imagined.

IN uses an RSS Importer to grab stories from several dozen RSS feeds which we believe represent the core IT news - TechCrunch, GigaOM, Ars Technica, The Register, and the various ZDNet Bloggers. Our analysis shows that stories from these sources alone average well over 200 stories each day¹. That is a heck of a lot of stories, and we have been unable to keep pace.

So how will IN respond to this challenge? I’m so glad you asked. Its not by giving up. Rather we are:

• Working towards integration with Amazon’s mTurk. This will allow us to shift excess editorial work onto a globally distributed and scalable workforce. As this occurs editors will focus from editing the actual RSS stories to reviewing the content edited via mTurk.
• Working towards opening editorial controls to the wider user base. Soon user’s will be able to see these “unedited” imported stories and offer their own edits of the story. Editors will approve/deny edits. Further, using the points system we will give incremental rights to wider users - preventing spammers from editing massive numbers of stories²
• We also intend to shift some responsibility to webmasters. While we have hit a lot of the core blogs, there are scores of other blogs we’d love to follow but don’t have the time. So, we’ll be working one-on-one with bloggers and giving them a custom control panel which allows them to import their blog, edit/post their articles, all in a streamlined fashion. Yes, there is an approval process built into this as well - so only the select, the few, will be able to use these controls - we aren’t opening ourselves up to every blog - nor even the majority of blogs.³
• I’ve moved full-time as of this past Thursday. Starting tomorrow will be my first full-time workweek at IN. Expect to see a dramatic uptick in the number of articles I personally edit.
• We are moving towards establishing a long-term, full-time relationship with our current outsourced/part-time developer, increasing the speed at which we can develop new features.

What This All Boils Down To…

For the time being we will continue to offer a great source for finding and discussing IT news and articles. Over the next several weeks expect to see us increase our ability to handle the massive amount of news many hundred fold as we dynamically scale our systems and workforce.

At the same time, we will continue to work on innovations for IN in other arenas - e.g. the visual story relations will continue at a similar priority level to the above.

Every challenge is an opportunity, not an obstacle. We adapt and change at the speed of light to the needs apparent…hold onto your seats folks, this will be a great ride.

The news continue to roll in…First, we’ve been working on squashing bugs and adding feature enhancements. Amongst them:

• A display bug when you “saved” a story due to a CSS issue has been resolved. This means a slicker UI.
• Sub-Categories are on their way. A technical issue with sub-categories prevented their implementation - but they are present now…over the upcoming weeks expect them to play a large role as we further sub-divide our categories (for instance, under software we’ll have divisions such as windows, linux, mac, and virtualization).
• We’ve completed code development of a new contextual, lightbox-based help system. We’ll be implementing help throughout the site over the next several weeks - get ready for much deeper insight into all the nooks and crannies of IN!

Besides all the development work, today I finished phasing out of Collages.net. Expect a significant uptick in the pace of work across Informed Networker as I move full-time with IN.

Finally, we’ve become an IT Roadmap Partner¹ and look forward to promoting IT Roadmap’s expos and receiving the publicity they will be providing us as well.

I’ll post something fuller later….but for those who are interested, on my hobby site Dave Enjoys I’ve posted a non-recommendation of Web.com’s services. A once happy customer…no longerr.

Image via Wikipedia

Today has been a busy day for IN. We are making some significant changes that we think you’ll find are for the better:

• We are currently dogfooding a rewritten Akismet anti-spam module (we heart Akismet). We’ll be releasing this code back to the SWCMS community once fully completed. This will result in a dramatic reduction in spam on IN (right now its hitting around 50%, with a little training we expect it to hit around 100%). Why You Care: Akismet anti-spam means we’ll be kicking those nasty little jerk spammers all the way to the curb!
• We moved entirely to Google Ad Manager. I’ll talk more about our experiences with gAM (I think I just made that up) in another post…But let’s just say, there is a bit to be desired in gAM’s UI, so much so we might have stayed with openX if they had a hosted solution we trusted as much as Google’s. Why You Care: We ditched the openX database and application - which isn’t exactly a lightweight - this means more resources are dedicated to serving the content you want right now.

And there is a heck of a lot more coming…

A little quiet over at IN over the last several days right? Absolutely. While the dedicated editors and consumers of IN continued to post new content on the main site, this blog has sat essentially untouched since August 12th. Expect that hiatus in posting to cease effective today.

For those who are interested, in one of my other lives I lead a youth ministry at my local church and led the group with my wife to Kentucky where we visited the Creation Museum¹ The day after we returned was Charity and I’s fifth wedding anniversary…which now brings us to today. So what has been happening during this hiatus and what is coming? So glad you asked.

• I made three posts on this blog that garnered us significant attention - What I HATE about ZDNet, IN and SWCMS, and DANGER: FACEBOOK PHISH. I’m still working on responding to all the feedback received from these three posts.
• We are nearing completion of the Webmaster Controls innovations which will allow webmasters to easily submit/manage their posts to/on IN.
• We are nearing completion of the Akismet anti-spam module rewrite.
• We posted job listings for Junior Editors and Sales Representatives on Craigslist and have received some quality inquiries we are currently sifting through.
• Margaret Mackey has been instrumental in the early phases of a incentives system we are currently architecting.²
• We moved from openX to Google Ad Manager³
• I am working closely with the SWCMS team. We are making significant progress in our continuing efforts to revamp and move forward this forked version of Pligg.

Finally, most exciting of all is the fact that as of August 28th I will be full-time dedicated to Informed Networker and no longer employed by Collages.net (whom I wish the best of luck). This means even more rapid development as I am able to again increase the number of hours dedicated to IN.

Thanks to gee01 for placing this photo under the
Creative Commons.

I’ve been using ZDNet for years (and years). I remember when it was primarily a source for downloading software - like download.com or snapfiles.com is now. I remember when they called themselves Ziff-Davis instead of the abbreviated ZDNet.

These days I read a lot of articles written by various bloggers on their network…and I was thinking about the great content these bloggers offer but the extreme frustration ZDNet provokes in me. See, I think about marketing. As a business owner I am constantly looking for ways to promote my business using non-traditional methods in addition to the more traditional. One of these ways is by participating on popular forums and blogs - entering into a discussion with others.

Unfortunately, ZDNet¹, have stripped away much of the incentive for participating in this dialogue. Namely:

1. Identity Promotion - When I comment on a forum or blog I expect to leave my name and website. This serves several purposes. First, if I say something extremely intelligent someone may want to follow up with me. Secondly, it gives me a little return on my time investment into your community site. It is a bit of quid pro quo². That is, you expect me to give you free content and to increase the value of your discussion, I in return expect some recognition for myself and/or my business.

2. Trackbacks - Essentially when one links out to a story or article a link is created back to the original author. I say, “Hey take a look at this nice article from xxx blog” and that blog tips the hat back and says, “Hey, xxx just said something nice about me.” This isn’t purely a quid pro quo relationship, but in fact is meant to encourage discussions across the blogosphere. Readers of one article can follow trackbacks to see how the rest of the blogosphere responds to these comments.

Here’s how ZDNet fails both of these necessary services:

1. Identity Promotion - One has to create an account with ZDNet in order to comment. While one can customize one’s display name (e.g. I just changed mine to informednetworker.com) one doesn’t get the benefit of an instant hyperlink (even if it is no-follow) back to one’s own site.

2. Trackbacks - While ZDNet does offer trackback links there is no way to grab them automatically (at least that I am aware of). You have to manually go over to the article and grab the trackback link. I imagine they did this to prevent spammers and this is most certainly the lesser of the two sins (so much so I even considered not including it).

Blogs/Forums must offer their users that ability to garner some benefit for interacting on the site besides simply garnering information. Garnering information is fine, but it is the community which is essential and if you expect people to take the time to leave intelligent comments they will expect something in return.

When I look at these popular ZDNet blogs one item sticks out - how small the conversation threads are. I would suggest this is because many busy professionals read the articles but don’t take the time to comment - there is simply no benefit.

At IN one of the first features we added was the ability to leave blog-like comments without creating an account - this includes a link-back to your website if you want to leave one.

For the lesser of two sins we fail as well. While this blog offers automatic trackbacks the main IN site does not. We intend to add this capability to the site in the near future. Automatic Trackbacks aren’t as core for us as to blogs because we are a content aggregator rather than the final destination for content. Users generally link back to the original article rather than to our summary…But we may soon have users doing both as we offer them a capability to “trackback” to our aggregated articles driving more traffic to their related stories.

P.S. Yes, I know the spammers are wretched. I get tons of spam every day…But Akismet performs miracles. Akismet grabs around 99.999% of my spam on the IN blog (we are working on a rewrite of the Akismet module for IN that will allow similar success on the main IN site…right now some spammers are slipping through).

P.P.S. I’m going to give a shout out to a few ZDNet bloggers in hope they’ll take the time to read/respond to this rant. Specifically, Larry Dignan, Mary Jo Foley, Ryan Naraine, Nathan McFeters, Jason O’Grady, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Dana Blankenhorn, Michael Krigsman, Dennis Howlett, Jason Perlow, Ed Bott, Robin Harris, Phil Wainewright, Roland Piquepaille, Steve O’Hear, Paul Murphy, Dan Kusnetzsky, Dana Gardner, Zack Whittaker, John Carroll, Tom Foremski, Denise Howell, Deb Perelman, Paul Miller, Christopher Dawson, and Richard Koman.

P.P.P.S³ Yes, I purposely titled this post as linkbait. Yes, I could have written ZDNet an email…But my experience is that large organizations have a tendency to lose those emails within the cubicles of somebody somewhere within the office. Whereas a post to a blog seems to elicit a much more noticable responses⁴

What are IN and SWCMS?

• IN is shorthand for Informed Networker. As you most likely know (since you are reading our blog), IN is a social news network for IT Professionals. Similar to Digg, Slashdot, or Reddit we distinguish ourselves with our exclusive focus on the IT Professional.
• SWCMS is an acronym for Social Web Content Management System. SWCMS offers an open source, mature, and actively developed, social news platform.

Pligg? SWCMS?

For those who have watched the site closely, you may know that we are based on the open source social news network platform known as Pligg. At this time we will begin the process of moving away from Pligg and to SWCMS.

SWCMS was founded by AshDigg, formerly the core developer for Pligg, and starts with the Pligg codebase as is but then differentiates itself with a different vision and leadership. This process is known as a fork and is fairly common in the open source world. The Linux Information Project (LINFO) notes that a fork, “…is the creation of a new branch of a software development project that is independent of the existing project.” These forks occur because, “…of differences in philosophy or incompatible personalities. The people starting the fork typically are dissatisfied with the pace and/or direction of the project, and they often have the goal of replacing it.” Such would be the case with SWCMS.

As noted further in the LINFO document, “…forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of bitterness and fighting over issues of legitimacy and design direction, thereby further slowing down the development of the software.” We will not be entering into any detailed discussion here of the reasons why AshDigg felt it necessary to fork from Pligg to SWCMS or why we at IN have decided to join this forked project as we want to avoid as much as possible the “bitterness and fighting” which can result over forking. In fact, IN continues to offer an source code developed by its developers to both the Pligg and SWCMS communities without cost.

What Does This Mean for IN?

• David Mackey has joined the SWCMS core team and will be assisting SWCMS on several different fronts.
• SWCMS and IN will have open and frequent communications helping ensure rapid development of IN features and bug squashing.
• IN will have the opportunity to work with a number of talented developers, graphic designers, and business owners who are also participating in the SWCMS project. We believe this provides us with additional and valuable business connections.
• IN will work to ensure rapid inclusion of new features developed by IN developers into the core SWCMS code base or as add-on modules as appropriate.
• SWCMS is working to rapidly move itself into full-time production, significant developments are under development and we believe overall the move to SWCMS will be a significant benefit to the IN community.

Here is one of those posts I promised. I said I’d try to lay it out how it is for everyone to see - how Informed Networker is or isn’t progressing. Well, today is July 31st, the end of our first two week timeline and its time to review what went well, what went poorly, and anything in-between. I hope you find this post informative and feel free to leave any feedback you may have as we are always open to suggestions and comments.

Advertising Sales:

• We said we wanted to implement a sidebar module ad system for 125×125 ads on Informed Networker. This is done - it was written from the ground up.
• We said we wanted to secure six advertisers for our 125×125 spot and three advertisers for our 468×60 spots. We did not complete this task. However, we do not consider this a major setback. In fact, we knew we were being extremely aggressive with this project and believe that our revamping of these projections for August will be much more reasonable (if at the end of August we haven’t secured these advertisers - then we would be in trouble).
• We wanted to recruit two sales representatives to handle sales management and work proactively on sales - this didn’t happen but will be rescheduled for August. Again, not a major concern at this juncture.
• We did build 125×125 buttons to promote our advertising sales campaign.

Development Goals:

• We did add a static CMS and change stories over to static urls, simplifying management and increasing search engine optimization.
• We did add KillSpam to our administrative controls.
• We did release phase one of story relations (just in time) though it has a few bugs we hope to fix this evening.
• We did release a fix for the CSS/JavaScript used to control our vote button, it wasn’t correctly displaying in IE.
• We did fix the issue with the all categories tab returning a blank page.
• We are nearly finished (hopefully deploying tonight) an editor lock feature that ensures multiple editors can’t work on the same story at the same time (this has become a problem - which is a good thing, it means our editors are working a lot!).

Marketing:

• We did evaluate PPC and other advertising venues.
• We did commit our budget for PPC and other advertising venues.
• We did not have much opportunity to recruit cast or crew for our viral videos. This will be rescheduled as an August objective.
• We did write one blog post nearly every day!
• We began compiling a list of IT forums and have been participating already in some forums regularly.
• We have been spending a significant amount of time in the forums regularly, but will be moving towards complete goal fulfillment in August.
• We made significant enhancements to the static content pages but have other exciting enhancements coming over the upcoming days!

Infrastructure:

• We did move our mail over to Google Apps.
• We did add reverse DNS and SPF records to help ensure our mail isn’t marked as spam.

Team Development:

• We did send out two newsletters to our internal team.
• We did not recruit additional editors via oDesk.

We would have liked to have accomplished more of our goals over this past two week period and are of course disappointed we did not. On the other hand, we feel we have made tremendous progress in our forward momentum and are really looking forward to August. Why August? Well, let’s see…

Dave Goes Three-Fourths Time!

For the first (nearly) year of Informed Networker’s life, IN was a nights and weekends hobby of min. In June I made the commitment to leave Collages and lead IN full-time. In July I began working four hour days at Collages, significantly freeing up time for working on Informed Networker. Now with August around the corner I step down to two four hour days at Collages, leaving the majority of my time to devote to IN.

For those who have been with us for most of this journey, you have seen major rampings up over the last few months as the commitment was made and the hours reduced. Now I am extremely excited to be moving almost entirely full-time with IN and on September 1st, I will move full-time with IN.

Why Will IN Succeed?

Some may doubt, but I know we will succeed. Why? First because I am convinced of my abilities. Second, because I am convinced (and so thankful) of the abilities and commitment of those who are assisting me in this endeavor. Third, because I know the market need and fourth because we have a great service with great features at an unbeatable price for IT Professionals (free!) and a reasonable price for advertisers.

Stick around. Make your bets, but IN is going to take this market by storm. Mark my words. Slashdot and Digg - you have been forewarned!