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

From BoingBoing, Memex, SaveTheInternet, TenPercent and TorrentFreak comes this story: Virgin Media’s new CEO, Neil Berkett, believes that net neutrality is “bollocks”. He wants to sell faster access on Virgin’s broadband network to the highest bidders - most likely large portals and advertisers.

Of course, Virgin Media could also use QoS (Quality of Service) protocols that are built into modern TCP/IP implementations to market a premium high speed service that would let subscribers get faster access to the entire Internet - for a price.

I discussed net neutrality in a billso.com post on 4 March 2008. It’s an important topic, especially as telecom firms and government look for new ways to squeeze more revenue out of subscribers.

There’s a long discussion thread at BoingBoing, with comments from several UK readers who want to break their Virgin Media contracts over this issue. Virgin Media is one of the largest providers of Internet broadband connectivity in the UK. It’s possible that the UK government will stop Virgin’s plans to shift almost all traffic to a lower priority.

Charlie Stross believes that Virgin Media, which used to be NTL/Telewest before a rebranding effort in 2007, is dropping packets for residential connections that use routers.

After the media attention regarding Phorm’s advertising cookies, which I discussed in a billso.com post on 9 April 2008, one would think that British telecoms would be a bit smarter than this.

UPDATED 20 May 2008: Kimberley Edwards has some additional comments in her 24 April 2008 article.

According to the New York Times, UK company Phorm has developed the long-feared ultimate ad-serving cookie.

The term “cookie” is a nickname for persistent client-side web browser data. Cookies solve one of the earliest problems of the commercial World Wide Web: storing user information in the web browser for multiple pages of the same web site. Wikipedia’s article is rich with details, and has a good reference list.

Most Web browsers allow users to erase their cookies, usually through a setting in the privacy or security settings. But users are lazy, so most browsers are left in their default, cookie-storing state. Some web sites recommend the defaults, so users do not have to reenter their credentials during their session.

Advertising revenue

Web advertising firms sell third-party cookies, which work on several different web sites. This helps advertisers track users, so that the ad firms can serve up appropriate advertisements to each users. Users can opt-out of these third-party cookies by finding an opt-out page that itself sets a cookie in their browser.

Google’s main source of revenue is advertising. So is Yahoo’s. In fact, many large web portals, blogs and magazines rely on their advertising revenue to survive. So anything that can provide more precise targeting of advertisements might improve revenue.

Phorm’s cookie technology relies on ISPs. Phorm installs hardware in ISP networks that helps Phorm track individual users at the web page level, no matter what site they access because Phorm’s cookies are linked to the third-party advertiser cookies.

For more details, read the articles at Open Rights Group and Richard Clayton’s blog. The Wikipedia article on Phorm has many more references.

Clayton’s security analysis of Phorm’s Webwise technology is also available as a PDF document, with even more technical details. Clayton doesn’t like the technology at all, for very good reasons:

Phorm assumes that their system “anonymises” and therefore cannot possibly do anyone any harm; they assume that their processing is generic and so it cannot be interception; they assume that their business processes gives them the right to impersonate trusted websites and add tracking cookies under an assumed name; and they assume that if only people understood all the technical details they’d be happy.

As bad as the Aloha Airlines passenger jet shutdown has been in Hawaii - see yesterday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin for some details -  British Airways is facing a much larger problem with its new Terminal 5 in London’s Heathrow Airport. How bad is it?

The British Airways web site has a graphic on almost every page that says “We’re sorry”, and BA CEO Willie Walsh may be out of a job soon. Maybe BA executives shouldn’t have thrown that opening day party, as Jeff Nolan discussed here.

BA has called in FedEx to help deal with an estimated 28,000 bags because the entire bag handling system failed. Bags that were headed the the European continent have been diverted to Milan for sorting, according to this BBC article. See the BBC, Wired, Business Week and Bloomberg for more details.

Reliability is a key success factor

Air travelers want to get their baggage at their destination. BA has had baggage handling problems for years, according to an 21 August 2007 Wall Street Journal article.

This BBC article reveals that baggage handling personnel could not find parking spaces and were standing in line waiting for assignments as the bags started piling up. Workers struggled to use a scheduling system that should have assigned them to specific areas of the massive terminal, based upon flight activity and traffic patterns. A system that should have handled 12,000 bags per hour failed on its first morning because the staff didn’t know where to go in their new workplace.

The new £4.3 billion terminal, which was dedicated earlier this month and built specifically for BA, was supposed to help matters. Now thousands of travelers are marooned in Heathrow and neighboring hotels because the airline has canceled flights for the fifth consecutive day, according to another Bloomberg article. The BBC article said that 250 flights were canceled in the first 4 days alone.

Quite a shock

For those stranded in the new terminal, it’s a bit boring. BA does offer free WiFi in its Terminal 5 lounges, according to Jaunted. BoingBoing noted on 19 January 2008 that electrical outlets are hard to find in the new terminal. All in all, it’s worse than being fumigated in your seat.

In Hull, England, at least one automated teller machine was delivering twice the cash on Wednesday, according to Retuers. As people spread the word by telephone, a line quickly formed. Users withdrew up to £600 each. Receipts showed the amount each user entered from the keypad, but the machine actually delivered twice the cash.

Payzone, a company that administers ATMs, would not comment in detail on the incident but said it appeared one of its machines had malfunctioned.

Police said those who had benefited could face charges but only if the operator complained.

The police shouldn’t have a problem determining who took advantage of this error.

1. All of the account numbers were recorded for each transaction.
2. The malfunctioning ATM had a working video surveillance camera.
3. Mobile phone records might show who called who, as well as which cell tower their phones were using.

The Hull Daily Mail has much more detail about this story, including comments from local residents.