Techrigy, Inc.

Engaging Social Media: Getting Started Guide to Social media Marketing

2008-06-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

This is taken from a white paper i just posted at http://techrigy.com/pdf/EngagingSocialMediaWhiteP.pdf.

Engaging Social Media:
Getting Started Guide to Social Media Marketing

Word of mouth (WOM) marketing is currently under going a renaissance. Of course, WOM is nothing new. We were using WOM long before we began studying marketing. There is no better recommendation on a brand than testimonial from a close friend. Yet to reach global audiences, marketing became, for a long time, about shouting a message as loud as possible. This worked for a while until we, the message target, had so any messages shouted at us we perfected the ability to tune out all of them. Social media presents itself as a way to reach people without shouting. Instead we attempt to engage in two way conversations with our customer. Social media allows the customer to tell us what they want instead of us telling them what we think they want.

Marketers that are able to use social media effectively will outpace their rivals. They will transform marketing into a giant sounding board that not only generates buzz, but also feeds into product development. Once your customers realize you will listen to them, they will be more than happy to share what’s good and bad about your brand giving you the opportunityy to improve.

Of course, WOM won’t work in a few situations. First, if the product you offer stinks, doesn’t work, or deserves no attention, WOM won’t work for you. In this case, you are better off figuring out how to fix what is broken. Second, if you aren’t willing to listen to the customer, if you think you know better than the customer, or are just too stubborn to change, WOM isn’t going to help you either. This guide will give you a base to start engaging social media so that you can make positive changes in your organization. It is broken down into two sections:

-The first section outlines steps for listening to your customers. Before you engage in any conversation, it is important you first listen to what’s being said. Imagine walking up to a group of people at a conference and immediately starting to talk loudly to the group. Wouldn’t work would it? The same applies to social media. No one will be receptive to you barging in and shouting your message to everyone. You must be engaged in the conversation before you can contribute. You should understand the context of the conversation before you engage.

- The second part of the guide is engagement. Of course, how you engage takes a lot of common sense. This is a guide, so we will give you some ideas and steps, but ultimately you will need to assess the situation and evaluate careful before engaging. Not every situation calls for the same response. Don’t take these guidelines as hard and fast rules. Instead, use it as a guide to getting started and help in steering you in the right direction.

Listening
Listening is the first stage of any plan of attack. Spend some time understanding why and where conversations are happening. Get comfortable talking the language of the people having the conversation and get to know the accepted practices of the group.

Step #1 - Start monitoring what people are saying about your brand.

Start by trying to understand what the crowd is saying about your brand. What are the negative and positive sentiments? Where are the conversations occurring? In the US, Europe, Pacific Rim, or South America?

Listen to the negative comments on your brand. What are the roots of the comments? How can you make changes to your brand to change these negative opinions? See what the positive comments are. Can you leverage these positive comments with customers and prospects? What can you do to re-enforce the positives around your brand?

Make sure you are getting as comprehensive a view as possible by tracking all of the varying social media including blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, social networking sites, micro-blogs (like Twitter), forums, and message boards. Keep historical records of the volume of buzz around your brand so you can see the affect your efforts have. You’ll want to track the buzz on a monthly basis so you can see the ups and downs and work to map your efforts to these changes.

Step #2 - Start monitoring what people are saying about your competitors.

Monitor your competitors as closely as you are monitoring your own brands. This can give you competitive insight into what people hate and love about the competition. The people that hate the competition may end up being your fans if you can avoid making the same errors the competition did. Can you figure out what about the competition people love? Can you beat the competition at their own game? Monitoring the competition can help in several other ways. It’s useful to know the volume of buzz around the competition versus your brand. This can help you evaluate your competitive stance and to know how much work you have. If you find your brand’s buzz significantly lower, that’s good news because you’ll have plenty of room to improve.

Find blogs that reference your competitors and make sure you are engaged in these conversations and getting your share of the buzz. The worst possible situation is to have your customers and prospects engaged in a dialogue with the competition that you don't know about.

Step #3 Start monitoring what people are saying in your industry.

There are many conversations going on around your industry that likely reference neither your brand nor its competitors. Yet these are places that your customers and potential customers frequent. These conversations are the low hanging fruit. Listen to them and see what they are saying. Anything you can learn from them? Anything you can contribute to them? Finding these conversations and get engaged in them can be very rewarding. Create buzz but don’t over-hype your product or company.

Engagement

Once you’ve gather another information, you are ready to begin engaging social media. Below are steps to get started.

Step #4 Start your company blogging
There are many approaches to blogging that can be effective. Some organizations setup a single blog for the company. Others promote the idea of blogging and allow their employees in to blog as individuals.

Generally speaking, encouraging your employees to blog is more expensive but more effective. You’ll have to accept that some of each employee’s time will be invested into blogging to promoting the company. But the voice of the employees will be more valuable and more transparent to the readers. Of course, you need to make sure that when you blog you have something interesting to say. People expect you to contribute to the conversation. Be interesting, insightful, and useful when you blog.

Step #5 Comment on other blogs

You are engaging in a conversation. You’ll have to stimulate those conversations if you really want to get them started. When you start blogging, you are creating conversations. When you are commenting on other blogs, you’re engaging in existing conversations. Make sure your comments contribute to the conversation. Offer a different point-of-view, share ideas, feedback, additional information, etc... Don’t pitch - educate and inform instead. Once you comment, you should check back to continue the conversation. Expect people to comment on your comments, and then to comment back. It’s important to make the conversation two way.

Another way to get engaged in some of these conversations is using linkbacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback ). Linkbacks allow you to comment on and talk about someone else’s post on your own blog. Using a linkback you can start additional conversations built on other conversations.

Step #6 Participate in conversations on tools such as Twitter.

Stay up to date with the new technologies that are facilitating these conversations. Get your own account on Twitter, FriendFeed, and other platforms that allow you to engage in the conversations. These platforms have search/track capabilities to allow you to find and “follow” people that might be interested in your brand or that might even be having problems with your products. Being out there, helping people having problems, and understanding peoples’ complaints is very important.

Check out Frank Eliason (http://twitter.com/comcastcares ) and how he is making a big impact on Comcast’s image by listening to conversations on Twitter - http://bryanperson.com/2008/04/28/comcastcares-is-listening-and-not-only-to-michaelarrington/.

Step #7 Engage your customers through social networks

Social networks are a useful way to promote your brand. There are really two different ways to accomplish this. One is to leverage existing public social networking sites, such as FaceBook or MySpace, to try to build fans around your brand. There are various stories of brands getting huge numbers of followers through MySpace and FaceBook groups. It’s certainly possible, but it certainly takes a certain type of brand. Bands and movies are great targets for generating fan buzz - but it’s a whole lot less likely if your brand is a business service or tissues. People just aren’t going to flock to your brand.

It’s still worth getting out to these sites, starting a group or community, and then inviting people that might be interested to the group. The huge successes will be few and far between, but it certainly won’t hurt.

Your other option is to build your own social networking site using platforms such as Ning (www.ning.com ). Setup your own social networking site and offer coupons, product hints, and even direct access to company employees through the site. Use the site to gather feedback on your brand, encourage people to leave ideas and complaints about your products. Then figure out how to fix them.

After you create you site, you will need to promote it. Use bloggers and other viral techniques to try to get the word out on your site.

Step #8 Contribute to sources such as Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular social media platforms. Some reports indicate that 1 of every 200 page requests is for Wikipedia. What does that mean for your brand? To start with, marketing yourself through Wikipedia is nearly impossible. Wikipedia does not like this approach. Case in point, Microsoft attempted to adjust some language used around an entry by hiring an expert to make the edits. Guess what? It didn’t fly with Wikipedia! It’s not going to fly for you either.

Also, it’s important to be aware that what is being posted anonymously on Wikipedia is being monitored. Tools such as WikiScanner (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ ) map anonymous entries from IP addresses to organizations. Reviewers can find changes made by an organization that are clearly PR moves or other attempts at manipulating points of view. Again, transparency is the only acceptable way to even try to contribute to Wikipedia.

A few suggestions. Use the Talk pages to help editors understand why edits should be made. If you make edits directly yourself, there’s a good chance it will get taken down. Be factual and cite references for any edits you make. Even an inkling of marketing hype will immediately result in you losing credibility with the Wiki Editors.

As well, consider getting your brand out on other websites, such as AboutUs.org and Wikia.com. See these other sources for more on Wikipedia editing.

http://net-savvy.com/executive/reputation/crash-course-on-wikipedia.html

http://publishing2.com/2007/01/24/what-is-the-check-on-wikipedias-power

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/12/15/entrepreneur-s-journal-does-your-businessneed-a-wikipedia-pag/

Step #9 Encourage your customers to talk about your product, good or bad.

Offers incentives for people to talk about your brand. Simple incentives are enough to give people the motivation to talk about a brand they like. Something simple like cool stickers, coupons, an upgrade of your service, or even just a link back to a blogger and some recognition are enough to generate some buzz.

Don’t use incentives like cash or valuable prizes. You invite insincere buzz which almost always backfires as well as the potential for fraud. When people know you are compensating others for hyping your brand, they lose credibility immediately. Keep it simple when encourage people to spread the word. When you see someone post something positive or negative on your brand, give them a shout out or a link back from your own blog. Let them know you are listening and that you care.

When you find something negative, don’t ignore or bury it. Find a solution for the problem. Turn the negative into a positive. Let the person know that there are people at the company that care and want to find a solution to the problem. Link to the problem from your blog. This lets everyone else know that you care about fixing problems when they occur. Companies pretending that they never have a complaint aren’t fooling anyone. Companies that show how they handle problems positively stand out.

Conclusion

Don’t stand idle and let social media run you over. The fact is that you can make a big impact on the buzz around your brand by taking the right steps. You won’t be able to change the perceptions and buzz around your brand overnight using social media, but you certainly will be able to make an impact and get insights you’ll likely not get anywhere else.

One last recommendation - pick up a copy of the book Groundswell. The book gives so much depth on understanding and using social technology, it is a must read for anyone marketing in today’s world.

We invite you to get started today listening to these conversation happening over social media using an SM2 Freemium account (http://sm2.techrigy.com ). SM2 gives you complete monitoring and analysis of social media for an unlimited period of time.

Are you a brand?

2008-06-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting perspective on using the freemium version of SM2 as a way to monitor your most important brand - YOU. Check it out http://thepaisano.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/what-about-me/

Yes, that was one of the intentions of SM2, to provide a way for EVERYONE to measure this stuff. Very different perspective than the Buzzmetrics of the world which just aren't reaching the masses. Every brand needs help - not just the big ones.

discussion on social media measurement to track new media campaigns

2008-06-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

I just started a discussion on http://www.insocialmedia.com around using social media measurement to track the effectiveness of new media campaigns.

http://www.insocialmedia.com/forum/topic/show?id=2025541%3ATopic%3A13882

I'm starting to map out how this can actually be used to get real numbers that can be used in an ROI model.

New Wikipedia Page - Social Media Measurement

2008-06-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

I created a page on Wikipedia for social media measurement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media_measurement

It's very rudimentary at this point. I invite everyone that has something to contribute to the page to come and edit it. It would be a great way to learn about how Wikipedia pages are created and edited.

BlogBackupOnline down for the weekend

2008-05-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

BlogBackupOnline will be down for the weekend. We are moving the server into a new data center. All your backups will continue and we will be back online ASAP over the weekend.

Blog post on Social Media Measurement Roundtable

2008-05-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Social Media Measurement Roundtable in Toronto, organized by Joseph Thornley, was held today.

It sounded like there was a lot of discussion regarding social media's influence, the degree of engagement in it, as well as its prevalence. Read about the details from Marshall Sponder, an attendee of the event, at the link below.

http://theanalyticsguru.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/social-media-roundtable-part-1/

Twitter spam or "Twam"

2008-05-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

I was recently running some social media searches on AARP and discovered Twitter spam. I would wager this isn't the first instance, but it is the first case I've encountered that is so blatant.

The twitter spam appears to use similar techniques heavily used in spam blogs (splogs). It seems to operate by creating multiple users created by "mortg" which are succeeded by a randomly generated set of characters. The exact same message is then pushed out through each account. In the case with the AARP, the spammers' (twammers') aims appear to be attempts at drawing in people searching for life insurance or bad credit mortgages.

I have to say, this form of spam makes my life miserable. Realistically, however, I anticipate that this is just the beginning. Today, I stumbled upon another account following a "user" while it was really just a redirect to a spam site. So, we're at the beginning apparently. Hopefully, the block feature will make Twitter spam (do I get to coin the phrase twam?) less annoying than email spam.

Capturing Authors' Perceptions

2008-05-05T21:16:00.000-07:00

One of the nice features SM2 provides is the ability to gain visibility into what authors are thinking when they post about different brands. SM2 is able to do this by looking at the tags and categories associated with the posts. Identifying how content has been tagged or categorized allows us to gain insight into what the authors are thinking and care about.

For example, let's take a look at an SM2 Author Categories Cloud generated for the company E*Trade and see if we can identify any patterns.

This is a standard cloud, presenting terms in alphabetical order while using relative font sizes to indicate the frequency the term is used. The larger the font, the more common the tag is.

Note the themes we see in the E*Trade cloud:

- Variations on "Super Bowl" demonstrates some buzz around E*Trade super bowl commercials.

- Multiple references to Commercials, Advertising, Marketing, Promotions, and Affliate programs.

- References indicating cross-industry posts, such as tags for Ameritrade (strongest correlation) and Bank of America.

- Many references to industry terms such as finance, broker, banking, and money.

- Several references to hi-tech companies such as Microsoft and Google.

Now let's compare this to a similar SM2 Author Categories Cloud generated for "Ameritrade".

In the Ameritrade cloud, we see many similarities to E*Trade's cloud:

- Cross-references to other financial companies such as Washington Mutual, Charles Schwab, Merril Lynch, and Goldman Sachs.

- Fewer references to high-tech companies.

- Similar industry terms such as brokerage, stocks, and trading.

Even with the similarities, you can also see some slightly different characteristic surfacing between the two different companies. With E*Trade, we saw a little more association with high tech companies. With Ameritrade, we saw more association with other financial companies.

Finally, let's compare those two clouds to an Author Categories Cloud for "Charles Schwab".

With this cloud, we see a very different picture portrayed:

- References to charities, an advisory council, and other movements.

- Similar cross industry references, but some different names, such as JP Morgan and Citigroup.

- Many references to leadership, empowerment, partnerships, and education.

As you can see, SM2's Author Categories Clouds feature provides insight into the personalities and public perceptions of a brand. In these cases, our sample size was fairly small. The larger the sample size, the better able you'll be able to identify different perceptions.

Once you've gained some understanding of the perceptions around your brand, you can begin working shaping your brand's personality as well as those perceptions into a reflection of the brand you want to be perceived as.

Get started investigating your own brand by signing up for an SM2 Freemium account at http://sm2.techrigy.com.

Kodak chief blogger

2008-04-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

Since I try to stay aware of what's going on in the our local community, I get a daily update from the Rochester Business Journal. I found this an exciting and inspiring article.

http://www.rbj.net/fullarticle.cfm?sdid=72421
" Kodak creates chief blogger post

By MIKE DICKINSON
Rochester Business Journal
April 3, 2008
Eastman Kodak Co. has added a new position—hiring its first chief blogger.
Kodak (NYSE:EK) Thursday named Jennifer Cisney to the post to provide oversight and creative guidance for Kodak’s two blogs: “A Thousand Words” and “A Thousand Nerds” — and to boost the company’s social media presence.
Cisney also is to serve as the company’s eyes and ears online, listening to customer feedback and sharing ideas and tips related to Kodak’s products and services, the company said.
“Just over 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs. Fewer still have chief
bloggers, and Kodak is among the first to name a female chief blogger,” said Jeffrey Hayzlett,
chief business development officer, in a statement. “We are committed to staying on the cutting-edge of social media.”

It's good to see Kodak taking social media seriously. Check out their blogs at http://1000words.kodak.com/ and http://1000nerds.kodak.com/.

Jennifer, I hope to see you around Rochester!

Confusion on space used

2008-03-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

Many of our BETA users have been experiencing some strangeness in the Space Used. Hopefully this will explain and I'm hoping we didn't cause anyone too much frustration.

You probably will see a large jump in space used because BlogBackupOnline has started counting the linked files (images you linked to from your blog) in the space usage calculation which it hadn't before. We have been backing up these files for you all along, however most users simply want to backup the text of their blog. If you delete the backups of the linked content, your disk space storage will return to the original value. If you wish to keep backing up the linked files, we recommend upgrading your account.

If you send an email to remove_files@techrigy.com we will remove the files for you.

As well, we are adding a button in BlogBackupOnline to do this manually. From the Dashboard, select the blog by clicking Manage next to the name. On the Blog Status screen is a button "Delete Linked Files". Just click this and give it a minute or so to delete the files.

Send me an email (aaron@techrigy.com) if you have an problems or if there is still confusion.

Regards,
Aaron
_______________________________
Aaron C. Newman
President/Founder
Techrigy, Inc.
http://www.techrigy.com

Show some love

2008-03-11T21:23:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to take a few minutes and show some love for all the people that have blogged about BlogBackupOnline. They are the key to our success, so I salute these people and encourage everyone else to blog about BlogBackupOnline as well.

This is an ongoing offer - blog about BlogBackupOnline and we will upgrade your account. See http://www.techrigy.com/special.htm.

* If you have a FREEMIUM account, we will upgrade your account from 5 MB to 10 MB.
* If you have a PROFESSIONAL account, we will upgrade your account from 250 MB to 500 MB.
* If you have an ENTERPRISE account, we will upgrade your account from 1 GB to 2 GB.

Send your link to upgrade@techrigy.com.

Here are some of the people that have blogged about us already.

http://thepaisano.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/automatic-blog-backups-for-free/
http://syncyn.blogspot.com/2007/07/just-lil-help-for-yall.html
http://syncyn.blogspot.com/2008/03/all-right-im-easing-back-into-it.html
http://yeepage.com/blogbackuponline
http://morningbrew.sdwhiteonline.com/2007/09/30/blog-backup-service-free-for-now/
http://milenecristina.wordpress.com/?s=Blog+Backup+Online&searchbutton=go%21
http://headgamer.blogspot.com/2008/03/blogbackuponline-rocks-and-has-saved-me.html
http://typeset.vox.com/library/post/blogbackuponline-because-really-who-wants-to-lose-their-posts.html
http://www.gabfire.com/periodic-back-up-of-your-blog-and-folders
http://www.gabfire.com/backup-guide-for-bloggers
http://3xw.us/?p=98
http://coollibrarianblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/back-that-blog-up.html
http://blog.looseends.net/blogging/blogbackuponline/
http://tisgarplen.blogspot.com/2007/12/do-you-backup-your-blog.html
http://jonathanstoolbar.blogspot.com/2007/08/32-i-blog-therefore-i-am.html.
http://workathomemomrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/08/back-back-back-it-up.html
http://conservablogs.com/velvethammer/2007/07/20/blogbackuponline/
http://www.retechcoach.com/2008/03/06/protect-your-assets-with-blogbackuponline/
http://myecila.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-backup-online.html
http://macauboy429.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B739BDB406F3E57E!272.entry
http://www.twoorthree.net/2008/03/my-favorite-web.html
http://wordswithin.info/blog/?p=426
http://takeonlogyk.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/blogging-tools-2/
http://greatapps.blogspot.com/2008/03/backing-up-your-blog.html
http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2007/10/storm-track-intimidation-al-qaeda.html
http://ranchochase.com/2008/03/07/how-much-do-you-value-your-blog-content/
http://justjan.blogsome.com/2007/11/16/back-up-your-blog/
http://lavanyadeepak.blogspot.com/2007/11/backing-up-weblogs.html
http://nukegingrich.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/attn-bloggers-check-out-blogbackuponline/
http://sedouki.blogspot.com/2008/03/blogbackuponline.html
http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/03/blogger-must-haves-backups-and-tags.html
http://simplyjews.blogspot.com/2008/03/carefree-blogging-with-blogbackuponline.html
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-E3i1rAk5f6i20c0qsT3i6A--?cq=1&p=1
http://vimokshananda.wordpress.com/
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-LL33Mbw6YrK2hr7az5.89DySDdvUBr5j?p=1
http://crazygoodlife.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-backup.html
http://sagesunicorn.eu/jabberwocky/
http://techlogg.blogspot.com/2007/05/backing-up-your-blog.html
http://kleinefrankie.web-log.nl

BlogBackupOnline V1.5 goes live

2008-03-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, after much blood, sweat, and tears, the new version is live. Thanks to everyone involved.

A few notes on the new release:

Biggest new features:
1) Full backup and restore for tags and categories (note tags are backed up as categories right now due to the fact WordPress publishes tags as categories in the feeds).

2) Recurring restores for blogger. Bloggger only allows 50 posts to be restored per day, so we've updated Blogger restore to perform 50 posts per day until it is done. As well, we've gotten a contact at Google that says you can request that restriction be lifted for a blog on a case by case basis. Check out the Help file to get more details on this.

3) Added some simple AJAX and reworked some of the layout of the GUI to make the experience simpler.

Recommendation - you should run a full backup again to get the tags and categories for your blog.

Another warning - if you've registered a blog in the past and you've set your feed to be summary only, you need to change this. We have noted some people during the BETA period backing up summaries - BlogBackupOnline won't let you make that mistake anymore, you can't register a blog that has only summaries enabled. But if you've already registered your blog, check to make sure you don't have summaries only configured in your blog.

Also, just to clarify again for FREEMIUM users - your account won't back up linked content anymore (like photos and images linked from your blog). FREEMIUM accounts will only backup the content in the blog itself, so if you need that linked content, please consider upgrading to a Enterprise or Professional account.

Thanks to everyone again!

BlogBackupOnline moving out of beta

2008-03-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

After nearly a year in BETA, BlogBackupOnline is moving out of BETA! After great feedback from our awesome users, we are preparing to release version 1.5 next week.

Great news - BlogBackupOnline will continue to provide a FREEMIUM version for our users. Our goal is to continue to provide a free and valuable resource for every blogger to backup their content.

We also found that many of our customers are eager for more new features and full technical support for BlogBackupOnline. In order to provide this level of service and to continue to provide new innovation with BlogBackupOnline, we will also be offering new "Professional" and "Enterprise" accounts.

Our absolutely free FREEMIUM service will include:

Initially 5 MB of storage (we measured this to be adequate for most blogs). As well, if you blog about BlogBackupOnline, send us the link (to support@techrigy.com) and we will double this storage space.

Our Professional account will include:

50 MB of storage
Support for backing up content linked from your blog
Support for restoring your blog
Email support
$4.17 per month ($49.95 per year)

Our Enterprise account will include:

1 GB of storage
Support for backing up content linked from your blog
Support for restoring your blog
Phone support
$8.30 per month ($99.95 per year)

Subscribers using less than 5 MB of storage space will be upgraded to the newest version automatically. Those users with more than 5MB of storage space will have an extended period of time (6 weeks) to continue to use the service to help them decide if they would like to upgrade to a Professional or Enterprise account.

After 6 weeks, we will continue to store your backups for one year, however new backups will not run. Techrigy will provide you with a guideline for exporting everything in your account and will continue to provide access to the backed up content.

As always, we’ll love to hear your feedback.

Regards,
Aaron Newman
President, Founder
Techrigy, Inc.
aaron@techrigy.com

Save Your Blog, Win a Prize contest

2007-08-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce our new blog contest--"Save Your Blog, Win a Prize".

The submissions we’re looking for will be writing examples that highlight the importance of backing up blogs, and the danger of losing a blog. We are looking for entries in three categories:

1) Real-life stories about blogs crashing- give us your heart-wrenching tales about losing your blog.

2) Blog crashing fiction- invent a story about losing your blog, or show off your creative writing skills and present a fantasy tale showing the importance of blog backup for humanity.

3) Blog crashing poetry- share your narrative poems, haikus, limericks, or epics teaching us to back up our bogs.

We will select 3 winners from each category, in addition to a winner for driving traffic to our site. Our winners will be able to choose from our prizes, which include some of the coolest gadgets to be found on the web today, candy, free hosting with siteground.com and unsitesolutions.com, and free books from Blurb.com.

Details about the contest are available here.

If you have any questions, please email eugene@techrigy.com.

Thanks, and we hope to see you participate in the contest,

The BlogBackupOnline.com Staff

25 Websites to watch

2007-06-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

While we were out of the office, BlogBackupOnline was identified as one of "25 Web Sites to Watch" by Preston Gralla in PCWorld Magazine.

Gralla had this to say about BlogBackupOnline:

"If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service."

It's great to continue to see people realizing the need to control and secure their blog's content, and Gralla's article is one heck of an endoresement. It's also great to be mentioned along with some of our other favorite products such as PBwiki, Pageflakes, and Swivel.

Thanks to everyone that continues to tell their friends about BlogBackupOnline, and please, stayed tuned, as we'll have a major announcement in the next day or two regarding a completely new service.

Blogger Restore Update

2007-06-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

We recently became aware that Google has updated its Blogger API, and this was causing a few BlogBackupOnline users to have problems restoring their blogs. (Thanks to those that e-mailed us about the problem.)

The error appeared as:

Error: Could not load file or assembly 'Google.GData.Client, Version= 1.0.9.6, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

We've managed to locate the problem, and Steven got the fix up and running just a few moments ago. Restoring to Blogger should occur without any problems or errors. Thanks for your patience, and please contact us if you experience any additional errors.

Corporations embrace wikis

2007-06-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

Sue Hildreth writes in “Computer World” about the benefits of social media for large organizations, specifically wikis as long-term information repositories.

" ‘After he left, his replacement showed me a stock he thought was interesting. I said, 'Wait a minute; we already researched that stock.'" The analyst who had left had researched the stock thoroughly and developed a strategy about when to buy it. "But do you think we could find that work? No way," Herrmann says. 'It was nowhere to be found.’

Herrmann realized that a wiki — a collaborative Web site to which everyone can contribute content — might have prevented the loss.”

We’ve seen blogging infiltrate corporate structures, and now wikis are following suit. Social media are another means for organizations to increase employee efficiency. Instead of e-mailing project documents between employees, wikis can act as a central place to deposit and edit information, technical plans, and project specifications.

" 'We like it because it's a peer review system, not a hierarchical system. We work in teams, each covering a sector, so this makes it easier to collaborate,' says Herrmann. 'We also wanted to do a better job of documenting and saving things that don't get saved, as part of our legal obligations.'"

As Hermann mentions, there are a number of legal requirements surrounding communications that take place in corporate wikis and blogs. Record retention, e-discovery, and ensuring that sensitive information is not distributed are all issues that organizations must comply with when using wikis or blogs. Hildreth also comments:

“CIOs also have concerns about security, governance, IT support and integration of Web 2.0 applications with existing systems. And the very nature of Web 2.0 — distributed and egalitarian — makes some managers nervous. 'Web 2.0 is decentralized,' explains Schmelzer. ‘There’s no centralized authority to mandate or control.’”

Techrigy’s SM2 does just that. SM2 provides a central system to help enterprises discover which employees are using social media inside the organization and from home, record those communications for record retention and e-discovery, and monitor these communications to ensure that social media are complying with company policies and that liabilities and organizational risks are not being created. Hopefully, with SM2’s compliance management, organizations won’t be afraid of implementing blogs and wikis, and they’ll be able to take advantage of these fantastic technologies.

Backup Embedded Pictures

2007-05-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

We've made a long awaited update to BlogBackupOnline. Users can now backup their embedded pictures with BlogBackupOnline. The backup engine will now automatically backup any images that you include with your blog entries. We've had this feature available for a few weeks now, but we didn't want to make any major announcement until we got all the bugs worked out of the engine.

Here's how to set BlogBackupOnline to include pictures in backups:

If you are registering a new blog:

Simply register your blog with BlogBackupOnline, and on the following screen select the "Images" checkbox. That's it - you're done.

If you already have your blog registered and you want to set it to back up images:

Select the "Manage" button in the dashboard for the blog
On the right, under "Media files," click "Manage"
Set how big you want the backup files to be (1 to 50 megabytes)
Click the images checkbox, then Submit

All of your blog images with future entries will be backed up. If you want to backup images from previous blog entries, you will need to run a Full Backup again.

We've also made a few other changes:

The restore screen has been modified. Hopefully it is less confusing now. Please leave your comments or send us an e-mail about how you like the new restore screens.

We have a Spanish version BlogBackupOnline up now.

These are all new updates and features, so there will be bugs here and there. Please send us an e-mail or leave a comment when you find one.

Thanks for stopping by the blog - we're looking forward to your comments about the new features.

LiveJournal Mass Deletion

2007-05-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

According to CNet News, LiveJournal suspended the accounts of 500 or so individuals that violated Six Apart's terms of service. Techrigy in no way condones any illegal activities, and we support the right of Six Apart in removing accounts that violate its terms of service. However, this is another powerful example of the need to backup your blog and other online content.

If these users who had their LJ accounts suspended had their account backed up with BlogBackupOnline, they would be able to simply transfer their blog to another service where they don't violate the terms of service, or they could create their own privately hosted blog. Unfortunately, many users did not have their blog backed up, and they have most likely lost years of blog posts.

BlogBackupOnline is free, and it is almost effortless to back up your blog. There's really no reason why you shouldn't be backing up your blog.

Thanks for stopping by, and please let us know if there is anything we can do to better your experience with BlogBackupOnline.

Breakfast with Tom Golisano

2007-05-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

We had the privilege to share breakfast with Tom Golisano yesterday morning at an event made possible by TEN. Mr. Golisano is the founder of Paychex, one of the most successful payroll processing companies in the world. He's also the owner of the Buffalo Sabres (who just happen to be one round away from the Stanley Cup finals).

Mr. Golisano took time to answer questions from the local entrepreneurs that attended the meeting, discussing everything from employee fraud to community activism. The key theme I recognized throughout his talk was perseverance and fortitude. In Layman's terms - getting stuff done.

This theme can be found throughout any successful life. It isn't always the best idea or the smartest person that achieves the greatest success. An essential factor is the ability to make things happen. It's far too easy to have you head in the clouds, dreaming of how you'll make that billion-dollar idea happen. It isn't until the rubber hits the pavement that anything real can be achieved. Revolutionary ideas are secondary; execution is essential.

In other news, Techrigy's own Aaron Newman was quoted in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where he discussed TEN.

"Before T.E.N. was around you were really on your own," said Aaron Newman, founder and president of Techrigy Inc., a Pittsford-based software company. "It's really a conduit to a lot of resources people didn't know about before."

TEN really is a great resource. Those in the Upstate NY area that aren't familiar with it would be well served to visit the TEN site. This being our first real press coverage, we will be proudly displaying it throughout the office. Cheers!

Spanish Version

2007-05-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

We're happy to announce that we now have a Spanish version of BlogBackupOnline available. (Click the Spanish version link on the homepage.) Please notify us if there are any errors in the translation.

If you'd like to see other language versions, please let us know. If there's enough demand, we might be able to put together another translation.

Army shutting down blogging?

2007-05-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting news on military bloggers from boingboing today.

Blogging (IMHO) is just another form of communication or expression. Shutting down bloggers seems like an impossible task. It's like saying no one in the military can use email.

I look back to how communication has changed over the past 15 years. I personally served in the Army during Operation Desert Storm back in 1991 and communication between people in the field and the family/friends back home was vastly different. Mail call was the highlight of the day when we would get a physical letter or package of brownies - there was no email. And an occasional 5 minute phone call was a special treat. It would be a shame to shutdown down such a great communication medium.

Venture Worthy?

2007-05-07T05:48:00.002-07:00

We had a great time this this past week at the Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Thanks to Jack and George from Derby Management for putting it on and to Deb and Mary from TEN for organizing everything.

We took home many key lessons, but one of the questions we found ourselves continuing to discuss is: how does a company know if it's capable of raising venture capital, or even if it needs to raise venture capital? There are a few variables every company considers when trying to decide if it is "venture worthy."

How big is the market?
What type of pedigree do the founders and key management have?
Are there barriers to entry?
How quickly can the company ramp up?

These are just a few considerations, but let's be realistic, the make-or-break variables are the market size and the experience of the company founders and managers.

What's the secret number for market size? I've heard $1 billion from some, $750 million from others, and a host of other amounts. In my experience, anything that has the potential to be a $500 million market wouldn't get tossed in the trash. There's another consideration at play that I think too many people forget. What's the probability that I can own enough of a market to make it worth a VC's while? And no, that 1% isn't enough. It's easy to say that you have a $1 billion dollar market, but how realistic is it that you can capture the market and destroy your competition for the next three years? This is something investors and entrepreneurs should consider.

The other variable, and probably the most important, is pedigree. If you've created two $50 million companies in the past 10 years, it's a lot easier to get that funding, if not almost automatic. If you were hire #2 at a $30 million company, you'll be fine. If you have been one of 100 marketing managers at a Fortune 1000 company for the past ten years, you'll probably need a great team and a great product.

This isn't an attempt at an end-all to any VC discussion, but it's something everyone starting a company should consider. As for the second thought - do you even need VC money? People tend to forget that there are many other funding options - Angels, grants, loans, family, friends, business plan competitions, etc. There's plenty of money out there, and it's a great time to be fundraising.

Losing data and other tidbits

2007-05-03T05:08:00.000-07:00

Whenever we pitch BlogBackupOnline to anyone, we always say that our concern is not that a hosting provider losing data as a user accidentally deleting content. A perfect recent example of this is Business 2.0 deleting its June issue from the editorial server before it went to press. The magazine lost all its layouts for the issue.

In college, when I worked at the newspaper, we religiously saved our layouts every five minutes, but things still happened that caused us to lose data and have sleepless nights. Having backups ready could have saved a lot headaches.

We've had a lot of people tell us how they lost their blog content because of a user mistake or accidental deletion. BlogBackupOnline can prevent that huge setback when your content is eventually lost - whether it happens tomorrow or a year from now.

In other news, some of us are attending the Entrepreneur Bootcamp with The Entrepreneur Network in Rochester. We're doing a lot of discussion and learning about business plans, raising capital, etc, so we'll be sure to share our experiences with you.

Updates

2007-04-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

We've pushed out another updated version of BlogBackupOnline. This release fixes a number of problems users have discovered, mostly with Blogger and WordPress.

BlogBackupOnline will now back up all of your Blogger posts. In the past, we ran into issues when users had more than 500 posts. All of your posts will now be backed up, even if you have more than 500 posts.

We also made a fix with WordPress and FeedBurner. Previously, if your WordPress blog redirected to FeedBurner, BlogBackupOnline could not perform daily backups. We've fixed this, and blogs redirected to FeedBurner will be fully backed up every day.

Unicode supports is also enabled and fixed now. All languages should now be fully supported.

For those that missed it last time, the comment backup and restore features has also been corrected. Some users were not able to backup all their comments, or their comments were not showing up after a blog restore. This has been fixed by tacking the comments onto the body of each post.

In a related issue, Google has been having a lot of trouble with their Personalized Home Page. Apparently, many users' personalized home pages reverted back to an older version due to some technical glitches. While our goal in creating BlogBackupOnline was never to simply create a Blogger insurance policy, one can never be too safe with their information and data stored online. This is simply another illustration of a freak accident causing users to lose their content. Thanks to NetworkWorld for the info.

We're constantly working to improve BlogBackupOnline. If you have any issues, please contact us at support@techrigy.com. Thanks for stopping by the blog.

Enterprise Blogging

2007-04-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

David Needle over at Internetnews.com writes an interesting article about how companies are handling the expansion of blogs and wikis. Employees throughout organizations are creating blogs and wikis without IT department or management having knowledge.

"It's become a control problem," Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, told internetnews.com. "'A lot of companies are surprised to find out how many Web 2.0 applications are being used by their employees.'"

Needle then goes on to discuss SpikeSource, a tool which helps companies implement blogs and wikis in a controlled manner.

Apparently, many companies are very hesitant to letting employees start using wikis and blogs.

"With over 135,000 employees worldwide, Schueller said P&G is largely 'a command and control' organization that isn't ready to open the floodgates to blogging and wikis. 'We're doing a lot of experiments to understand what will work best.'"

Social media are very frightening for organizations to consider, especially when thinking about just how much sensitive information employees can distribute at the click of the button.

It will be interesting to see how companies handle the proliferation of blogs and wikis. These social media present great opportunities for collaboration and information sharing in organizations, but if they are created in an unstructured manner without corporate knowledge and approval they could become major headaches.

Backing up and restoring comments

2007-04-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

We've received a few emails telling us how some users have been unable to back up and restore the comments on their blog. We know that this is a must-have feature with blog backup, so we've been hard at work solving the problem.

Steven and Jay have created a fix for comment backup and restore, and we went live with the changes last night. You should now be able to backup and restore blog comments. When restoring comments, the comments are added to the end of the body of the blog post. The essential usability of the comments after restore is the same, although technically the comments are not restored to specific comment fields. We're working on this though.

Please send us your thoughts on the new feature.

Keep tuning in - we have a lot of new information and thoughts about the company and future product developments that we'll be sharing with you in the coming weeks, and we'd like to hear what you think.

Hope you are enjoying the spring weather, and thanks for stopping by.

Progress Update

2007-04-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

BlogBackupOnline has been live for about four days now. We'd like to thank everyone that has tried it out, and especially thank those that have sent us comments and feedback. We have been investigating and trying to solve every e-mail bug report.

We've noticed a few bugs in the backup engine, mostly with WordPress blogs. Aaron and Jay were able to create a fix for this, and WordPress should be working fine now.

Other improvements we've made:

- created better error messaging

- changed the restore screen language

- enhanced detection of WordPress blogs

- enhanced archive crawling of WordPress blogs

We're also working on adding support for more blog platforms.

Also, a big thanks to all of the bloggers out there that have posted reviews or links. We really appreciate everyone's write-ups and feedback.

Here is just a sample of some of the blog coverage:

Barry's Best Blog
Webware Killed the Harddrive
Download Squad
AppScout

One thing we want to mention is that yes, picture and video backup support is in the works. We'll have it up and running as soon as we can.

Interesting stats you might enjoy from BlogBackupOnline:

630 Users Registered
1271 Blogs Registered

Types of blogs registered:

Blogger - 585
WordPress - 231
Windows Live Spaces - 70
MoveableType - 66
LiveJournal - 28

Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for using BlogBackupOnline. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.

Up and Running

2007-04-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

The public beta of BlogBackupOnline is out! We finally released the updated beta last night - now anyone can register and back up their blog with BlogBackupOnline.

To recap, BlogBackupOnline allows you to:

- create full backups of your entire blog
- register for automatic daily backups of your blog
- restore your blog
- transfer your blog from one platform to a different platform
- export your backup files to any location

With BlogBackupOnline, your blog content is no longer locked up with your hosting provider, and your blog can be restored at any moment.

Not to mention that BlogBackupOnline is still free while we are in beta.

We've had more than 100 users register already, and we'd like to thank everyone for registering and sending us your emails and comments.

We hope that you'll try out BlogBackupOnline and find that it alleviates a lot of aches and pains with trying to back up your blog.

As with all betas, this isn't a perfect service, but we're working every day to make it better. Please contact me with any questions, bug reports or feedback - I'll be glad to help.

Thanks for stopping by, and please let us know what you think of BlogBackupOnline.

Oh, and a big thanks to StartupSquad for the great BlogBackupOnline review!

Going Live

2007-04-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

We’re gearing up for the public beta release of BlogBackupOnline. That’s right, after many months, BlogBackupOnline is almost ready to go live.

BlogBackupOnline brings all the control back to the blog owner. With BlogBackupOnline, it’s all back in your hands.

As advertised, BlogBackupOnline provides full and daily automatic blog backups for practically any blog out there. After registering your blog, BlogBackupOnline crawls your blog to create a full backup, and then it uses your blog’s RSS feed to maintain daily backups of your blog. The backups are performed automatically every day – you don’t have to do anything.

What’s the big deal?

Well, the flip side is that once you have your blog backed up with BlogBackupOnline, you’ll be able to restore it at any moment. No more worrying about lost content or blog posts. Restore to yesterday’s backup, or even a backup from six months ago. You can even automatically transfer and restore your blog contents from one hosting platform to another. Your blog is finally portable.

You can also export an RSS file of your backup to any location – including your own hard drive.

The best part of BlogBackupOnline is that there is no software installation or programming required. Just register your blog and let BlogBackupOnline do all the work. Stop by when you need to restore or export your blog.

We’ll be releasing the live beta very soon – so stay tuned.

If you’d like to be notified when we go live, or just want to say hi, drop me a line at adam@techrigy.com

Thanks for your patience – we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.

Useful Blogger backup template

2007-03-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a link that demonstrates how to use a template under Blogger to export your entire blog.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447&useful=1&show_useful=1

Older post on a lost blog

2007-03-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled upon a story worth sharing.

"So … that’s all the content of this site lost. Around 700+ postings, all the comments, all the pages, all the links, all gone. Nice one. I’ve managed to recreate the wordpress database and put up this initial posting, but as for all the old content, it looks like it’s gone. As will I be, when I sort out a new hosting provider, but until then, sorry folks, all the old stuff is no more."

Mark was able to point people to the Internet Wayback Machine for some of his lost content.

Here's the link:
http://laurentschneider.blogspot.com/2006/11/backup-your-blog.html?

4 Different Blog Posts on "your data"

2007-02-26T07:26:00.001-08:00

Here are some interesting stories in the news today.

http://www.bloghash.com/2007/02/smooth-upgrade-to-wordpress-211-in-8-steps/ upgrading blog version without losing old content

http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19092 using gmail for some backups

http://blog.totalkiss.com/2007/02/youtube_crashes.html youTube & google "crash"

http://thecontentwrangler.com/article/web_based_content_management_is_your_data_saasafe/
saas content safety

bandwagon and bloggingstocks

2007-02-21T16:36:00.000-08:00

Some interesting posts for the day:

From bloggingstocks.com, here is an article on backup. It talks about how we should perform backups, different ways to do backups, and some options to pick from. Specifically they address the issue of "essentially trusting your data to someone else".

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/02/19/technology-for-the-rest-of-us-back-it-up-baby/

Here is an interesting new service - bandwagon (http://ridethebandwagon.com/) - which provides online iTunes backup. They are suppose to launch tomorrow.

Look-no hands

2007-02-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

I think it is great that people are beginning to understand the importance of backing up their content. There are new posts almost daily with the "work-arounds" users have figured out.

Here are another 2 entries in the "thanks, but do I have to?" blog back up methods category:
http://www.ashbaughonline.com/2007/02/15/blog-backup-strategy/

http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/BlogBackup/

The point is that these are work-arounds developed by people who understand how all the pieces fit together.
But-blogging has gotten simple enough for everyday users like me to join in, and I don't understand most of what is happening in the background. I don't want to. That's what this Web-as-platform, social-networking, join-the-community explosion is all about.

Hackers go Global

2007-02-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

Check out this latest news story about hackers attempting to get in to computers and your stuff EVERY 39 SECONDS.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/527132/

Hackers managed to briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday February 8, 2007.

Whose Content is it?

2007-02-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

The number of stories about the need to back up your blogs is almost overwheming at this moment.

The link below gets into interesting territory. The issue of who controls your postings and content is really highlighted. http://battellemedia.com/archives/003355.php

The search for backup solutions is heating up. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

Control Your Content

2007-02-09T14:38:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Alison. I joined the Techrigy team this week. BlogBackupOnline.com will be in private beta by the end of next week and the caffiene is flowing. If you want to add your name to our list of testers send an email to beta@blogbackuponline.com.

Blog are not immune to the evils that come at us over the web. We download security updates, scan our emails, protect our PCs and back up our data. Our web based content is more vunerable-making stories like the one below inevitable.

Bloggers get Hacked is a catchy headline. It’s a short piece about being “under attack”, and how personal it feels. Starting up a blog is essentially joining a community, and we want to feel secure within that community. Feeling secure requires that we have control of ourselves and our “stuff” and this little piece highlights the importance of that control.

BlogBackupOnline allows you to take control of your blogs. Back up your remote data to our secure data center. Export it, restore it, receive it on DVD-it's under your control.

One Laptop Per Child

2007-01-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

So while at Mashup Camp, we attended a presentation at the MIT Museum on the One Laptop Per Child program. We showed up a little late, but it was quite interesting. Here's the website for the program http://laptop.media.mit.edu/. The idea is to provide affordable ($100) laptops for children in developing nations and the idea was born at MIT.

The presentation was given by Walter Bender. He had a few demo machines. The device was much smaller then i expected. The design seems to be very, very sturdy and weather-proof. It's based on some form of linux with XWindows. It has wireless capabilities and no standard hard drive that can crash (this thing is designed not to fail and the hard drive is one of the computer most common point of failure). Walter talked about using wireless in places where wireless is not common. It's done by creating a mesh of wireless hubs, each laptop connecting every other laptop create a wireless network where one doesn't exist.

There was question and answer session where alot of thoughts and concerns where brought up:
1) Will a black market for the devices be created and how to prevent
2) What kind of training will there be
3) Does this kind of project hurt US workers
4) Can we create a similar project for students here in our country
5) What pressure have we seen from parties such as laptop builders to stop this

The program has created a limited number of laptops at this point. The last batch was 2500 so they have not scaled the operation yet.

It sounds like a solid program that could bring the world that much closer.

Mashup Camp - Day 2

2007-01-18T22:07:00.001-08:00

Today was the last day of Mashup Camp and it was the shortest day. I started with the presentation on Amazon web services. Very interesting, Amazon has so much beyond selling books going on now ;)

They discussed the S3 service which is basically virtual hard disk space. It's very cost-effective apparently, so I'm going to give it a try and upload all my digital photos there as a backup. I spent the last few hours trying out the S3 services and mapping a drive to S3 and creating a URL link to a file on S3. I'll post on that tomorrow perhaps. The company Mashery (http://www.mashery.com/) announced in the meeting they use S3 to store all their backups. The presenter continued talking about their other services such as EC2 which is virtual servers. They have Linux and MySQL available as virtual servers and he mentioned it cost 10 cents per hours which came out to roughly $72 per month.

I went next to a discussion on Mashup security which was quite interesting for me because of my security background. I am an officer in the Web Application Security Consortium (http://www.webappsec.org/). The discussion focused on a few topics. First the need for a framework for session management. A mashup today requires you to enter the credentials of any other web services with accounts you want to access. Is there a way to change how this trust works? A ticket-granting service like Kerberos? Everyone seemed to be looking to OpenID as a start to a solution. Another issue was the security of the browser. There was talk about whether the browser can and should be trusted but no real conclusions there. The session leader was an ex-security researcher from nCircle, one of the leading security assessment companies out there.

Overall Mashup Camp was a great experience and I meet a ton of people. Hopefully Techrigy will be showcasing our stuff at the next Mashup Camp!

Mashup Camp Day 1

2007-01-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

(Pictured here - David, the brains behind Mashup Camp)

My day started with a session on the Semantic web. There was much discussion on how this needed to be done in small chunks and that there wasn't much incentive for people to implement the semantic web, so it needs to be incidental to some other value derived from implementing the semantic web. There were discussions on the upper versus lower case semantic web and how we need to get there in small steps. One woman as well discussed concerns over privacy associated with the semantic web cataloging information about people such as skype numbers, cell phone numbers, etc... Her comment was that woman have to worry about being Skype Stalked if their information is too open.

My own comment was that Sematic Web needs to be dumbed down. Its way to complicated for the masses when it uses terms like ontology, semantic, etc... I struggle with the concepts and terms, until it is simpler it wont be universal, and until its universal, it wont hit critical value.

At the end of the talk, there was a side demo done of a new Semantic Web product called BigSwerve (seemed to be a MyBlogLog competitor).

My next session was on Commercialization and Licensing of Mashups. There were alot of concerns about exploding mashups that get shutdown by webservices they rely on. There was alot of concerns and questions on Terms of Services and the ambiguity built into them, for instance what is a commercial site? Google's definition is if you take money to log into a system. However, it is not defined and most people agreed that was likely on purpose. Someone there built the Amazon Light based on the Amazon API but linked to Netflix from the videos and got a cease and desist letter from Amazon. Cease and desist letters seemed more common then I expected. There was talk about using the Mashup Wiki to start a project to define terms of service that developers hope the big API providers adopt. There was some disension that this would be a waste of time.

At lunch my discussions continued with a company that build websites for government and public sector orgs. The attititude was they we know we are violating terms of service, but we really dont have an option. One lady said see wanted to pay a quarter per web service call for her 100 calls a day. She called the end vendor but they didn't offer anything less than $5000 to get anything, so instead she just continued to use the service violating the terms of service. It seems the web services business models don't care about the micropayments. They might learn a lesson from Google that makes a fortune 1 nickel at a time.

Following lunch was Speed Geeking with about 20 mashups. I got a chance to see the following Mashups:

1) GoogleBase(semistructured data) + GoogleGadgets = BaseGadgets from a Google employee.

2) GanstaMap.com

3) RoboCal - Google Calendar + a text-to-speech webservice. Can call you when things on your calendar are due. Also there was a botcastbuddy.com which calls you and reads whats in your bloglines account.

4) iGem - genetic engineering competition wiki looking for ways to break down the silo between teams.

5) StrikeIron - reseller of API data for Mashups making it more affordable. They showed an Excel widget they have to pull lots of data.

6) Proto - development environment for writing mashups are other programs.

7) Yahoo did MyBlogLog mashups combined with delicious bookmarks

8) IbisEye did a mashup for a historical data hurricance tracking system in which you could see the path of a hurricane from 70 years ago.

9) Hype machine - music tracking mashup

10) AOL demo of Boxely and WIM mashed up.

11) BookSearchTimesThree - searching the text inside any book. Takes the 3 sources, Amazon, Google, and someone else(?) and combines the results.

Next I saw a presention from Dapper which was much like Kapow. This seems like a very exciting area - creating an API from HTML where an API does not exist. Their technology seems pretty powerful and everyone in the audience was very excited about it.

The conversation also sequed into a discussion on terms of service, ownership of content, etc... For instance, Facebook data ownership. Facebook has a license to the data. The owner actually owns the data. So if you write a Dap to it, who's permission do you need? An article from AP on the New York Times - how do you get rights to Mash that up?

FeedBlitz added

2007-01-16T16:25:00.001-08:00

I've added a FeedBlitz subscriber option to the left column of our blog so if you would like to get Email rather than use a feed reader to get the latest entries you have that option. It's a nice option and it's free, so offering it was a no-brainer.

Warning: we are not affliate with FeedBlitz so we don't control your email address when you register with FeedBlitz.

SaaS Disruptions

2007-01-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

I came across an interesting post on Moon Watcher/Globelogger on SaaS disruptions. Read it at http://www.globelogger.com/item.php?id=889. It talks about a number of service disruptions with salesforce.com, and typepad. This is interesting because it's making it more obvious that SaaS is a great idea but does not eliminate service outages and other IT issue. Solutions like SpanningSalesForce as well as backing up SaaS content will continue to be very necessary.

The author of Moon Watch, Charlie Woods, runs the company http://www.spanningsalesforce.com/. They provide feeds for SalesForce.com so when you are on the road and you can't access the SalesForce.com website, you still have feeds of your important sales content (thats one view - I'm sure there's other takes on the features). Great idea. They look like they are very close to putting out SpanningSync. It's great to see success with SaaS and Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. Let's hope this is just the start!

Mashup University, Day 2

2007-01-16T15:53:00.000-08:00

(picture to the left - Jay Mari, Director of Software Development for Techrigy and super-nerd)

Presentation from Kapow Technologies right after lunch. They have a service that creates APIs for web sites that dont give you an APIs. So much information available out there can not be accessed programmatically. They have created a kapow robot called RoboMaker that allows you to build on a Web page to create a "virtual" API out of any HTML source. It allows you to find a specific tag in the page and create fields out of that, perform conversions on fields, etc... Then you can right a Mashup using the "virtual" API. They called it "Mashups for the Long Tail of the Web". From Openkapow.com, "a free open service platform that makes it possible to use data, functionality or GUI from the web as part of your mashup." Andreas Krohn's, the presenter, final words "HTML is the worlds most common API - start using it today!"

Also saw a presentation from Chris Radcliff, "That API Guy at Eventful". Eventful has an API you can use to incorporate events into your Mashups. Something interesting he talked about was actually people requesting events. If enough people ask for a performer in a specific area, they can possible cause a grass roots efoort to not just schedule but even create an event. Event can be GEO coded in the HTML and in the API, so that you can locate the event based on GEO location.

A presentation from Autodesk on MapGuide Open Source and MapGuide Enterprise. Autodesk is actually a large $2 billion company - this is not their core business. It seems they decided to open source this product and offer it out to the community. It has some very complex options to create maps and run operations around GIS and mapping. They have the ability to create multiple parcel layers and run complex queries on those layers. Its integrated with Google Earth.

Next presentation was from Infusion Development on mashups in the enterprise. Infusion is a 120 person tech consultancy working with some large financial institutions. There demo was based on a Virtual Earth mashups. I found it interesting and helpful when they started addressing what is needed for an enterprise mashup - Reliability, scalability, security, Interoperability and integration, documentation, and maintenance. These are the really issues Mashups and Web 2.0 have to address before it is going to become mainstream. All the cool technology in Mashups and Web 2.0 are going to remain on the fringe until they can address those concerns by Enterprise Admins. There demo was of federal emergency mashup - basically was done in 150 lines of code.

Final presentation of the day was done by Jeremy Lueck. He was part of Truveo which was bought by AOL for $40 million. He is an AOL Video Search Evangalist. The most interesting part of his presentation was that he forgot his keyboard for his MacMini so he used the overhead projector :)

Tomorrow starts Mashup Camp, although I've heard several reports of weather ruining travel plans. I look forward to report how it goes tomorrow.

Mashup University Day 1

2007-01-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick overview of Day 1 of Mashup University:

It seems many people didn;t show up after signing up. Please be careful if you sign up for a free unconference that you don't inadvertantly fall into this practice of skipping it. It's a shame since it's free, so many people put so much effort into the event, alot of food goes to waste, and it prevents someone else from attending because all the slots were filled. Thankfully the extra food ended up donated to a local shelter. Nice job David!

My day started with "Speed Geeking" where we saw small presentations on the following Mashups:
- mashup helping flood victims return to New Orleans called "After Katrina"
- AOL's Microformats
- IBM's "Enterprise Mashup tool" call QED (Quick and Easy Design)
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)
- LignUp - "a comprehensive IP communications system as well as a development platform that allows for quick and easy integration of voice and rich media into web applications and portals"

Following lunch was a presentation from AOL on "Microformats + DOM/AJAX to create mashups" by Kevin Lawver. This was interesting as I like the idea of setting more web hypertext into microformats that can make the web more structured and usable. A great example that was used was if you enter your events in microformats it becomes so much easier to cross refernce who else is going to the same event. Even the idea of microformats leading to imroved SEO made alot of sense. Kevin touched on how search engines are starting to understand these microformat. Hopeful this will truely lead to a more semantic web!

This was followed by a presentation on OpenAIM API and another presentation on Boxely. Both technologies worth looking into.

Mashup University tomorrow

2007-01-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

We are exciting to leave for Mashup Camp/Mashup University(http://blog.mashupcamp.com/) tomorrow. It's running from Monday thru Thursday at MIT in Boston. This is our first Mashup Camp and we truely appreciate David Berlind and Doug Gold for the hard work they put into it, as well as having it on the East Coast so we can attend! It's going to be 4 days of absorbing a huge amount of technical content and mixing with some fellow techies. If you are going to be in Boston for the week, drop up a line and we will buy you a beer/wine/coffee/etc... We just enjoy meeting other people excited about technology. Even if you can't go, check out the website - I believe they are haved podcasts and feeds of some of the content.

On another note, I was at the Coop in Harvard Square last week and came across a book that piqued my attention - Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (http://www.wikinomics.com/book/). I'm about a quarter of the way through it and its very exciting. If you're interested in the collaboration revolution going on, I recommend picking it up. I won't spoil it and tell you how it ends.

There was also an interesting post (http://meetings.abanet.org/ltrc/index.cfm?&data=20070109#088D4FA3-E334-F967-2FCBD59A3DDD4C3A) a few days ago from the American Bar Association discussing free services (such as Gmail), remote data storage, privacy concerns, and scrutinizing of online backup services. These are becoming pressing issues particularly in the legal field with the sensitivity of data. It's refreshing to see these topics being discussed more commonly. Expect to see Techrigy on the cutting edge of data protection and privacy.

Last note is on a neat blog I came across, or rather that came across us - http://www.startupsquad.com/. The blog seems to have the inside track on startup news, so if your interested in that area, add the feed to your reader. Following the feed for the past week, I've been impressed.

Gmail data lost

2006-12-28T20:19:00.000-08:00

This week I'm going to post on a recent event demonstrating the need for remote online-content backup. Namely that users of Gmail ended up losing some emails.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/

Of course this is extremely timely, although perhaps if they would have given us another month it would have been nicer ;)

I guess this is our way of "unofficially" announcing the availability of support for backup of Gmail by the end of January and backup of other Google account data to follow shortly. Here are some features to expect.

-Backup all remote data to our secure data center
-Export all remote data to your local computer as a single export file
-Receive a monthly DVD with all data on it
-Backup entire history of emails

Until the end of January, we strongly suggest following these instructions to backup your gmail:

http://grasshopperfactory.com/cbc/back-up-your-gmail/

As well, consider backing up your other data, such as:
-Google Calendar
-Yahoo! Mail
-Corporate data such as SalesForce.com
-Online bookmarks
-Blogs

Update on BlogBackupOnline

2006-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Things are heating up at Techrigy in December, even though Rochester, NY is getting very cold.

First off, the release of BlogBackupOnline.com is imminent although still not available. The private beta is planned for December 15th release. Please email us if you are interested (beta@blogbackuponline.com).

Second, we are looking to expand. If you are interested in an exciting position at a new start in a hot market, email us at jobs@techrigy.com. We have started some recruiting efforts in the local area, but all candidates as welcome. We are looking for engineering, business development, and marketing roles.

Changing gears, I spent some time this week playing with AllMyData.com. Peter Secor is one of the founders and is a friend of a friend back from his days at Micromuse where he was a superstar. I think the idea is really cool - when they pull it off, it will be a killer application. The idea seems to be around backing up your hard drive using file sharing in a peer-to-peer network - you could compare it to bit torrent. Anyhow the bottom line is they are talking about $2.95 per month to backup 10gb. Right now I am using Connected.com (IronMountain Digital) at $20 per month. If I were one of the big providers of remote backup, I would be all over AllMyData.com. Good luck to them.

Try out Gliffy.com

2006-11-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

I figured I would post today about Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com) since I just finished using it and found the experience great! It's not the first time I've used it and honestly, it makes perfect sense. If you haven't checked it out, it's Visio-like but free and with no install. Considering I only use a diagramming tool every couple of months, I simply don't want to shell out for Visio and I don't want to download it, install it, etc... so Gliffy is a great solution.

Check out Gliffy's blog at http://www.gliffy.com/blog/. One of their latest posts is on a new plugin to Confluence, an Enterprise Wiki (http://www.gliffy.com/blog/?p=41), so it looks like they are very busy over there. Hats off to Chris and Clint!

Now to tie this into backup - this is another opportunity for backup of online content. I have some documents stored up on Gliffy I would not be happy with if they "went away". I really ought to have a backup but currently there's not much I can do to make that happen. I guess I could go through and save a .PNG of each document each time I make an update. Not practical.

Gliffy doesn't have an API (that I am aware of) to suck a copy of your files out. Maybe a "Save as Visio document" feature would facilitate the capability to provide a backup.

Well, needless to say we are going to look into adding support for backup of your Gliffy documents to BlogBackupOnline.com. We will let you know how that works out.

Techrigy comes online

2006-11-20T17:03:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our first posting. This blog is being launched in conjunction with our website (www.techrigy.com). Techrigy's site was officially released today (a big thanks to Josh at http://www.grindcolordesign.com/). We are still waiting for the release of our first product, BlogBackupOnline.com (http://www.blogbackuponline.com), which is still due out in the beginning of December.

This blog is dedicated to product and company announcements, as well as news on the online content backup industry. While you will definitely see alot on Techrigy's products specifically, we will also be providing information on news outside of the company.

Thanks for reading!

Aaron C. Newman
Founder/President
Techrigy, Inc.
http://www.techrigy.com