Mediablather podcast: Doug Kaye

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Doug Kaye is a podcasting pioneer. A successful software entrepreneur whose love of audio engineering dates back to his teen years, Doug launched IT Conversations in 2003, when the word “podcasting” didn’t even exist. He caught a break when his early recordings of O’Reilly Media conferences actually helped boost registrations for that company’s events. Since then, the Conversations Network has grown to encompass recordings of thousands of speeches and interviews about topics ranging from artificial intelligence to smart cities to brain surgery.

You can listen to his conversation with David and Paul Gillin that he had earlier in September here.

Finding the real Tea Party online

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There was a story in the NYTimes last week that took me back a few years, about the political candidates who have become good at cyber squatting their opponents’ Web domains. The practice isn’t new, indeed the Times published a story back fifteen years ago by James Gleick about the tactic and quoted from Brooks Talley and how he owned several domains such as Dole96.org, when the “real” Bob Dole web site was something else entirely, where thanks to the Internet Archive, you can view the site here.

Apart from the obvious lack of historical context, there was something else missing from the Times’ piece: that finding the “real” Tea Party Web site is next to impossible. It isn’t just cybersquatters (one of whom that ranks high in Google juice this week is selling a male enhancement drug, which brings up all sorts of amusing quips that I will restrain myself from making), but the very decentralized nature of the Tea Party itself.

Now, I am not taking a position about supporting or not supporting them. Clearly, a lot of voters are interested in their candidates, given the results of the past week’s primary elections. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to give a Tea Party candidate a campaign donation, or want to volunteer to work for one of their local candidates. You will quickly find out that you can’t do either of these activities with confidence. Unlike the well established other parties that have carefully crafted sites, the Tea Party folks are a cyber-mess.

Just Googling “official Tea Party web site” won’t get you anywhere, and indeed, some of the listings on the first couple of pages are somewhat hard to pin down without further research into who owns the domain. There is the Tea Party Patriots, which is the work of Mark Meckler. He has a Ning group as well as a regular Web site that asks people to donate $10 a month and be part of the first 10,000 to do so. That seems suspicious. There is another site called Tea Party Patriots Live that is owned by Jason Hoyt. This one looks more legit, but again, who knows?

Then there is the Tea Party Express, which is part of a political action committee called Our Country Deserves Better that has its own separate Web site.  Another PAC is called Stop This Insanity that has a domain JoinTheTeaParty.us.

Going to Facebook, there are a few pages that are devoted to Tea Party causes, but again, hard to say with any certainly which is the authoritative one. And Wikipedia doesn’t offer any links to clarify what is the official site either.

I realize that the very grass-roots nature of the Tea Party makes it hard to have a definitive central site, but still. There are a lot of other grass roots movements that have done a better job branding themselves online. Of course, even the best branding doesn’t guarantee complete name recognition: I doubt many of us could name the chairman of both the GOP and Democratic National Committees. Still, at least you can be reasonably sure that when you go to their Web sites, you are at the real McCoys.

Is Facebook an enterprise friend or foe?

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If you work in a corporate IT department, it is a hard call to say whether you want to, in its own argot, de-friend Facebook.

With seemingly everyone you know getting onboard the popular social networking site, IT managers are finding out that Facebook makes sharing information easier, information that ideally should remain within a corporate network.

Probably the most extreme example was a story I heard earlier this year. An Army grunt posted the location of his next mission in Afghanistan as his status update on his Facebook page. Within moments, the mission was scrubbed and the soldier was being sent back home.

How about the Michigan juror who posted her verdict on her Facebook page, prior to ever getting into the jury room to deliberate? Needless to say, she was removed forthwith by the judge. Now it isn’t unusual to hear about someone losing their job because of a Facebook indiscretion.

And the opportunity to track intra-office romances via the participants’ status messages is mind-boggling. Back in the olden times, we just had to rely on misdirected romantic email messages to amuse us. Now we have access to full-color photos and video documentation.

Speaking of entertainment, I am sure you have also noticed the collection of movies and TV shows that feature Facebook elements. And some of them even have accurate story lines, too. It is hard to think about anything else these days.

So what can an IT manager do to protect his or her enterprise? There are a bunch of strategies and products, as security vendors have become more Facebook-aware themselves. You can set up firewall policies, turn on bandwidth controls, or use a variety of data loss prevention and network monitoring products to track what is being sent out to the world.

Certainly, just about any firewall worth its packets can block Facebook access totally, but you might not want to do that. Let’s say you don’t mind if people message each other within Facebook, but playing Farmwille or other games during 9 to 5 is verboten. Several firewalls can make this distinction, such as McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise. Some firewalls, such as Sonicwall’s, have all sorts of granular policies to fine-tune what behavior is and isn’t allowed.

Or let’s say you run IT for a college campus. You can’t block your students’ use of Facebook (you might start a revolt), but during the daytime when faculty wants to get their work done, you might want to reclaim some of this bandwidth and at least slow access down. A number of products such as Blue Coat’s PacketShaper can do this. You can simulate the rate of say, a dial-up line for Facebook from 9 to 5, and turn it back to the full OC-3 pipe afterhours.

And in the world of data loss prevention (which is where the extreme examples cited above can make anyone a bit nervous), you can make sure that customer data or other sensitive information is properly monitored. You can also track who spends the most time on the site too.

To learn more about these and other products, you can read an article that I wrote for Techtarget last month, as well as go to my screencast review site Webinformant.tv where you can see my short videos that demonstrate some of the products that I mention above.

Techtarget: Selecting the right conversion tool for your P2V migration

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After you decide that you want to virtualize your environment and you select the products to use, the next step usually involves some sort of conversion process — taking a running physical desktop or server and moving it to a virtual machine. Although you can set up a new VM from scratch, it’s easier — and faster — to begin with a physical machine that is set up with all the applications you want in your virtual world.

In my latest article for SearchVirtualDesktop, I take a look at the tools that can help in this physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration.

New features of Symantec Backup Exec 2010

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Symantec has a new R2 version of its Backup Exec 2010 backup software that is easier to install, quicker to make backups, and a raft of new features that include better support for virtualization, archiving, and deduplication.

Symantec Corporation
Mountain View, Calif.
http://backupexec.com
Pricing: $1174 for one media server, deduplication and archiving options extra

Go to my screencast video here.

New features of Symantec Backup Exec 2010

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Symantec has a new R2 version of its Backup Exec 2010 backup software that is easier to install, quicker to make backups, and a raft of new features that include better support for virtualization, archiving, and deduplication.

Symantec Corporation
Mountain View, Calif.
http://backupexec.com
Pricing: $1174 for one media server, deduplication and archiving options extra

How to write a stellar computer product review

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Let’s say you are a college student taking journalism and your assignment is to write a review of some computing product or service. What do you do? To get things started, here are a few suggestions from someone who has been writing such reviews for more than 20 years, publishing hundreds of them in dozens of IT trade publications and Web sites.

Make sure you have the most up-to-date product version. This seems obvious, but there are many download sites that don’t make it easy for you to determine this. Make sure you are testing a shipping version too: the differences these days between beta and final versions are very blurry (remember Gmail was in “beta” for several years).  And if you are testing some Web service, realize that the code that you test today will change tomorrow, so it is important to check back when you finish review (if some time has elapsed) to make sure that you cover the new features that were recently added. I know, the Web makes for a moving target.

Go to the vendor’s Web site, collect information such as system requirements (which version of Windows, with what Service Pack and what version of .Net Framework and Internet Explorer) and make sure you have a PC that can run the software you downloaded or work with the particular hardware.  If you are testing a network product, make sure you have at least a server and a client or two for your tests. Also find the current pricing information (this is usually the hardest thing to discover), and call the PR contact listed for the company (if indeed it is listed) and tell them you are going to be reviewing the product. You could ask them for a special tech support engineer to resolve any issues, depending on the product and your own level of comfort.

Some professional reviewers shun special tech support, I find it useful especially if you are stuck with a problem that is entirely of your own ignorance and you are trying to resolve the issue and get your review finished.

Don’t write about your installation experience. Even if it was onerous, your readers don’t care. They want to know what the product does. Just get straight into the review. If you must carp about the install, write the graf and then delete it before your final edit to get it out of your system.

Give us a nut graf that sets expectations of who uses what and why. See the first graf of this screed as an example: I tell you who should read this piece and why I am qualified to write it.Most of the times this is the second graf of your review: “Microsoft’s new cloud-based thing is aimed at engineers who can understand how to configure routers in their sleep, but isn’t yet ready for the general IT population.”

Understand the context of where the product fits into your reader’s computing ecosystem. If it is a cloud-based Web application, does anyone use similar premises-based applications of equivalent functionality? Why or why not? If you don’t know the context, this would be a good time to talk to a few IT folks to get some idea of how they intend to use the product, or drawbacks in similar products that they are trying to avoid.

What breaks or doesn’t work when you try to use a Mac or Linux machine? Not everyone uses Windows PCs, you know. Dealing with a mixture of endpoints is part of the challenge of any modern IT department. Same is true for a variety of browsers. Make sure your test plan is rich enough to include these variations.

When you get some unexpected result, it is polite to call the vendor and let them know. It could be something you did. Or didn’t do. They could have a fix coming for this situation, something you might want to tell your readers about. Or you could have found a real honest-to-goodness bug. It happens.

Take copious screenshots for your own reference, as well as for ultimate publication. I prefer to use TIFFs because you can preserve higher-resolution screens. I then create a private photo album on Picasa or Flickr that I upload the screens to and link in my article so my editor can pick the ones that s/he likes. Having this record can be useful if you are going to get paid to write another article for a different publication down the road, because you won’t have to go back and try to re-create your test bed.  Windows 7 (Snap) and Mac OS (Grab) come with built-in utilities to take screenshots. Oh, and include captions on all of your screenshots too.

Look at the previous version, or at least the press release, to understand what is new and shiny and different about the current version. What did the vendor add, why did they add it, and what does that mean for users of the legacy product?

Look at the competition too. If you don’t know which products are competitors, you can ask your friendly vendor PR person. If the vendor tells you that they have no competitors (they often like to say that) and you know this not to be the case, don’t be afraid to call them out on it.

If you don’t know how to use desktop virtualization technologies, now is the time to learn. Virtual machine products such as VMware have made the product reviewer’s job a lot easier. When I began in this business, I had a room full of PCs that were setup for different situations. Now I have a hard disk filled with VMs of different operating systems, and when it is time to test something, I can make a copy from my clean master and not have to worry about reinstalling the OS if something goes south.

Email your PR contact when the review is published. These days, almost everyone has set up Google alerts but you want to show that you care. Thank them for their help, even if they were less than forthcoming. You want to build up a relationship with these folks. Don’t be afraid to enter into a dialogue with the vendor to explain your point of view and take the time to listen to where they think you missed the boat.

Good luck with your reviews and feel free to share here some of your own tips.

For a more detailed missive on how PR people should deal with the press from the press’ perspective, see the very excellent “Care and Feeding of the Press” by Esther Schindler here.

Mediablather: Are Google’s Best Days Behind It?

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Has Google’s time passed? A recent article in Forbes Magazine suggests that it may have. Google has been unable to combat the Facebook threat with a social strategy that has captured users’ fancy, despite its recent attempts to acquire knowledge in this area.. The company’s stock has been stagnant for nearly three years and its growth rate is slowing. Does this mean Google is over the hill?

In our MediaBlather podcast this week with Paul Gillin, we talk about this and how Google has failed to capture any juice with social media.  You can download the show here.

The tug between browsers and apps for your clickstream

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When you need something online, is your first impulse to bring up your Web browser or go to your smartphone and run an app? The Web/app balance has shifted perhaps permanently in the app’s favor, meaning that more and more we go to an app when we need something online, and streaming video is accelerating this shift. For those of us that were old enough to remember when Netscape and AOL were different companies, I think this is a sad development.

Certainly, it depends on how often you access a particular site: for daily habits, having an app makes sense, if the app encapsulates the kind of browsing experience that you normally would be doing with your PC. But apps are more than just better bookmarks (remember them?), and indeed they have taken off as true alternatives to general browsing.

In this month’s issue, Wired magazine has declared that the Web is dead. They cite stats that show the venerable HTTP protocol is in decline, in favor of peer-to-peer and other specialty apps. Apps certainly are very appealing: you can have the Internet right now, in your pocket, without having to boot up your PC’s browser or find a Wifi hotspot.

But the rise of apps has some problems, including that they are less capable, don’t work the same across all smartphones, can cost money to download and are less usable than the general-purpose browser-based Web.

Take a look at Urbanspoon.com, a great Web site that lists local restaurants, reviews, menus, and more. The iPhone app is miserable, and on a recent test when a client and I were out for dinner in Mountain View, it took us less time to walk up and down the Castro strip than bring up and fool around with the app on either of our phones.

And just about any newspaper app has its limitations, just because everyone reads their favorite paper differently. The NY Times iPad app, for example, does a nice job for top-level articles, but if you want to get deeper, you will be frustrated and move to their Web site for additional reading.

Certainly there are counter-examples: Facebook’s app has more functionality at the moment with its geo-locator Places feature, which isn’t found on its traditional Web site. But that is just an anomaly. Most of Facebook’s functionality still requires a full browser. And there are dozens of Twitter apps that are more capable than their desktop cousins.

When it comes to finding an app, you have a sad collection of app stores, other than Apple’s, to try to discover them. Several of the stores, such as the Android Marketplace, make searching miserable. The stores classify their apps into such broad categories that you spend too much time scrolling around the results. Or else they force you to use the in-phone store versions to do the searching. Apple forces you to use iTunes, but at least you can look for your apps on your desktop and not suffer the tiny phone screen. Ironically, the more apps that are created for the store, the harder it is to find them, particularly if you are trying to use your phone to track them down. (You can read more about what I think make for a great app store experience here.)

Compounding things is that once you download an app to your phone, you have to maintain it just like any other piece of software in your life. There are always dozens of app updates awaiting me, and some days it seems that my social media maintenance is my major job: the time to check my LinkedFaceTwit status updates, approve or ignore friend requests, update my apps, promote my articles on Digg and StumbleUpon, add links to my blog (blogs? Remember them? They seem so last year.) and so forth can take a big chunk of time out of my day.

I blame a lot of this on video streaming to our phones. Part of the problem with video is the huge bandwidth consumed, but part is an overlay of conflicting video standards, formats, rights management, and other issues that just make it a mess. Still, an app like Major League Baseball’s AtBat 2010 is a thing of beauty to watch ballgames on your phone, except you can’t watch all games on all phones yet.

And while you have the ability to watch many broadcast TV shows inside your browser thanks to Hulu and Netflix On-demand, it can take some effort to find them too. Would my Roku be better off with a real built-in browser that I could use to display Web videos on my living room TV? Yes. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of its apps (they call them channels) that I have to install and navigate instead. More maintenance time.

What are your thoughts on the app/browser divide? Please share with me here.

SearchEnterpriseDesktop: Blocking USB access

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A rogue employee can easily carry a lot of private data out of your offices using a USB drive. While gluing your USB ports shut (like my local library did) is one way to prevent data loss via a portable drive, a less drastic — but just as efficient — option is a security or desktop management product.

I look at how five different products can disable USB devices in a story this week for TechTarget here.