Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
Here are slides from my presentation to the Scripps Oncology Nursing Advanced Practice course in San Diego. One of my points is that the title I was given for the presentation, To Network or Not, is really a false choice.
Given the growth of social media and social networking, it isn’t a question of whether health care providers will participate, but rather how they will, and how soon.
Last week I shared a video from David Allen on Getting Things Done, or GTD.
Here’s some more Saturday viewing from another author who has taught me a lot: Seth Godin. He even has his own section among the SMUG-recommended textbooks. Seth is speaking to employees at Google, and for those who haven’t read his work, it’s a good introduction:
Check out Seth’s blog, too.
As I mentioned in this post, David Allen’s work with GTD was a major focus of the content here in the pre-SMUG days.
Through this video, I’ve invited David to be a guest lecturer for the SMUGgles, giving an overview of his GTD methods and how and why they work.
(Well, in reality, Google invited David to to address its employees, and because of the magic of YouTube we all get to listen in.)
I highly commend this to your viewing:
And if you don’t have the book yet, you can order it below:
The last several months have been a whirlwind, culminating (at least to this point) with the Feb. 10 launch of our member community site for the Social Media Health Network, which is associated with our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.
We’ve also now completed our staffing for the Center, and of course that was a major undertaking, as was selecting the new members for our External Advisory Board.
The hectic pace and the need to try to get back on top of it all led me to refocus on more rigorously applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which was among the main topics of this blog in the pre-chancellor years. Here’s a post from 2006 that’s a good jumping-off point for GTD exploration.
So on Saturday, January 15 I decided to head over to the office after our radio show production, and spent about three hours getting to this point:
Of course I didn’t capture the “before” state, but let me assure you it wasn’t pretty.
And as I referenced in the video, neither was my email inbox. I did make a strong effort over the ensuing few weeks, but even as of Feb. 13 I had nearly 2,300 emails that were in various stages of processing:
So last week I made a major push, and by Friday at 3:38 p.m. CST I reached my goal:
As GTDers know, that doesn’t mean that I had nothing left to do with my emails, but it did mean I had processed all of them and had decided whether they were
As of this evening I have kept my office in the clean and clear mode for 27 work days. I’ve had five straight days of getting to the empty email inbox.
With the explosion of communication, your life is not likely to get less busy any time soon, as the number of potential inputs you get will continue to increase. That’s why it’s important to have a means of handling all that “stuff.”
If you haven’t explored GTD, I highly recommend it.
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:
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.
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.