SMUG | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 102: Blog Search Engines

Blogs are great tools for news and conversations. So how do you find out what people are saying in blogs, so you can join the discussion?

If you want to monitor blog mentions of a topic (or your company’s name), you have numerous paid options. But I recommend that you start with the free ones, such as:

Technorati,
BlogPulse, and
IceRocket
And of course you also can sign up for Google News alerts, too.

For any of these, it’s easy to get automatic, up-to-date alerts via RSS feeds or e-mail, so you can be aware of what is being said about topics that matter to you. Here are the steps, using Technorati as an example:

Go to Technorati.com and enter your term of interest into the search box. In my case, I’m interested in health policy reform, so I entered health reform in the search box.

You can narrow the scope by taking advantage of what Technorati has defined as “authority.” In essence, this is a count of how many other blogs have linked to a given blog in the last six months. This tells you that some other people have found the information useful or interesting. The next two graphics show what happens when you search for posts with “some authority” or “a lot of authority” (and in the latter the search term was put in quotes, “health reform” to narrow further.)

Another way to narrow the scope is to search for posts that are tagged as being about your topic. (For background about tagging, read this post.) Here are the results for posts tagged “health reform”:

Your next step should be to sign up for automatic alerts from Technorati about new posts that fit your search term or that are tagged with your term. Click this button…

…and (provided you have completed Social Media 102: Intro to RSS or its equivalent) you will be taken to your RSS aggregator or feed reader, where you will have an opportunity to suscribe to a feed of this search.

After you’ve subscribed to the Technorati feed, your next step should be to visit some of the blogs that came up with “some authority” or “a lot of authority” in your original search. These blogs may write about your topic regularly. If so, you will want to become a regular reader. But instead of having to visit them each day, you can just subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

Also, in Technorati, you can search for blogs that are tagged as being about your topic, not just that have some posts relating to it. Here are the results for blogs about health reform:

After you’re done with your Technorati search, you can follow much of the same process with BlogPulse and IceRocket.

Homework Assignments:

Go to Technorati and search for key words that are of interest to you, such as your company name. Subscribe to the feeds for those terms.
Find at least five blogs that are “about” your key terms, and subscribe to those blogs’ feeds in your RSS feed reader.
Repeat the process using at least two other search engines, choosing from BlogPulse, IceRocket and Google News.

This post is part of the Blogging curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). For information about enrolling in SMUG, click here.

Intro to Blogs

Note: This Social Media University, Global course is cross-posted as Social Media 105 and Blogging 101.

Many people have misconceptions about blogs. Some of this is based on misinformation or disinformation from the mainstream media about mysterious “bloggers.” Like we’re a completely different breed, if not a full-fledged new species that should be prevented from procreating.

In essence, a blog is just a Web site that allows comment and conversations. Thanks again to Lee LeFever for his “plain English” overview:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI]

The best part about blogs is that if you are reading this, you can have one. And it won’t cost you anything, except perhaps two minutes of your time. But we’ll let you prove that as part of your homework assignment.

So, if you don’t already have a blog, SMUG can help you get started. You can pay to have a TypePad account if you wish, or you can get a free one from Blogger, a Google service. In the spirit of academic freedom, SMUG doesn’t require that you use WordPress.com for your blog. But we do recommend WordPress.com. Why?

It’s free. Not a 14-day free trial, but completely free for the basic service.
You get 3 GIGABYTES of storage at no extra charge, and there is no limit on bandwidth, which is pretty impressive.
SMUG uses WordPress.com. Everything you see here (except for our domain name) has been accomplished without spending a penny, and with no support from an IT department. So if you see something you’d like to replicate on your blog, you can just ask the Chancellor (see box at upper right, or put your questions in the comments) how to do it.

WordPress.com does have some limitations on the kinds of scripts or widgets you can embed. And you can’t use Google’s AdSense program to monetize your content. (If you’re seeing Google ads on this blog, they’re from WordPress.com, not SMUG.) But then again, the WordPress.com service offers an astonishing level of benefits at no charge to me, so I think it’s great.

If you really think you’re going into blogging as a for-profit enterprise, you might consider TypePad. Or, you could start on WordPress.com, register your own domain (like I did with social-media-university-global.org) and use domain mapping. Then if you decide you want to move on to full-blown WordPress on a leased server for maximum customization, you can move it and re-map without breaking any links or losing Google juice.

Homework Assignments:

If you don’t already have a blog:

Think a few minutes about a name and URL for your blog. But don’t think so long that it keeps you from taking the plunge and actually starting. If you later decide you don’t like your URL, you can always get another blog on WordPress.com. They’re free.
Get a timing device of some kind. It can be an old-fashioned analog wristwatch, or better yet one of those digital athletic ones. If you have some kind of stopwatch function that would be ideal. But don’t spend any money for it (you could even use the clock function on your computer, if necessary.) We just want to get a rough idea of how long step four takes.
Start your timer.
Start your blog on WordPress.com. In the curriculum for the SMUG Blogging major we will be working through lots of lessons that will use WordPress as the blogging platform. So if you use WordPress instead of Blogger or TypePad it will all look more familiar as you doing your homework. Click here to get a preview of what it will look like when you start your WordPress blog, and click here to actually sign up for your account.
Stop your timer.
Add a comment to this post, including the URL of your new blog and how long it took you to get started. Was it two minutes or less?

For All Students:

I plan to create a post of SMUG student blogs, so if you don’t want your blog listed there, please also indicate that in your comment.

If you already have a blog:

You’re one of our advanced students, so help please help your classmates by sharing your experience. Leave a comment below indicating

what blogging platform you’re using,
what you like and dislike about it,
how long you’ve been blogging and
your URL.

Check Out Our SMUG New URL!

Social Media University, Global is still hosted on wordpress.com, but thanks to the wonders of domain mapping, we now have a URL worthy of a higher education institution:

social-media-university-global.org

I have said previously that I would only put things on this blog that were free. The reason for that was so I could tell FUD-plagued prospective bloggers, “If you see it on my blog, you can do it without spending any money or involving your IT department.”

I decided to make this one exception, because it’s only about the URL, not what you actually see on the blog. And maybe I’ll create a new page called “What’s not free” where I can indicate this and any other enhancements I decide to purchase.

This blog has been at leeaase.wordpress.com since its inception, but with the rebranding I did last month, it seemed reasonable to spend the princely sum of $19 to get an appropriate URL. That way, as I recruit new faculty members, they’ll be writing for social-media-university-global.org, which sounds a lot better than leeaase.wordpress.com.

So I registered this new domain with GoDaddy.com for $8.99, and then paid the $10 to WordPress.com for domain mapping. It took a while for my WordPress.com credits to go through, but all-in-all it was a painless exercise. The gang at WordPress.com gave really clear instructions, and if I would have purchased my domain through them instead of GoDaddy it probably would have been simpler (although it would have cost an extra dollar.)

I mainly used GoDaddy to better understand how the domain mapping process works. If I had bought the domain through WordPress.com it would have been simpler (they would have managed steps I needed to do manually), but the process would have been opaque to me, and I wouldn’t have learned as much. And practical, hands-on learning is what SMUG is all about!

I will be writing about this experience in a future course in the SMUG Blogging curriculum, Blogging 305: Domain Mapping.

Meanwhile, I’ll be seeing if this change creates any problems for RSS feeds or anything else. I expect it will drain some of my Google juice for a bit, but I think it will help a lot in the long run, having descriptive words in my URLs.

Let me know what you experience with this change.

Ending the Facebook Hacker Challenge

It’s time to bring the SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge to an end. No one has been successful (and I don’t think they would be), but in a comment today, Erik Giberti raised a good point that I hadn’t fully considered.

Lee, I’m not a lawyer, but I think you’re violating at least the Facebook Terms of Use and possibly the DMCA (although that’s a tricky moving target) by encouraging this generally considered illegal activity; that is cracking Facebook vulnerabilities.

My purpose in issuing the Hacker challenge was to counter the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) being spread about Facebook’s secret groups. “Can you really trust that the data you put in a secret Facebook group would be safe? What about trade secrets, or marketing plans? Aren’t you putting those at risk by using Facebook instead of having them securely behind your firewall?”

I was comfortable enough with Facebook’s security that I was willing to risk $100 that no one would be able to get into the secret group I set up for purposes of testing. But while I thought the risk of losing $100 was worth taking to prove a point, the risk of having my Facebook account suspended isn’t.
So here’s my advice for people who are thinking about using Facebook groups for business discussions:

A secret Facebook group should be at least as secure as e-mail. Everyone uses e-mail to discuss business issues, even though e-mail messages can be forwarded to an unintended party, or possibly intercepted in transit. By contrast, it’s relatively harder to get into a secret Facebook group.
Create a legal warning notice for your secret Facebook group. Lots of companies put legal notices on the bottom of their e-mail messages or on faxes (remember when you used to send those?) saying that the information is confidential and intended only for its recipients. I’m sure a good lawyer could develop the same kind of language to post in the descriptions of secret Facebook groups.
A secret Facebook group will be even more secure if you keep it, well… SECRET. For someone to hack into your secret group, they first need to know it exists! I put out a challenge to the world, saying that if anyone could find out what was in the recent news section of my secret group, I would give them $100. Then I published not just the name of the group, but its URL. No one was successful, although one person talked big about being willing to do it for $1,000. If you don’t tell anyone other than your intended participants about your secret group, it would be that much harder to hack.
Be Smart. If information is truly critical, so that disclosure would have serious negative ramifications, don’t put it in a secret Facebook group. You wouldn’t put your Social Security number, your bank account PIN, credit card numbers or the launch codes for nuclear missiles in an e-mail. Don’t put them in Facebook, either. But lots of less-critical information could be shared within Facebook secret groups with relatively low risk.
The calculation should always be risks vs. rewards. If a Facebook group enables you to collaborate more effectively than you can using your current methods, and if an information leak wouldn’t bring financial ruin or global thermonuclear war, the reward probably makes the risk worth taking.

I’ve done my own calculation of risks vs. rewards based on Erik’s comment and Robert Scoble’s experience in being kicked off Facebook, and that has led me to declare that the SMUG challenge has ended, as of 12:01 a.m. CST on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008. I am not encouraging anyone to hack Facebook’s security. The $100 offer to get into my secret group, and the $200 offer for posting a photo to it, is withdrawn.

I find Facebook too valuable that I would not want to risk an account suspension on the grounds that I had encouraged others to violate the Facebook TOS. A rock star like Scoble can get his Facebook reinstated quickly. For the rest of us, it might take longer.

My challenge was meant to be supportive of Facebook as a place for business interactions. And I think it has accomplished its purpose, if it has helped to banish the FUD.

SMUG Facebook Hacker Challenge Update

The SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge, which I conceived in response to a question during this podcast interview, has attracted some interest.

Anthony at AllFacebook put out the all-points-bulletin for hackers to give it a shot. And Goob said

Frankly, I think it’s just a great publicity event. Promise some money if people can do something you’re confident is impossible, let a ton of other sites write about it and link back to you, and sit back and relax. I can [sic] the same thing though. I’ll give $1 million dollars to anybody who can figure out the number I’m thinking of between 1 and 78 gazillion. See, it’s that easy.

And Justin Flowers added, while misspelling my name,

While reading the post, I suddenly realized that I had a similar challenge that I wanted to make, and that, in fact, I was willing to offer more money for mine.

You see, I, Justin Flowers, trust the security at the US treasury so much that I’m willing to offer a $1000 dollar reward to anyone that can break into the US Treasury, and steal $1,000,000 US. If you show me the 1 million, I’ll pay up. I’m willing to double my payout if you bring me a picture of you in a vault at the Treasury.

In their rush to sarcasm, they both Goob and Justin missed the point. The security of the US Treasury isn’t in question, and this isn’t about mind reading. No one doubts whether the banking system is safe from being hacked (even by Danny Ocean and his 10 friends).

But data security for business information is precisely the issue with Facebook. I get the question a lot, as I did on the MindComet podcast:

“If I use a secret Facebook group for business planning, can I feel confident that my data will be secure?”

And that’s the reason for the SMUG Facebook Hacker Challenge. I’m betting $100 that the answer is “yes.”

Do I hope lots of people link to the hacker challenge and spread the word? Yes, because that will help us find the answer to our question about data security in Facebook secret groups. This is a real academic research project.

Unlike Goob, I’m not thinking of a random number for someone to guess. I have a real answer for someone to find on this secret Facebook group, if they can beat Facebook’s group security. It’s right there, in the recent news section of the group. And the information itself is worth a lot more than the $100 bounty.

Yet in the blog discussions of the hacker challenge, one question that’s been raised is whether the $100 prize is lucrative enough to attract the attention of a really proficient hacker. In fact, in the comments on the post announcing the challenge, the mysterious jmprei offered to do it for $1,000. I guess the $100 isn’t enough for her or him.

As a professor at SMUG, I do have the security of tenure (after all, I’m the Chancellor), but since

we don’t charge any tuition for our online university, and
our University Endowment is…well…zero, and therefore
My SMUG salary also is nonexistent…

I’m not ready to raise the ante on my own. (In fact, my wife says the current hacker challenge prize has to come out of my Christmas money.)

So if anyone else thinks it’s worth raising the payout to find out how safe your business-related data would be in a secret Facebook group, here’s an opportunity for you to provide some extramural research funding for SMUG.

I’ve established a PayPal account for the SMUG Research Fund, and have transferred $100 into it. Whoever meets the SMUG Hacker challenge first gets whatever is in the account at the time of the hack.

So it becomes a fun little game of chicken for any hackers who think a $100 prize (and worldwide fame) isn’t worthy of their time and talents. As SMUG students or any interested bystanders make their $1, $2, $5, $10 or larger contributions to the SMUG Research Fund, I will update this post to indicate the new prize level.

I think it may eventually reach the point at which Greed and Fear will intersect for some hacker. They would then have the Deal or No Deal decision to make: Do I wait for the prize to go up and increase the payoff, or do I claim it now to avoid having someone else snipe it?

Please note: None of our 40 students (cool!) should feel any obligation to contribute. Social Media University, Global is a free university. Also, contributions to the SMUG Research Fund are not tax deductible. But if anyone does want to help advance our practical knowledge of whether Facebook is safe for business data, click here or in the SMUG Research Endowment widget at the bottom of the right sidebar.