NetworkEvangelist.com

Cybercrime goes mobile (by TrendMicroEurope)

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:07:40 -0500

Cybercrime goes mobile (by TrendMicroEurope)

berg'd: Video streaming & net neutrality

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:23:56 -0500

berg'd: Video streaming & net neutrality:

UPDATE: I’ve added additional data and observations to a new post here.

—

When the Comcast/NBC Universal merger was approved by the Department of Justice, Comcast agreed to two interesting stipulations regarding the neutrality of their residential broadband service:

If Comcast provided…

"Nearly 70 percent of SMBs that haven’t gone to the cloud say cloud security standards would..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:17:31 -0500

“Nearly 70 percent of SMBs that haven’t gone to the cloud say cloud security standards would help allay their concerns about security in the cloud, and 38 percent want more transparency from cloud providers. Nearly 35 percent aren’t going to the cloud because they’re concerned it will be costly to make the move from in-house to the cloud.”

- Why Some SMBs Still Fear The Cloud - Dark Reading

A funny thing happened on the way back from the Data Center

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:42:00 -0500

A funny thing happened on the way back from the Data Center:

I don’t mind working in the DC but sometimes I wonder, who designed these “standard” components and did he/they design them with human hands, fingers and eyes in mind.

"Zynga upended its whole IT model, shifting most of its infrastructure to the Amazon Elastic Compute..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:41:36 -0500

“Zynga upended its whole IT model, shifting most of its infrastructure to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets businesses buy virtual servers and storage, scaling capacity up and down as needed. “They clearly saved us. They clearly were helping us scale throughout 2010 and 2009. They did an amazing job,” Leinwand said. But eventually, Zynga “realized we could actually do it on our own and we could scale it in a way that worked better for our business.” The private cloud Zynga would build is in some ways better and more efficient because it’s entirely under Zynga’s control. Moving nearly all of its own servers away from retail, co-location data centers, Zynga started building its own data centers on both US coasts. By early 2011, about 20 percent of Zynga game users at any given time were logged onto servers in Zynga’s own data centers, while the other 80 percent were playing in the Amazon cloud.”

- How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own | Ars Technica

"It’s only one example of a broader campaign by telecom companies to protect their cartel at all..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:53:26 -0500

“It’s only one example of a broader campaign by telecom companies to protect their cartel at all costs—even at the expense of keeping the country’s poorest on the wrong side of the digital divide for many years to come.”

- Why Are Telecom Companies Blocking Rural America From Getting High-Speed Internet?

"Cisco has used this concept of spin-ins before and often they involved the same three founders —..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:52:42 -0500

“Cisco has used this concept of spin-ins before and often they involved the same three founders — Mazzola, Jain, and Cafiero. However, when I read this memo, I see a company making a tactical admission that it has become so big, so bureaucratic and so broken that it cannot count on internal teams to build any ground breaking products. The SDN memo, at least from my perspective, sends the wrong message to Cisco’s engineering corps: you are worth more outside than you are inside Cisco.”

- Cisco memo: We can’t build anything — Cloud Computing News

"But I think the problems go deeper. I don’t think Silicon Valley and all the other alleys and..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:38:46 -0500

“But I think the problems go deeper. I don’t think Silicon Valley and all the other alleys and silicon places are out of ideas. But I do think that we’ve reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field. We’ve maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don’t give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we’re dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago — stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos — just at higher resolutions. On the mobile side, we’re working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That’s the palette that everyone has been working with — and I hate to say it, but we’re at the end of the line. The screen’s gotten better, but when’s the last time you saw an iPhone app do something that made you go, “Whoa! I didn’t know that was possible!?” Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that’s as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard. It’s difficult to say precisely what role this limiting factor plays, but if you start to think about what you could do if you had a 100MB/s connection everywhere you went, one’s imagination starts to run wild.”

- The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

A look into the number of mentions of “Petrino” on...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:09:00 -0500

A look into the number of mentions of “Petrino” on Twitter the past week. Data courtesy of Topsy.

Every :60 in Social Media

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:22:34 -0500

Every :60 in Social Media

Clay Shirky on Internet Issues Facing Newspapers (by...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 04:00:38 -0500

Clay Shirky on Internet Issues Facing Newspapers (by BerkmanCenter) - This is a couple of years old but if you have the slightest interest in journalism or the internet platform you should watch every minute of this.

@SREE'S SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:40:05 -0500

@SREE'S SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE:

==> SHORTCUT TO THIS PAGE: http://bit.ly/sreesoc <==

I am constantly updating, editing, adding to this list. Your feedback, suggestions and tips welcome, sree[at]sree.net or via @sree - mention this page.

-> PRESENTATION: Social Media for Publishers, closing keynote at Digital…

"Surely you can come up with a viable business model… I will help you. 1) Start by building an..."

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:03:59 -0500

“Surely you can come up with a viable business model… I will help you.
1) Start by building an application that is useful.
2) See #1.”

- Location-Based Services Take a Turn for the Horrible | Social Media Explorer

(via A really short guide to Twitter | SreeTips - CNET News)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:20:06 -0500

(via A really short guide to Twitter | SreeTips - CNET News)

The six elements of human behavior that drive social media

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:40:06 -0500

The six elements of human behavior that drive social media:

Altruism
Hedonism
Homophily
Memetics
Narcissim
Tribalism

Good concise post.

Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:42:30 -0500

[Please pardon my sharing the entire text of this article. I encourage you to visit the source article at the NYT website but who knows when it will be put behind the paywall. So it is “reprinted” here.]

Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits

If you “like” something, does that mean you care about it?

It’s an important distinction in an age when you can accumulate social currency on Facebook or Twitter just by hitting the “like” or “favorite” button.

The ongoing referendum on the Web often seems more like a kind of collective digital graffiti than a measure of engagement: I saw this thing, it spoke to me for at least one second, and here is my mark to prove it.

But it gets more complicated when the subjects are more complicated. Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a remarkably different gesture than expressing digital solidarity with kidnapped children in Africa, but it all sort of looks the same at the keyboard.

In the friction-free atmosphere of the Internet, it costs nothing more than a flick of the mouse to register concern about the casualties of far-flung conflicts. Certainly some people are taking up the causes that come out of the Web’s fire hose, but others are most likely doing no more than burnishing their digital avatars.

In February, the digiterati went bonkers after the Susan G. Komen foundation (shorthanded as #Komen on Twitter) announced it was cutting off financing for Planned Parenthood. And then #KONY2012 started popping up in my Twitter feed and I, along with 100 million others, watched a video about the indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony.

After weeks of remaining under the radar, #TrayvonMartin began to surface as well, with many suggesting that the people who got so frantic about the victimization of young black males on another continent needed to look closer to home, at the death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida.

As a reporter, I don’t sign up for various causes, but as someone who lives — far too much — in the world of social media, I can feel the pull of digital activism. And I have to admit I’m starting to experience a kind of “favoriting” fatigue — meaning that the digital causes of the day or week are all starting to blend together. Another week, another hashtag, and with it, a question about what is actually being accomplished.

I ended up thinking a lot about the power and limits of digital activism earlier this month when I was in Moscow during the Russian presidential vote. I spent election night with Aleksei Navalny, a Russian blogger who had become a tip of the spear in the social media campaign against the current government. On that night, camera crews from around the world swirled around him and it seemed as if anything was possible.

But by the next day, it was clear that Vladimir V. Putin would retain his grip on power, and Mr. Navalny ended up posting on Twitter from police custody when he was arrested after an opposition rally. Social media activism may prove to be a durable force in Russian politics, but in these early days it is no match for offline might.

Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” is not entirely dismissive of the Web as a political organizing tool, but is skeptical of the motives, and power, of digital activism.

“My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish and narcissistic purposes,” he said. “Sometimes, it may be as simple as trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.”

Which brings us to the online campaign denouncing the fact that “Bully,” a movie about child-on-child harassment and violence to be released Friday, has received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board.

I have watched the evocative trailer for the movie and met the director, Lee Hirsch. And as a parent of a 15-year-old, I have skin in the game.

On Thursday, word came that David Boies and Ted Olson, the attorneys who were on the opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, had joined the effort to persuade the motion picture association to change the film’s R rating to PG-13, so that the young people most affected by the issue could actually see the movie. Celebrities and politicians, everyone from Drew Brees to Justin Bieber, have weighed in, as have more than 460,000 people who’ve signed an online petition demanding that the rating be changed.

The petition was started by a teenager, Katy Butler, who was bullied for being a lesbian, and has blown up huge on Twitter and elsewhere.

“We were absolutely disappointed with the rating,” Mr. Hirsch told me Friday. “This film has been heralded and welcomed by all kinds of education groups, and multiple school districts were planning to take their students en masse.”

Mr. Hirsch said the petition came out of nowhere. “I got an e-mail the day after it started and I have watched it rising since,” he said.

Generally the way people express support for a film is by paying for a ticket. If “Bully” were seen only by the people who signed the petition, it would have a domestic gross of about $5 million. “Food Inc.,” “Inside Job” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” all major documentaries that landed with significant impact, never made it to the $5 million mark.

There’s another thing to wonder about. The film is distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s company — who I can say without irony is one of the most talented bullies in any business — and what seems like a blossoming of netroots has obvious commercial value to the Weinstein Company. It would not be the first time a distributor happily courted controversy to call attention to a film.

I called Christopher J. Dodd, the former senator who now runs the motion picture association and who was on the receiving end of a full-fledged Web revolt after his organization’s support of unpopular piracy legislation in January. I expected him to suggest that all the online petitioners had failed to grasp the nuance and importance of the ratings system. Not so.

“These are our customers and it behooves us to listen to them,” he said. “We had a screening in Washington and among others we had Katy Butler, who started the petition, and she got up and spoke. I commended her for what she had done.”

“This is the world we are going to live in as far as I can see into the future, and we need to be part of that conversation instead of wringing our hands,” Mr. Dodd said.

Mr. Dodd said he and Mr. Weinstein had been in steady and earnest communication, and that he believes that some sort of compromise on the content of the film will be reached so that young people who wish to can see the film together — as they should — without having to hold hands with or seek permission from their parents.

That outcome — a very traditional organization responding with an open mind to a netroots outcry — made me think again about my own cynicism about Web activism. Many of the folks who made the unpopular decision at Komen are gone and the policy has been amended. Trayvon Martin’s death is under investigation and the president is now weighing in directly. And who knows, perhaps the Web-enabled sunlight on Joseph Kony will end with him being brought to justice, finally.

Sure, hashtags come and go, and the so-called weak ties of digital movements are no match for real world engagement. But they are not only better than nothing, they probably make the world, the one beyond the keyboard, a better place.

"Following the Twitter hashtag for these talks has revolutionized my learning and retention of..."

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:41:05 -0500

“Following the Twitter hashtag for these talks has revolutionized my learning and retention of talking head sessions. Every pastor of every church and every public speaker should have a hashtag designated for every one of his/her sermons and talks and let the people formerly known as the audience participate and interact. None of us are as smart as all of us. Revolutionary.”

- SXSW Interactive — Day Four Recap — My 10 Highs & Lows |

Five Things You Need to Fix on Your Facebook Business Timeline | PCWorld Business Center

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 05:37:36 -0500

Five Things You Need to Fix on Your Facebook Business Timeline | PCWorld Business Center:

Good tips

"A 2011 survey by Kaplan Test Prep, the education company, of college-admission officers showed that..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:14:48 -0500

“A 2011 survey by Kaplan Test Prep, the education company, of college-admission officers showed that 24 percent of them had gone to an applicant’s Facebook or other social-networking page.”

- Miss Seattle’s missteps on Twitter provide a lesson in Social Media 101

"Following the Twitter hashtag for these talks has revolutionized my learning and retention of..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:02:05 -0500

“Following the Twitter hashtag for these talks has revolutionized my learning and retention of talking head sessions. Every pastor of every church and every public speaker should have a hashtag designated for every one of his/her sermons and talks and let the people formerly known as the audience participate and interact. None of us are as smart as all of us. Revolutionary.”

- http://www.randyelrod.com/sxsw-interactive-day-four-recap-my-10-highs-lows/