Bill’s Blog

Anyone know of a good WP theme?  I’m looking for a new theme that has a header graphic.  I’ll create the graphic and change it periodically.  Ideally, the header graphic would contain the blog title as well.

What else should I include in the new theme?

Two or three columns?

Widgets?  What kind?

What else looks nice?

Jeff forwarded me this great video by Commoncraft.

Bill Johnston invited me to the Online Community Rountable held last night at Autodesk in San Francisco. Since I was in the city attending the Web 2.0 Summit, I decided to stop by. I’m glad I did. This turned out to be a great place to meet fellow online community managers. There were people form big companies like Microsoft and Apple, as well as people from smaller companies like The Well and an online fantasy sports site.

The key topics we discussed were

• Who in the organization should own community?
• How to get the rest of the organization involved with community?
• Community identify and branding

Who in the organization should own community?

There were a variety of opinions. Some thought that marketing should own community, since talking with customers is ultimately a marketing function. There were certainly a lot of people who disagreed with that opinion. Most people agreed that many marketing departments just don’t get community. They still view marketing as telling, rather than viewing markets as conversations.

One interesting idea was to have marketing report to customer support. Not a bad idea if you ask me.

How do you get the rest of the organization involved?

This one was an important topic to me. It was the question I raised to the group. There were some great ideas that came out of our discussion. Here are a few:

• get them involved with reading the community posts (start slow)
• add a banner that displays for internal people only telling them who to contact to participate in the community
• create a structured project and set aside community time. This sounds more complicated than it is. One person said they set aside two hours where engineers answered forum questions. After that time several really liked it and continued to participate.
• Put your documents in a wiki. The idea was that people throughout the org would be inclined to edit the wiki or to read comments from those who did

Community Identify and Branding

What do you do when the community loves you and your brand so much they start using it in other venues? If you let them, you risk loss of control or worse. If you are a hard nose about it, you’ll upset the community and lose some of that magic fairy dust you’ve worked so hard to get. There were lots of opinions, but everyone agreed this was a hard one.

One very smart company said they asked their community to help them create a logo just for the community to use. What a great idea!

I had such a great time with these folks. I’m definitely up for doing this again the next time I’m in San Francisco.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is creating a new advertising system that lets advertisers target users based on all of the personal information Facebook knows about them.  You shouldn’t be too surprised, advertising is all over the web these days.  It does seem like we might be heading for a future that looks a but like Minority Report.

What do you think of ads on websites?  I find that I completely ignore the ads in gmail.  I have to remind myself that they’re there.  Is it worth putting up with ads in order to get free services?

I just joined facebook.  It’s an amazing platform.  I’m glad they didn’t have it when I was in school or I might not have gotten anything done.

But now we have twitter to share little thoughts.  We have blogs to share big thoughts.  We have myspace to share ?????  And now we have facebook.  Where does it end?  Isn’t there one service / network / site someone can join?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article Saturday about blogging.  It noted that it’s been ten years since the first blog was launched (by Jorn Barger).  It’s interesting that I started this site ten years ago as well.  I did it to share photos and stories with my friends and family back home after we moved to Oregon.  My site would not be a considered a blog, I’m sure.

The WSJ article features some very interesting and unexpected bloggers – Mia Farrow, Christopher Cox (head of the SEC), and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.  I bet there are more.

Who is the person you were most surprised had a blog?

A few months ago I posted on how I was thinking about switching providers.  Well, I did.  I’ve ben working on the switch for about a week.  As expected, there were a few hiccups along the way.  In fact, some of them still remain.  For example, there’s a funny character that’s seen throughout the blog.  It looks like it appears everywhere there’s a space!  I can edit it out manually, but what a PAIN.

Also, I’m still uploading files.  Turns out I have around 10,000 photos from the past ten years that I’m still uploading.  That’s 22,000 files!

Then there’s the weatherstation.  I haven’t even started thinking about getting that moved yet.  Shouldn’t be too difficult though.

Anyway, so far I’m fairly happy with the new setup.  I’ve certainly learned a lot about PhP and MySQL.  I’ll work out the kinks in the next few weeks.

Yeah, ok I’ve been quiet for a while. I’ve been keeping busy setting up a new hosting provider and a new Mac.

The Mac experience is the most interesting, so I’ll start there. Using a Mac inside of a primarily Windows company and you’re pretty much guaranteed some trouble. So two weeks ago I drove over to the IT place to pick up my Mac. When I got back to my desk, opening the box was like a breath of fresh air. I stared at the MacBookPro in anticipation. How long until I was blissfully typing emails and chating with my co-workers? Take a guess…

Friday I started the build process. It completely wipes the drive, partitions it, and dumps the special IT version of OSX on the system. Then it automatically does some configuration like adding the machine to the active directory. Finally, it adds a Windows VM using Parallels. Sounds good, right? On Friday mine got as far as copying about half of the 10 or so GB file before I had to leave work. Two hours wasted.

Monday I started again. This time the file copied and OSX was installed. But, it wouldn’t recognize the network. I spoke with the coordinator for the project and was told to “try it again”. Ok, six more tries and it still didn’t work. Somewhere in there I heard that the connection between a couple of sites was down so the Mac couldn’t be added to the active directory. So I headed out for the long weekend without my mac

Tuesday morning I plugged it in and started the install process one more time (if you’re counting, that makes 8). This time it worked! In a completely automated fashion, my machine had installed

• OSX
• Office for Mac
• Parallels VM
• Windows Build
• All Windows SW
• Added to the active directory
• copied all my data from my old system

I’ve been using the Mac as my primary business machine for four days! It’s pretty cool. The only thing I don’t like is having to use Windows to run outlook. If there was a similar email client for Mac that integrated well with Exchange it would be Nirvana. They way Outlook is configured also has some quirks. My OST files are on a parallels shared file system. When I go into standby and come back, outlook loses itself. I have to shut it down and restart it beforeit can see the mail folders again.

Any suggestions for me? What apps should I try now that I’m using a Mac?

I just moderated (read DELETED) 21 spam comments for this blog.  The burning question I have is why does this still happen?  Have any of you ever responded to the guy who has $50M for you, if you’ll only send him $20k to cover his expenses?

Most of the spam comments appear to be links to sex sites.  They try their best to disguise themselves (sometimes), but there are helpful hints that give them away.  Do people actually fall for the comment – “nice site, I totally agree” followed by a link to whatevertheirfavoritesexsiteis.com?

And finally, why would they target this site?  It’s read by maybe 5 people on a regular basis.  The cost doesn’t seem to be worth the benefit.  But that’s just my view.  If you know something I don’t, do share.

Thanks to Josh for pointing this out.  It’s hard to believe this could happen to anyone!