billso.com

As business blogging becomes a key success factor in some industries, business bloggers sometimes face pressure to produce excellent metrics right from the start. Their managers sometimes try shortcuts to success, only to find that the online community can see through these tricks.

SEO 2.0 has posted an excellent list of 10 things a business blog should not do. These include:

Number 1) Writing under an assumed name. I use an old email address (billso) for my domain name (billso.com). My real name is listed on my about page.

Number 9) Requiring employees to read, rank and promote the blog. I do not require my employees or students to comment or rank my blog articles. I do assign blog articles for my students to read with their assignments. My blog articles provide up-to-date examples that my course textbooks cannot provide.

Building reputation and authority

SEO is an acronym that means search engine optimization. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses that offer advice on getting more advertising revenue, more readers and a higher Google rank.

Many bloggers get caught up in revenue generation, as I mentioned in my billso.com article of 27 March 2008. It’s much more difficult to build a blog’s reputation and authority. These attributes can be measured by counting the number and kinds of inbound links to a blog, a blog’s search engine ranking, and quotes in the mainstream media.

For readers, reputation and authority are difficult concepts. It takes little effort to lose these attributes. SEO Chicks has some more good examples of what not to do with a business blog. It’s a bad idea to set up a flog, especially in the United Kingdom:

A ‘flog’ is a fake blog usually created by a PR or online marketing firm for the purpose of falsely representing themselves as a consumer, usually for the purposes of creating a buzz around a specific product or brand. Sometimes this is done as a brand or online reputation management activity.

There’s usually hell to pay when the mainstream media or the blogosphere discovers a flog or a fake.

Related posts on billso.com

• 8 April 2008: Blogging and teaching
• 5 April 2008: Blogging can kill you
• 27 March 2008: Blogging as a business model
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 25 February 2008: Social Media 101
• 11 June 2007: Blogging for a living

Earlier today, we noticed that YouTube was not available. An ISP in Pakistan, PieNet, single-handedly blocked global access to the popular video site for two hours, according to multiple reports on the Times of London, ZDnet, ReneSys, OpenDNS and Data Center Knowledge.

PieNet hijacked YouTube’s domain name by sending Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) instructions called advertisements to reroute all requests for YouTube.com to an IP address in Pakistan. ISPs use BGP to link the routers in their networks together, creating the global internetwork that we call the Internet. ISPs trust that the BGP advertisements they receive from other ISPs are correct.

Trust is cheap

Researchers have developed encrypted forms of BGP, but ISPs would rather not implement these more secure protocols because more powerful and expensive routers would be needed. While Cisco and other router manufacturers would welcome the additional sales revenue, ISPs would pass along their increased costs to businesses and consumers.

Many Internet protocols and services rely upon trust. Email is a good example. The core e-mail protocols do not check message content or the identities of senders and recipients. Email messages are sent across the Internet as alphanumeric text. Over the years, as a few users decided to exploit the open nature of email, we have added protocols and services to identify spam, check user identity and encrypt messages and passwords.

Pakistan goes offline

It is very rare for a major mistake like this to happen, because ISP managers and staff understand the value of reputation and trust. This redirect was probably not an accident or an error by PieNet staff – it was almost certainly an intentional hijacking designed to make a political statement. A bogus BGP advertisement is a very loud and rude way to make such a statement.

Richard Stiennon of ZDnet notes that PieNet probably brought all Internet traffic in Pakistan to a grinding halt, as Pakistan Telecom could not handle millions of requests for YouTube.

YouTube engineers detected the redirection quickly and asked for help from major ISPs. Their next step was to find the bad BGP instructions. This was a trivial exercise, as PieNet’s identifiers were all over the advertisement.

PCCW Telecom, the main Internet provider for Pakistan, removed Pakistan’s ISPs from the Internet until the new BGP advertisements propagated to ISPs across the world. Once YouTube’s route was restored, users could watch their videos again.

Internet users in Pakistan will have slower Internet connections for the next few days, and network engineers around the world will keep close tabs on Pakistani ISPs.

In this post on his blog, Kevin Kelly discusses how the Internet is a massive copying machine. This is a major reason that digital rights management (DRM) does not protect business models very well.

The music and movie industries have focused on protecting content and managing copying, instead of building and offering value that is difficult or hard to copy. U2’s manager recently attacked ISPs, search engines and other companies for aiding and abetting music and video file sharing on the Internet. (CBC).

Kelly, on the other hand, proposes a network economy where sharing and abundance are key success factors that every content publisher must satisfy. He also identifies 8 key success factors that spur customers to buy instead of copy.

It’s difficult to copy reputation and trust, but it’s rather easy to offer or measure these attributes. Just look at eBay.

Reputation and trust are relevant in education. Jason Schultz published links to several YouTube videos of students demonstrating how to cheat in school. BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow discussed his own experiences with cheating when he linked to Schultz’s post.

Schools offer interpretation, which is another form of value that is difficult to copy. Grading, evaluation, advising are good examples of content that is very difficult to copy. These also have elements of personalization, which help increase their value.

Patronage is another factor. Some users want to pay for content, even if it can be downloaded free of charge.  Physical forms that cannot be downloaded through the Internet can also make content more valuable – cover art and booklets are examples in the music industry.

Convenience is also an important value generator. Immediate access to content may be more important to some users than eventually finding free access through peer-to-peer networks or file sharing. Metadata, XML and web services are some of the tools that small and independent publishers use to sell their content.

Blogs are also part of the value system that is created as multiple value chains link together from end to end. BoingBoing is a good example – that blog has several editors who promote their solo media projects through the web site. I discovered Kelly’s article on a BoingBoing post, as a matter of fact.

Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO, is stepping down after a brutal year for the company. The New York Times reports that John Donahoe will be promoted from president of the Marketplace division, and will assume his new role on 31 March. The Times ran a story about Donahoe on 21 February 2007.

It has been a brutal year for eBay. The company’s stock price has dropped by a third in the last 90 days. The e-commerce sector continues to grow, but eBay’s market share is shrinking. This interview published today by Reuters, Donahoe claims that eBay will rebound in a recession as casual sellers return to eBay to earn additional income.

eBay’s acquisition of Skype has been a disappointment, even with an additional 30 million subscribers in the last quarter of 2007 – see IP Democracy for more details. Last August’s outage damaged the VoIP’s service’s reputation and customer standing. In this 2 October 2007 article, I discussed how competitive rivalry was increasing in the VoIP industry. eBay may never recover its investment in Skype.

Another eBay acquisition has attracted attention in Hawaii. StubHub, which was mentioned in this 12 December 2007 article in the Star-Bulletin, became an important secondary market for 2008 Sugar Bowl tickets.

24 January 2008: Here’s an article about Donahoe from yesterday’s BusinessWeek. He’s committed to an eBay turnaround, even if it hurts the stock price. First task: reduce the seller fees. Next: make eBay an easier and safer web site for buyers and sellers. As the New York Times points out, better search tools may be an important part of the second task.

I’ve been removing apps from my Facebook account over the last month. Some of these apps sounded fun when these apps were a novelty. Over time, I got more and more invitations from other Facebook members to add more apps.

But SuperWall and FunWall were slower than the default Facebook Wall. I didn’t really want to draw graffiti on my Wall.

The Oktoberfest app was fun in September, when it first appeared. After it morphed into beer, it became dull.

Finally, I decided I had enough. MyAquarium infected our Windows computer with malware that took 3 hours of systematic registry hacking and file deletions to remove.

After I did my little victory dance, I deleted MyAquarium from my account and reported the app to Facebook.

The New York Times ran an article today about online impression management. Academic researchers have examined how users post meaningful photos of themselves, and send carefully worded email messages. As I mentioned last June, employers have used MySpace and Facebook to investigate job applicants. Users who claim this form of background checking is an invasion of their personal privacy should consider why their made their profiles publicly available during their job search.

Because my Facebook site is linked to my university e-mail address, my Facebook site makeover continues. My page is still fun and festive, but it’s a bit more guarded these days.