Does the Cloud Have a Silver Lining?

One of the great joys of writing about Cloud Computing is the wealth of available clichés: silver linings, saturation, rain-making, cloud seeding (of the investment variety rather than ‘shadow operations’ with Silver Iodide). Cloud is bathing in the wave-mania formerly enjoyed by SOA, an architecture that has been pronounced deceased so many times it could be forgiven for thinking it had acquired feline genetics. Was this the reason for its suppleness and agility?

When people start to ‘talk cloud’ there appears to be an almost celestial reverence for its potential. I suspect the ‘manage my mess for less’ crowd see it as a form of simplistic outsourcing (true to a degree), but I strongly advise avoidance of this premise and for the same fundamental reasons as I advise against it in pure play BPO and commodity IT outsourcing. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ will create very ‘dusty’ clouds over a relatively short period of time. Moving to a ‘utility model’ does not mean you wish to delegate key parts of your business without retaining appropriate control and the ability to innovate. Moving functionality to clouds should not be an excuse for ‘technological abdication’.

Services (and I use the term deliberately) that can be provided through cloud and utility computing must be analysed and classified based on the needs of the business. Start thinking about resilience, security, reliability, business continuity and disaster recovery, information security, regulatory compliance, agility, benefits of private versus shared clouds, performance, service level agreements (SLA), testing, commercial lock-in and many others and suddenly you are faced with a complicated decision process with a significant number of important due diligence activities. Having a ‘Business Intelligence’ and ‘Content Management’ focus I also ‘worry’ about the potential to create ‘untapped’ silos in the cloud implementation and it is critical to ensure that valuable business information isn’t suddenly dematerialised into ‘thin air’. It would be a ‘poor show’ to have flattened out our enterprises via service orientation only to reconstitute ‘silos in the sky’. From an information security perspective we must also ensure that clouds do not weaken our overall position, either from penetration attack, an ‘insider’ attack (remember the cloud may be provided by a 3rd party) or what I term a lack of ‘forensic sterility’ in the separation of services and data by the cloud provider. Virtualisation is great, but environmental separation of competitor’s data must be absolute. Remember that true separation encompasses people, process and technology.

Cloud is attracting new market entrants. Some are industry ‘old hands’ repurposing offers and utilising existing and proven data centres and communications infrastructure. The market ‘spread’ is also becoming relatively plentiful. In other words small businesses, mid-tier and multi-nationals can all benefit and participate in the cloud. Small and mid-tier businesses may well find themselves ‘playing’ with the newcomers, and here I would advise a great deal of care and attention in selection of supplier(s). It is perhaps something of a modern day cliché, but “the last thing you should outsource is sense”. As I argued many times with SOA (and indeed with EAI as its predecessor) nothing is a panacea and it would be a mistake to consider cloud as the all encompassing solution.

Service Orientation is going skyward. The tapestry of cloud functionality will to an extent rely on the SOA / services view that has been so prevalent in enterprise architecture for the past 5 (or so) years. This makes a lot of sense as with a ‘cloud model’ we are (in certain cases) ‘simply’ providing a technical abstraction as to where, how and by whom the service is implemented. What we have learned in SOA will facilitate simplified abstraction, authentication and identity services, SLA measurement / enforcement, governance, and hopefully a reduction in the potential for technical and commercial lock-in through provision of well defined service contracts.

The silver lining of the cloud is really an amalgam of elasticity, centralisation, potential homogenisation of technology platforms (reducing overall maintenance, support costs and driving cost benefits from additional purchasing power), efficiency (through virtualisation) and many of the inherent benefits of ‘traditional outsourcing’.

The current ‘industry buzz’ could almost be described as cacophonous, and as benefits of cloud are heavily geared towards cost reduction this makes a great deal of sense in a ‘depressed’ market. My cautionary note however is not to rush to decisions. Ruminate on the business and technical functions that can be moved to the cloud and determine whether private or shared clouds are the way to proceed. Supplier (I prefer the term Partner) choice requires appropriate levels of due diligence to ensure your business is not detrimentally impacted by any decisions. Cost pressures are obviously really at the forefront in 2009, but remain more than a little cautious with key strategic decisions. Getting operational cost out of the business quickly is certainly laudable, but over simplify or short-cut your due diligence processes with cloud and you may find it will ‘rain on your parade’ in years to come.

This is a great example of the power of heat maps. I'm not sure whether it's the 'ultimate' good example or the 'ultimate' bad example!

A trained squirrel would only have clicked the Google ads once, but I did this a multitude of times while looking for decent Joomla templates. I will admit that it was late at night and there may have been whiskey involved, but that's another story.

As I really like the site, and as it does provide tonnes of great content for Joomla I've scrubbed any identifying marks.

Can you spot the 'trick'? Make the Google Ad links look like sub-menus.

Based on the philosophy of making it simple for people to comment on your blog, I was faced with the question - "what is the best approach that balances simplicity, easy of commenting and prevention of spam addition".

There are tonnes of bots hitting my site regularly, many trying to add comments (often of a very adult nature) and links to a myriad of dodgy content. Some ways to deal with these along with my recommendation:

1. You can use the Block Anonymous Links module in Drupal. This will stop any anonymous user posting a link in a comment. This is an effective, but crude way to block comment spam. It is effective as most spammers want to drop links (these get blocked), it is crude as it prevents genuine users providing genuine links in the body of the comment. Note: you can also set 'rel=nofollow' on the links to take some of the motivation out of spamming
2. You can moderate all comments. Effectively everything gets stored and you moderate a comment approval queue. Very useful if comment volume is low and you want to personally check every post. I think this is good for businesses, or for sites where the conversation is not 'flowing'. Remember any delay in moderation of the comment may actually stifle good debate in the comments
3. Captcha and ReCaptcha - you can use Captha modules in Drupal to present text, math, audio or image Captchas. Audio is important for accessibility reasons. Text and math Captchas are neat as they are simple to solve, but some spamming algorithms can break these. The image Captcha you get with the ReCaptcha is very strong, but occasionally a bit hard to solve even for a human with 20:20 vision! Anything that frustrates the commenting process is a bad thing. Images from the Captcha module are a bit simpler to 'decipher'
4. Using spam filters. There are great services like Mollom and Akismet that provide spam filtering. According to the Akismet web site 84% of all comments are spam - sobering thought!

I've tried throughout the lifecycle of this blog using Block Anonymous Links, Captcha and ReCaptcha. I've recently switched over to Mollom. The reasons:

1. I want commenting to be simple and not require moderation of each comment (although I do check everything periodically)
2. I don't want highly complex Captcha images presented that might stifle commenting
3. I want to try and catch 100% spam comments and not let them onto the site or into any moderation queues
4. Mollom has sophisticated spam filters and only presents a Captcha image if it suspects the comment to be spam. Mollom also supports audio Captcha, which is important for accessibility. Refer to the Mollom site for an overview of how it works and a technical white paper for additional techie details

Using Mollom, comment text is analysed to look for 'known' or 'suspected' spamming patterns. If it looks ok, the comments gets classified as 'ham' and added to the site. If the text looks 'suspect' a Captcha is presented - this will block the spamming bots. Unless you want to run moderation of every comment before it goes public you cannot be 100% sure that some spam doesn't get through the filter. That's why I would also advise checking added comments on an (at least) daily frequency. I think the spam filtering services such as Mollom are the best way to go for personal blogs where you want to balance simplicity in commenting with prevention of spam and the work associated with moderating the approval queues. If you're running a business site, or a site highly susceptible to spam or derogatory comments, you probably have little choice than run 'per comment approval' by a human administrator.

Both Akismet and Mollom have free versions of their spam filtering services, which is great news for the 'blogger on a budget'.

I've been interested in the concept of personal branding for quite some time, and admittedly have read one or two books, and some great resources on the web. These tend to focus on 'brand definition' - i.e. what do you stand for, what do you offer, what key features differentiate you - and so forth. Marketing is somewhat covered, advice (and good advice) is usually to join Twitter, start a blog, join various social networks (and niche social networks), LinkedIn, Facebook etc., get a presence on Stumble, Clipmarks, Digg, Delicious et al. and build various other outposts. I'm going to borrow the term 'presence engineering' which was coined earlier in the week as a good overall definition for the marketing strategy. It is essentially about delivering the brand to the right audience.

What do I want to Achieve

I basically want to map out a week to week journal of my trials and errors in social media marketing. I'm not marketing any product or seeking any sales or revenue - that probably simplifies things - as the rat wont starve! This is simply an experiment in how to optimise personal brand marketing for the 'marketer or one'. What I mean by that:

1. I have no budget - it is simply expenditure of personal time and energy
2. I have no team - it's just me - and I don't write bots! I also occasionally need to sleep!
3. I have no professional marketing experience. It's basically what I can pick up from others - so I'll be asking friendly pro's for advice.

I want to measure the impact of the effort and try and define better what works and why. A question I have been posing (and I don't think has really been answered) is how to best make personal social media marketing efforts efficient and ultimately scalable. When the workforce cant be scaled (remember just me and no budget) then working smarter and using clever people's ideas to best effect will be paramount. I'm really on a 'fairy dust' hunt, but I will capture the ideas I tried out, what sources I gleaned them from and what benefits they yielded. I will wrap this up into a weekly post along with some data about where I felt gains were made. I will probably redefine what I am measuring over time as it's difficult to quantify this so early. I say a bit more about this later...

If any social marketing gurus are looking in and would like to 'give me a hand' with suggestions / advice as a 'case study' I would be very willing to participate.

Inspiration

There are some wonderful people out there talking on this subject with very impressive authority. This guide from Chris Brogan is one of the best I've seen. Personal Branding by Dan Schawbel is a fantastic site and I will be using many of his suggestions and tips as part of my Lab Rat experience. On the blogging side of things, Problogger will be a constant companion - it has set me back on the path to righteousness on a number of occasions. As I go along I'm going to create a list of the 'useful resources' of the week - I will say more in each weekly post and create a trail on Delicious so that the bookmarks can be easily followed.

What is My Brand

I'm actually quite happy with what I think my brand attributes are and how these are conveyed. If I were asked to elaborate I would say the brand portrays:

• Professional and academic achievement
• Intellectual eclecticism
• Philanthropic spirit
• A willingness to share
• Hopefully just enough eccentricity to be endearing! I claim to be the Jackson Pollock of IT for this very reason, and have often remarked that I wanted to have a longer bio on Twitter so I could also claim to be the 'ice-cream Shaman'.

The Starting Point

I am a technologist, not a marketer, PR guru or communications consultant. I understand quite a bit about the technical mechanics of web sites and SEO. To underscore the key point: I am not a marketer - I have no professional experience in this field at all. As someone trying to understand how best to 'market' a social media brand this is quite a big drawback. To balance that weakness I do read as much material on the subject as I can (there are great blogs out there!).

I admit to not starting week one with a blank sheet. I have already established what I believe is a credible and interesting brand, I have been active on a number of Web2 sites for at least 12 months, and I have been blogging (admittedly learning as I go) again for a pretty solid 12 months.

The Metrics

It's difficult to know what exactly to measure as there are so many options. As an initial hypothesis - and this will probably evolve over the weeks and months, I will being by measuring:

1. Number of unique pages in the Google Index - a reasonable measure of the number of 'mentions' across cyberspace - although not 100% accurate due to duplicate removal and potential 'algorithm dances' that good old Google likes to take us on
2. Number of followers on Twitter (weekly gain as a percentage) - I include Twitter due to my overall fascination with its potential
3. Number of unique visitors to my primary blog (this one!) - again this is a tricky measure as I find hits increase dramatically every time I post new content. Understanding the impact of that versus other activity may be a little complex
4. I could also measure amount of new friend requests on LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed etc. - but let's keep things simple to start

When I get more data I will probably want (and may have to resist the temptation) to use analytics to look for trends (you see this is the Business Intelligence side of me trying to exert its influence already!).

What am I going to do this week?

Well, remembering that I also have a day job I'm hoping to try the following:

1. Build more outposts
2. Comment on blogs of interest (I tend to be a fairly active commenter on Mashable, Chris Brogan dot com, Problogger and quite a few others)
3. Blog at least 3 times this week - I do try for more, but priorities can shift around in the real-world
4. I maintain a pretty constant presence on Twitter, so I'm not expecting to do much other than 'business as usual'
5. Read lots of inspirational material that will help me formulate my marketing plan (suggestions very welcome!)

Someone remarked on Twitter that I should 'ditch the suit' and do something a bit more wild with the graphics in homage to Jackson Pollock. That gave me an idea to re-do the picture in the style of Pollock's painting 'Number 5'. Watch out for that! I might just video the creative process and add the result to YouTube. This might be an opportunity for a viral video!

Tips / Suggestions

As I take the form of a lab rat I'm very open to suggestions / tips / sites / resources. Please add these to the comments and I will then make reference to them in next week's post.

Baseline

I'm creating a snapshot of my contact page on Week One. I will no doubt be adding to it quite extensively, so good to have a baseline view of the starting point. This also gives the split of sites I use on a 'primary' and 'secondary' basis. It will be interesting to see how that 'shifts around over time'. I'll leave that as a footnote to this initial post.

• Google Index - searching for "Steve Nimmons" (quoted) brings out 15,000 results as of now
• I've currently got 1249 followers on Twitter, I'm currently ranked 24th in London on Twitterholic - I'm not sure if that is a good thing!
• As I want to measure % increase in blog visits this will need two weeks worth of data. As for friend counts on social networks, I suspect this is a whimsical measure, but again I'll put it in as a percentage next week.

Tune in next week for some initial thoughts and hopefully one or two interesting discoveries...It will be interesting to try and quantify and hopefully streamline some of the personal social marketing tasks. Going from 'brand defined' to one of the Internet 'uber-presences' is a sizably difficult 'problem' to understand. Let's see if we can break down an achievable set of goals into bite sized activities for each week.

And finally...a resource I have been finding incredibly useful this week is this article on Social Media Answers entitled Niche Social Networking Sites. There are links within that post to many many reviews of potential networks and other Web2 resources. It really is very well worth bookmarking.

Footnote: Social Site Snapshot - Week One

Where I usually hang out

Social Networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, RSA Networking, Mashable

Music - iTunes, LastFM, iLike

Video - YouTube, 12seconds.tv, Seesmic

Books - Amazon, LibraryThing

Photos - Flickr, Picasa

Blogging - Circumference of a Moose, Blogger, MyBlogLog, Technorati

Microblogging - Twitter, Twellow, Twitterholic

Comments - Disqus, coComment, BackType

Events - Upcoming, Meetup

Lifestream - FriendFeed

Sharing - Stumble, Clipmarks, Digg, Delicious, Google Reader

Citizen Journalism - Now Public, Articles Base

Other places I hangout - but maybe a little less often

Social Networks: MySpace, Hi5, Xing, Xanga, Spoke, ecademy, Friendster, Konnects, Plaxo, Netlog, Live Spaces, Netvibes

Profiles: Google, Yahoo360, Yahoo!, Retaggr, The IAP, BusinessCard2

Mashups: Lifestream.fm, Profilactic, iminta

Music: Blip.fm

Forums / Blogs: BoingBoing, The Huffington Post, My Telegraph, IT Toolbox, Ars Technica, PC World Forums.

When people talk about LinkedIn they usually cover topics such as:

1. Building the network before you need it
2. LinkedIn for Social Networking and Business Opportunities
3. Finding a job using LinkedIn

The Traditional Problem

A feature of the site that I find very useful (and wished existed years ago) is the ability to find 'virtual mentors' and subsequently source new ideas for career and personal development. About 7 or 8 years ago I spent a lot of time thinking 'where next' and 'how' in terms of building a highly credible technical (and to an extent public) profile. The issue in 2001 / 2002 was the distinct lack of Web2 / Social Networking sites, and therefore a pretty tough time finding exemplar CVs and information about successful people that I would 'like to emulate'. My solution at the time (which still seems reasonable) was to plough through lots of public academic profiles (mostly staff lists on university web sites). Draw backs with this approach were:

1. Lack of depth in the profile - i.e. you could see the end result but not necessary a path between stages
2. Profiles were heavily 'academically skewed'
3. Limited volume of profiles - although I was able to spot trends that I then further researched
4. Fairly limited opportunity to ask questions and network (in the online world)

I am pleased with the end result of the activity. Fellowships in 7 well regarded professional institutions is amongst the net result. The point here is that imperfections in the availability of information and tools at any time cannot be used as an excuse. Make the most of what's out there.

LinkedIn is 'Perfect'

Fast-forward 7 or so years and now re-evaluate the problem and approach. LinkedIn has appeared and has been populated with millions of CVs. Better still there is a very handy search function, practically limitless opportunities to ask questions and network. The quality and depth of available information is vastly (understatement) improved. Now in your quest to define 'where next' and 'how' you can look at many many samples of online resumes. There's no shortcut to finding the person (or group of people) to which you most aspire. First define search criteria such as 'who are the industry leaders', or 'who is senior in company X'. Then it's research time! Look at experience, keywords, group memberships, professional memberships, 'non-professional' activities. Start a list of achievements, accolades, groups, qualifications etc. that resonates with you and has a synergy with the people you are 'nominating' as your virtual mentors (they may never even know they were mentors!).

If approached appropriately I'm sure the people whose profiles you most aspire to would be rather flattered and pleased to assist with clarifications and advice. Start prioritising and make a 1 year 3 year and 5 year plan. Achievements are usually quite 'additive' in nature and a natural order will tend to 'fall out' once you define your goals. This will hopefully lead to a structured goal plan underpinned by exemplar references.

Experiment

I don't want that to come across as simply 'homework copying' or profile cloning. You simply want to gain intelligence fast on the best things to join, and the most useful professional qualifications, institutions, forums etc. Experiment with lots of other ideas in parallel, but use the information that sites such as LinkedIn provide you to plan (realistically) for your career advancement.

As I'm sure everyone will have seen Google has done a rather splendid, remarkable and strangely beautiful job of mapping the world's oceans. This has been highly publicised over the past couple of days.

So what I want to know is 'did they find Atlantis'?

I'm so disappointed that the Web isn't buzzing with theories and conjecture - Google 'finds Atlantis', Google 'finds Nazi gold'...

Well, I'm off to study the maps in detail. I also want to see if they mapped Lough Ness and whether there is evidence of Nessie in G-Maps.

Ok, so a pizza van has just drawn up opposite my house. I'm getting paranoid. I've used Atlantis, Nazi and Nessie in one post - expecting the assassins bullet...

ps. This was not a guest post by the Fortean Times.

pps. (ducking beneath the table) - if anyone finds a map reference for Atlantis please add to the comments section. I will sing songs in your honour in Valhalla, and may even add the performances to YouTube...

News abound today about the commencement of the trial of senior Google executives in Italy over a wrangle about the presence of a rather unpleasant video on their Italian video service. The video featured 4 youths in Turin teasing another boy with Down Syndrome, and was removed by Google when complaints were received.

What gets me irritated about this story however is the seeming 'cash hunt' that over-exuberant litigators are embarking on. The video was undoubtedly offensive, but here are key points to consider:

1. Google Executives were in no way associated with the creation of the video, I'm sure were abhorred by its content, and once the material was brought to Google's attention was removed
2. Google cannot be reasonably expected to moderate and police the world's video sharing. The volume of content would be unmanageable. Any legal precedent could not be enforced, and to be perfectly honest I do not wish to see another large corporation attempt to act as a moral arbiter. Applicable laws and public taste do just fine
3. The vast majority of content uploaded to video sharing sites is perfectly harmless and requires no 'vetting'. There are mechanisms to flag offensive content on these sites and I would imagine it strongly in Google's interest (for brand and reputation protection) to delete such material without delay

It seems to me the story misses some important points:

1. Who originated the offensive material in the first place and what litigation is ongoing against them?
2. As the protagonists are said to be 'youths' what action is being taken against the parents?
3. There needs to be a serious debate about completely inappropriate action towards the disabled. Focusing on Google's 'alleged responsibility' completely ducks this and let's these ignoramuses off the hook

It would be an absolute travesty if the main crux of this episode were ignored due to a cash hunt. Google and 4 sacrificial executives cannot be held accountable for the ills of this microcosm of Italian society.

I would be very against increased moderation of the Web2 space. The Social Media Minute is the instant conversation, the pulse of the Web and of public sentiment. If we need to 'inline' editorial safety catches, it will be like having a real-time conversation time delayed 10 seconds. Discussion should be truly live, not pseudo-live because of some ignorant Italian youths who should be the subject of prosecution and ideally undergo an appropriate form of restorative justice. 

Throw this case out of court!