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May 7, 2008
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On Twin Cities Live I'll be chatting about Skype and how to use it as a free videophone solution as well as a way to use it as a house, baby or babysitter monitor. I won't be getting in to the deep dark secrets of what is going on behind the scenes on that show, but I will here!
Skype is an interesting creature. Unlike other VVoIP applications like iChat AV, SightSpeed, MSN, AIM, etc., etc. this application uses peer to peer technology to make and place calls. Unlike many of the other VVoIP applications, Skype is one of the very few that seems to work without issue behind both a firewall and NAT, even at the corporate level.
With the exception of logon servers, Skype has no central server to maintain the network. Instead, Skype uses peer to peer technology to decentralize the network and to help ensure a very high uptime percentage. Once you log in to Skype, your system becomes part of the network itself helping to decentralize the load of routing phone calls. This also means that your computer will be used as a node so a bit of your bandwidth and CPU will be borrowed to help the rest of the Skype network, even if you're not in a phone call. I think of it as giving back to the community, but others may not like this so much. Although you're helping to relieve load, a good chunk of the Skype traffic goes through super nodes.
Super nodes are Skype nodes that are on huge pipes such as Universities and ISPs. When a supernode goes down the whole Skype network feels the pain but it won't take everything offline. That's the beauty of the Skype network, so long as a few nodes are still online, the network will self heal to a point.
This all means that your call can be routed to any computer on the Skype network to reach its final destination. A computer you can't control. And that brings us to security. Skype uses a 256-bit encryption AES which is also used by U.S. Government Organizations to protect their own data. In other words, very secure.
So basically Skype is a giant peer to peer network with super good encryption that makes your phone system almost or just as reliable as your local Telco but without the ability for the government to listen in on your conversation. But instead of only being able to use voice you also get video, chat, SMS and presence awareness all in one application.
Of course those super nodes could end up being an issue some day, but until then in my opinion Skype has the highest call quality, best NAT/Firewall traversal and largest feature list. Oh, and the basics are free too! And that's why we covered Skype on Twin Cities Live today!
Want to add me to your Skype contact list? My username is benjaminhigginbotham Want a really in-depth technical analysis of how skype works? Check out this PDF which explains exactly how it all works.
Update: This is the segment that aired on Twin Cities Live
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May 6, 2008
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Here's one way to gain a lot of Twitter friends instantly: teach a large group of non-Twitter users how to use the service.
1. Text 40404 with the term: join
2. Reply to the confirmation with a username of your choice.
3. Reply to that message with the following message: follow edkohler
Then, sit back and watch the friend confirmations flow in.
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May 5, 2008
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May 2, 2008
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Edelman has published an interesting study measuring consumers trust of various sources ranging from "People like myself" to "bloggers" that aims to explain the credibility people give to different relationships:
I wonder how different the results would be if - rather than bloggers - the poll asked whether they trust "Perfect Strangers?"
Then, switch the other questions to, "a person like myself" who blogs, etc.
For example, if I'm looking for a restaurant recommendation, I'll often turn to "a person like myself" to decide what's worth checking out. And I may find that recommendation on the blog of "a person like myself" who seems to enjoy similar restaurants around Minneapolis.
If I'm interested in digging deeper into an issue, I may find the perspectives of a professor who studies the issue for a living valuable, even if the professor publishes her professional research on a blog platform.
Personally, I put much more weight on a person's credibility than their choice of publishing platform.
I get the impression that Edelman is asking the wrong question here.
A better question could be built around, "How do you determine whether someone is credible online?"
How does someone go from being a random stranger with a blog (known as "a blogger" in Edelman's current study) to someone who's credible and trustworthy on a subject that interests you?
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May 1, 2008
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I've found myself answering this question a lot lately, so I figure I should just turn it into a blog post so I can point people to it.
So, you've decided that you want to host your own blog with Wordpress? Great. Here's what you need to make that happen.
1a. A web host that supports PHP/MySQL. Most web hosts do, but be sure to check before you pay. Personally, I use MediaTemple.net for my blog hosting, but there are many many hosts that are perfectly capable of hosting a Wordpress blog.
1b. This isn't a requirement, but it's nice if they allow .htaccess editing. Not all do. Without that, you can't create human friendly post URLs, so your URLs will end with something like .com/?p=386 rather than .com/post-title-humans-understand/
2. A domain name. Something that's easy to spell and memorable is generally a good rule of thumb, but that's for you to decide. After buying your domain, you'll need to update the DNS records to point to your web host's servers.
3. A Theme. Wordpress comes with a handful of pre-installed themes to choose from, but they're not spectacular. You can build an entire theme from scratch, but you may find the free themes available here valuable as starting points for your design. Plenty of designers can help you customize one of those themes or help you create something that's entirely unique.
4. Plugins. You can customize the functionality of your Wordpress site using Plugins. For example, you may want to allow commenters to subscribe to the comments of a post and receive emails when others reply. There is a plugin for that and hundreds of other things.
5. An FTP program. You'll need this to upload Wordpress, themes, and plugins. Personally, I use CuteFTP, but there are dozens of choices - both free and paid - to choose from.
Those are all the tools you need.
Other tools that can be helpful include:
- An HTML editor like Dreamweaver, for editing themes.
- An image editor like Photoshop for editing themes and images for posts.
- A stats program like Google Analytics for tracking traffic to the site.
- Using Feedburner to track RSS feed subscribers.
- Using the ScribeFire extension for FireFox to make blogging more efficient.
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April 29, 2008
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I believe I've had at least one conversation regarding the effectiveness of meta keywords in search engine rankings every week for the past 10 years. For some reason, it's a sub-topic of SEO that inexperienced website owners hear about and suddenly latch onto as if they've suddenly discovered the keys to high search engine rankings.
Imagine for a second that meta keywords really were that powerful. Wouldn't that mean that website owners who had discovered their magical power would suddenly dominate search results while the unknowing fell further behind? While that may seem plausible, imagine being in Google's shoes. They're trying to provide the most relevant results they can to their users, so using a hit or miss factor like this would correlate with search results quality that would be arbitrarily influenced by the use of this magical key.
While I feel that I've done my part helping explain the lack of value in meta keywords over the past decade, I don't think anything comes close to the decision that came down this past week: A judge ruled that meta keywords are worthless, which means that using a competitor's trademark in a meta keyword tag can't be a trademark violation since it provides no benefit.
Why would a company do that? Imagine you're a porn site that's trying to attract visitors and you come to the realization that many people search for the term, "playboy," online and they may be interested in checking out your offerings . . . if they only knew about them. While you could pay for advertising, instead, you decide to add the term "playboy" to your website's meta keywords under the hope that this will improve your search engine rankings. At one time, it may have. A long long time ago. But even then, it was only one of many factors search engines used to determine whether a site was relevant for a given term and deserved to rank high. Playboy actually was involved in some lawsuits similar to the above scenario back in 1997.
David Snyder of Marketing Pilgrim succinctly explains the benefit this ruling provides professional SEOs:
Court Declares META Keywords Dead
So the next time you get a phone call from a shady SEO malpractitioner selling you on the idea that you are not coming up in the SERPs because of a lack of Meta Keywords, go ahead and tell them that Meta Keywords are dead, and you have the death certificate.
Problem solved. Moving on.
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April 21, 2008
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One problem I've been noticing more and more as of late is that certain archived posts on blogs tend to become magnets for comment spam.
One way to deal with this is to automatically close comments on posts after a set amount of time. That's not a bad thing, but I think there can be a lot of value in comments on seemingly old posts so I prefer to keep them open when possible.
What I tend to see is a lot of spam on a limited number of posts. Most often, this seems to be related to the topic of the post where topics known for being more attractive to spammers draw more spam comments.
If you find that you have some problematic, spam attracting posts, consider disabling comments on just that one post.
Here are two examples of how this can be done.
In Movable Type, find the problematic post in the admin side of your site and uncheck the feedback checkboxes:
And the same thing works for Wordpress:
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