Category: Blogging

March Madness in July

I’ve admittedly been infrequent (some might even say derelict) recently in developing new posts here on SMUG. The main reason is my focus during this season on my son Joe’s AAU basketball team, and chronicling their spring and summer season.

Right now we are in the middle of what I call “March Madness in July.” It’s the time when NCAA coaches are able to be on the road scouting talent and offering scholarships. Joe and his cousin Tom, both seniors-to-be for Austin High School, are playing with the Minnesota Magic Elite AAU team, based in the Twin Cities. And aside from my work-related blogging, my discretionary effort recently has been on the Magic site, where we have profiles of each of the players as well as video highlights from many of their games.

As I write this, Lisa and I are in the air above Tennessee on the way to Orlando for a national AAU tournament at the Wide World of Sports complex. Next week we head to Las Vegas for the Fab 48.

I probably will do a post with more analysis of the Magic site as part of the curriculum here, but for now here is video from the first half of one of the team’s stronger efforts, from a tournament in St. Cloud at the end of June:

The Magic site is similar to the site I developed for the Austin Packer Fast Break Club, which support the Austin High School team.

Both are examples of what you can accomplish with a Flip camera and $30 or less for a custom domain on WordPress.com.

Upgrade to WordPress 3.4 – Embedding Tweets

I just got the notice that there is a new version of WordPress available, so I did the automatic upgrade and checked out some of the new features. One I think is kind of neat is that you can embed a Tweet within a post just by pasting in the URL, like this:

 

 

 

If everything works as it should, you’ll see the tweet about our new Mayo Clinic iPhone/iPad app being featured in the Apple WWDC keynote embedded below:

So people reading your blog can interact with the tweet directly. It’s much better than taking a screen shot of the tweet and embedding the image.

Cool, huh?

 

Beyond Hyphenation

As enrollment in rural schools declines, smaller communities have been left with no viable alternative but to consolidate their schools with neighboring towns.

Typically this leads to a lot of hyphenated names for the resulting school districts, such as (in our part of Minnesota) Zumbrota-Mazeppa, Elgin-Millville, Dover-Eyota and the like. Sometimes the district comes up with a whole new name for the school, as when Rose Creek, Adams and Elkton combined to become Southland.

I believe my wife Lisa’s home district set the hyphenation record when New Richland-Hartland combined with Ellendale-Geneva to become…you guessed it…New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva, which the sportscasters abbreviate as NRHEG. Sometimes they’ll pronounce each letter, but if they’re in a hurry they just say NURR-heg.

A similar phenomenon has happened over the last half-century in the newspaper business, as competing newspapers in a community combined because neither could sustain themselves economically. So in Minnesota’s largest city the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune, which I remember as separate papers in the 1980s, became the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Likewise in Milwaukee the Journal and the Sentinel became the Journal Sentinel in 1995.

Hyphenated or not, you can probably think of several combo newspapers like this (e.g. Seattle Post-Intelligencer) – feel free to chime in with your examples in the comments.

But what happens when even the combined papers can’t make it? When even hyphenation can’t make the business model work?

We’re seeing that this week with the announcement that the Times-Picayune of New Orleans will be ceasing daily publication in the fall, moving to three days per week: Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

If a metropolitan area of 1.2 million people can’t support a daily print newspaper, that’s a significant milestone in the decline of the traditional newspaper business model. Employee layoffs are coming there, too, which is the continuation of a trend being tracked at Paper Cuts.

As Seth Godin and others have said, newspapers aren’t primarily selling news to subscribers; they’re attracting subscribers and renting their attention to advertisers. The new publishing schedule of the Times-Picayune makes this explicit, as Wednesday is the traditional day for advertising inserts.

With so many choices for consumers in how they will get their news and entertainment, the mainstream media oligopoly is much less profitable than it was a generation ago. Those traditional media players have some built-in advantages. but the barriers to entry that formerly protected them (FCC licenses and the huge amounts of capital needed to buy transmitters or printing presses) are now practically non-existent.

That’s why I have often said:

Don’t just pitch the media. Be the media.

Do pitch the media. Work with the existing outlets as a resource and help them serve their audiences.

But be the media too. If you have a story to tell, you can do it through a blog. And you aren’t just limited to text: you can embed video, audio, slide presentations, photos and other resources. It costs you literally nothing to start.

Have you taken the blogging plunge? If not, why not?

 

Belated Blog Birthday

For a blog that started out with a nondescript alliteration as its title – Lines from Lee – it’s only fitting that I would have a similar approach to the title of this post as I celebrate the fifth anniversary of my first blog post – four days late.

I’ve made it a point each year at this time to take a look back on how this blog has changed – and changed me – over the previous 12 months. See my first, second, third and fourth blog birthday posts for my journal on the journey.

This year, as I celebrate the fifth birthday of what has become SMUG, I’m also celebrating the first anniversary of Mayo Clinic establishing our Center for Social Media.

If I thought the first four years were eventful, this last one has felt like a Space Shuttle launch. It’s been gratifying to recruit a fantastic External Advisory Board, a tremendous staff (click to enlarge the team photo from our recent retreat) and to see more than 80 organizations join our Social Media Health Network.

And while NASA is winding down the Shuttle program, we’re just getting started. We’re holding our Third Annual Health Care Social Media Summit in Rochester in October in collaboration with Ragan Communications, along with our Network Member Meeting and Social Media Residency. We’re also holding a contest for patients and caregivers to attend for free (and even get airfare and lodging costs paid.)

Much of my blogging has been on the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media site (and the related Network member community), so my posting frequency on SMUG has suffered a bit. I definitely plan to still keep growing the SMUG community and provide resources, though (we’re at 1,265 SMUGgles as of today), and maybe recruit more associate professors with honorary doctorates.

If you would like to be among the honorary SMUG Ph.D.’s, drop me a note using the Contact Form. I would be glad to involve other contributors on the SMUG Faculty.

These last five years have been amazing. Thanks to everyone who has been part of it.

 

Why do Spammers do this?

This isn’t a metaphysical question about good and evil. I’m really trying to understand what the motivation or payoff is.

Over the last week or so I have been experimenting with BuddyPress as a way of adding social networking features to SMUG. I’ve been impressed with the functionality. Now that I’ve learned some of what I was seeking to discover through the experiment, I have reverted back to the previous theme and disabled BuddyPress.

One of the settings I enabled in BuddyPress allowed visitors to sign up for an account here. They just had to fill out a form, like this (click any of the images to enlarge):

And then they would see a message which said they would be getting an email message with a link to confirm their registration:

When they clicked the link in the email, they would return to the site and see this confirmation:

Today I got a message from a helpful SMUGgle, Michelle Murray, who said she had gotten an “internal server error” message when trying to visit a curriculum post…and that the problem had happened a few times. So I decided to investigate. To cut to the chase, here’s what I discovered:

A whole bunch of new “users” whose names were eerily similar. The extent of the problem is shown in this closeup of the user totals, which you don’t need to click to see clearly:

After I had deleted 50 of them, here is the closeup of the user type breakdown:

In other words, my blog had essentially been the target of a Denial of Service attack by a spam bot creating nearly 6,400 accounts.

As I examined one of the profiles, it seemed odd that the person behind the spam would try this, because it wasn’t immediately apparent what benefit they would derive. Here’s an example of what they had entered for each fake user:

And when you look at the tail end of the Website field, it is just the link to the member profile on SMUG, not some other Web page they wanted to give Google juice.

It seems that the goal is to somehow help a site devoted to offering six-pack abs to its customers (clearly something I could use), but it isn’t (or wasn’t) clear to me how this spamming strategy would drive traffic to that site. Other spam email domains pointed to searsuckersuit, realestatequicksolutions and comfortersonsalenow, all with .coms appended.

On further reflection, it seems perhaps one way this scheme could work would be if the spammer accounts could be used to bypass the Akismet comment filtering. In that way they could include links back to their sites within comments.

Or maybe if my default for new users was to make them Authors instead of Subscribers, it would give the spammers a chance to create new posts with lots of links to their sites:

What do you think? Based on what you see above, what would be the benefit to spammers in creating 6,000+ accounts on a site, without any links back other than in the user email domain, which isn’t published?

Was this just a first step in a plan to eventually unleash a torrent of new posts or comments?

By the way, for the time being I have turned comment moderation on, so I’m not just relying on Akismet. So when you share your thoughts, it may take a little bit for me to moderate and approve the comment.

Meanwhile, does anyone have a recommendation for mass deleting 6,300 spam subscribers in WordPress?

Otherwise, it looks like I’ll be selecting 50 at a click and deleting about 126 times. Should be an hour or so of mindless fun.