SMUG Social Media University Global

Chapter 11 = 11 Cents Per Share for Sirius XM

They aren’t the only ones filing for bankruptcy lately, but it’s interesting that even a “new media” company like Sirius XM satellite radio is contemplating seeking relief from creditors:

Sirius XM Radio Inc. has hired advisers to prepare for a possible bankruptcy filing, which could come in days, according to a news report.

The New York Times said late Tuesday documents and analysis of a potential Chapter 11 filing are nearly complete, say people close to the company.

Sirius, whose radio personalities include shock jock Howard Stern, has struggled to refinance its debt load at a time when banks are skittish about lending. About $1 billion worth of debt comes due in 2009.

One of the supposed Sirius advantages was commercial-free music, available anywhere. But with Pandora available on the Web providing the same service (and customized channels that fit individual interests), and also with an iPhone application, that seems like a less distinct advantage for Sirius XM.

I’ve enjoyed the rare occasions when I’ve had a rental car with satellite radio, but can’t see paying a monthly fee for the service.

Apparently I’m not alone.

RAQ: What Does RT Mean in Twitter?

Here’s a question from Julia:

I’ve seen a lot of tweets that start with RT, like this one

I’m thinking it means “Return Tweet”??? But I’m not sure. Is there a new lexicon of TLA’s evolving as a result of Twitter and do you know specifically what this one means? Maybe this should be a RAQ if you think relevant?

Answer: RT means “retweet” or “re-tweet” and it’s a way for one Twitter user to pass along information found on Twitter to his or her circle of followers.

For example, if Julia sees this recent tweet of mine:

She might want to pass it along to her followers, who may or may not be following me. She would use the following syntax:

RT @LeeAase http://snipurl.com/bovi2 – UW selling students’ personal information for $90 apiece

…and would add any additional comments that fit within the 140-character tweet limit.

By using the RT @LeeAase she is crediting me for finding and originally tweeting this, which alerts her followers that I was the source, and then they might decide to follow me directly.

When I originally responded to Julia via email, she replied:

Ah! That makes sense. There have been times I’ve wanted to pass something along, but didn’t want the person I learned it from to think I was stealing their thunder (so to speak). I love that they’ve solved that issue…

That’s exactly the reason for the RT. The ethos of social media is

to share and pass information along, but also
to credit the original source.

Two little characters – RT – plus the username of your source, meets both goals in Twitter.

GoDaddy Enhancements?

Long-term SMUGgles will know that in early January I made the switch from hosting this august university on wordpress.com, to a self-hosted wordpress platform using GoDaddy as the provider.

I still plan to do some posts on that process, which was fairly straightforward and has some signficant advantages, not least of which is the little ShareThis button I have at the bottom of each post, which makes it much easier to pass them along.

One problem I’ve experienced lately, though, has been a slowdown in site performance. On Saturday morning at 9:49 CST, for instance, I tried to access the SMUG dashboard, and I got the following message (click to enlarge):

Saturday mornings are the least busy time of the week for Web server traffic. But at 10:32 I got this message:

Followed by this at 10:43

And this at 10:57

Is it just me, or do you see a pattern, too?

<rant>

One of my pet peeves when traveling is when, after a long delay, the flight attendant or the captain comes on the intercom and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for our patience….”

How do they know we’re being patient? Is it just because we haven’t ransacked the cabin? Patience is a virtue, fruit of the Spirit in Biblical reckoning, and I’m trying to cultivate it, but too often when I’m being thanked for patience I’m not feeling it. In fact, being thanked for patience sounds to me more like presumption.

</rant>

So, as your Chancellor I won’t thank you for your patience in continuing your studies even though SMUG has sometimes been slow.

I am, however, inviting you to join me in a research project to diagnose and hopefully fix the problem.

Part of the problem might be that I’m using the Shared Hosting plan with GoDaddy, instead of a dedicated server. Maybe another blog on my server is getting a lot of hits and slowing the performance.

But I’m using the Deluxe plan, which allows the following:

With 1,500 GB of monthly transfer available for my account, I would think the server should be more responsive. After all, I believe 1,500 GB would be enough bandwidth to download every post I’ve written (and every file I’ve uploaded) something like 37,000 times. I know some new SMUGgles have really been diving in, but we only have 274 in our Facebook group, 923 Twitter followers and a little over 300 RSS subscribers.

So somehow I don’t think SMUG is what’s swamping the servers. I also don’t believe I’m running any plug-ins that would be likely to cause the slowdown, although that’s certainly possible. But one of the plug-ins I had installed was an HTML cache that should have actually speeded up the loading.

I want to get to the cause of the problem, so I can solve it to provide a good experience here for SMUGgles, and also to help you – if you move to a self-hosted WordPress blog – to avoid slow page loads for your users.

My hypothesis is that the GoDaddy server isn’t delivering, because while I just loaded this page (where you can buy GoDaddy services) in 6 seconds, the front page of SMUG took 25 seconds (although I just tried it again and it was 8 seconds.)

So I’m inviting you to help me diagnose the extent of the problem.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it:

Have a clock ready that enables you to measure time in seconds
Click this link to open the SMUG front page in a new window, and note how long it takes to load.
Leave your measurement in the comments on this post, or if you are on Twitter, send your measurement as a tweet with the hashtag #smugtime. Please also indicate what kind of Internet service you have (i.e. DSL, dial-up, cable modem, T1) Your comment on this post could just say, for instance, “12 seconds DSL” or your tweet would say something like:

Helping @LeeAase diagnose server issues. #smugtime = 8 seconds cable modem.

Either way, I will get time stamped measures for what users are experiencing (in addition to my snapshots from last Saturday) to help me determine the extent (and hopefully the cause) of the slowdown.

Thanks for reading this far (note that I’m inferring, not presuming!), and please help in this project if you can by taking a few measurements at various times of the day.

I will update this post as I learn more.

Sunday Drivers

When I was a youngster, people who drove particularly slowly were disparagingly called “Sunday Drivers.” The idea was that they must only drive once a week on the way to church.

The good thing about Sunday Drivers is they rarely got in accidents, and if they did they wouldn’t do much damage at such low velocities.

My wife, Lisa, ran across this video yesterday that shows some motorists who would be well advised to limit their driving to once a week…or less. It’s not really related to SMUG coursework, but I’m sharing it just for fun, and hoping your Sunday driving experience today is better than these:

Continue reading “Sunday Drivers”

RAQ: Adding a Photo to a WordPress Post

Julie asks:

What is the best way to post a photo on a blog? A photo that I tried to cut and paste from a Word document didn’t take. Please let me know when you have a chance.

Here’s the answer:

Continue reading “RAQ: Adding a Photo to a WordPress Post”