Alan’s (Old) Blogometer

The Big Three, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Steel.

Who will be Big Blogging? What form will it take?

This is an open blog post like one of Hugh’s.

pre-update I’m seeing comments, and I’m still editing. Bad blogger. I’m not covering up, just composing. I’ll be done in a bit.

UPDATE

Fortune 500 Blogging: 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs, as good a place to start as any. This comes to by way of Scoble and Corporate and Political Blogging, Get Rid of the Fear and Be Yourself.

Synopsis: Before you throw your kickoff party and let marketing run the show, please, try to imagine the fun you’d have if the 800 number on your box of soap flakes rang any phone in your firm at random.

Discussion: What are your 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs?

There’s a dark note mixed in with the happy buzz about blogging these days. Bloggers have been fired from their jobs for what they thought were innocuous posts. Investor relations departments are having legal nightmares over an innocently-meant blog revealing critical info to the world before it’s sent to investors. PR departments are finding themselves side-stepped by the media who go direct to blogging staffers, instead of carefully prepped official spokespeople.

This is a bit much. First, as you’ll see, I’m not going to take pity on the poor-widdle corporation that doesn’t know how to manage it’s own information. Second, stories of dismissal are few, and stories of employment are many. If anything, you should be concerned that once your employees are blogging, the headhunters will be able to dial in your best talent.

Releasing confidential information?

• If your employees are releasing confidential information, that’s not a blogging problem. It is a more general problem. It’s called incompetence.

Look at your brand identity and messaging, and ask: How can blogging augment those things? “Augment” is a key word here, because having corporate blogs should mean *more*, not *different.*

This is peachy. I have a firm with a couple tens of thousands of employees. I’m going to get them all blogging the corporate message, instead of, oh, say, serving customers, or whatnot. How will a couple tens of thousands of folks who’ve been handed foreign software and concepts respond to my blogging edict?

Most likely by forwarding it to Scott Adams.

Employees who plan to blog must be very clear on the company’s PR and communications stand, and should be instructed not to “take a radical left or right turn from the corporate message,” says Poulson.

Making a sharp left or right turn from the corporate policy?

• If only your CXOs are blogging and even they can’t toe the line, then your blog gets filed under comedy. Make sure they’re not also releasing confidential information. (See above.)
• If you’ve gone off and told everyone in your company to blog, handed them the corporate message, and told them not to take any turns. Please, also provide them with instructions on how to use the clipboard to cut and paste.

Staying within the boundaries of a corporate message is pure non-sense. You can count on your employees to avoid insulting your firm, but if your message is “synergistic customer quality” but one of your CNC machinists goes off half-cocked and blogs about “quality customer synergy”, well maybe you’ve tasked the wrong employee for torch bearing.

Oh, and what happens when that machinist goes on strike? May he blog about that?

You can simply hand out the policy to your marketing director to share with the appropriate people, or have a big kickoff party, hand off the policy, and invite everyone to blog, or post it on an intranet.

This is advice for a Fortune 500 company?

The problems faced when allowing everyone to blog, are many. It is fraught with risk, and you’re not going to mitigate that risk by printing out instructions and throwing a kick off party.

This army of bloggers will be met with commentators.

Commentators are NOT customers. They certainly are not employees. They will say things.

They will say good things. They will say bad things. They will say paisley things. They will say ANYTHING.

• Are your employees prepared to field scathing criticisms of your products?
• Are customers going to ask individual employees for customer service, circumventing your customer service queues?
• How does an employee for one brand route a comment regarding another brand to a person who can respond intelligently?
• What about employees who maintain a strict partition between their personal and business lives (read: restraining order)? May that employee blog anonymously?
• How are they going to respond to ugly, ugly comments, or e-mail messages, that are personally or politically insulting?
• Conversation means that people talk back. When is it okay for an employee to take issue with or dress down a commentator?

Five Steps to Launching Corporate Blogs

1. Get an feed reader, Feed Demon, or NetNewsWire. It’s a software program that pulls blog articles into an e-mail like program, so you can read through blogs the same way you read through e-mail. Instead of going from site to site, the articles come to you.

   Until you use a feed reader, you won’t get it.

   Issue a feed reader to everyone who will be blogging, and train them on how to use it.

2. Read blogs. I go with Scoble on this, but it’s number two. Number one is get your feed reader, otherwise you can’t really read blogs.

   Now look around. Who’s already blogging about you anyway? Do you have fan sites? Do you have flame sites?

   Do a soft launch. Have your CEO or other future bloggers respond in the comments of relevant blog posts.

3. Whoever is blogging needs support, and not from marketing, but from the people who know how to deal with problems (is that HR?) Scoble himself got worn down by the gadflies in this comments, and some of the stuff sent to political bloggers is horrifying.

   These are not customers. You need a procedure for dealing with insults and threats. An employee blogging rah-rah for your firm should not have to endure personal or political insults alone, especially one who would otherwise be working internally.

4. Does your firm do anything that makes for good television? Anything that is steeped in technical lingo, particulars?

   Give a blog to the team that crash tests your automobiles, or conducts the taste testing of your snack foods, or the people create and record the voices of your cartoon ducks. Set them up like English Cut, or the new Horse Bliss. Create a blog where your employees can regale readers with stories of the know-how and history that makes your firm special.

5. Look at leaks as failures not specific to blogging. You could just as well be leaking out of e-mail, camera phones, or happy hours. You must clearly mark trade secret information.

   Recognize that by giving a person a blog, they are one more exit for information. They will be facing customers and the press. They may have no experience in these matters, and need exceedingly clear guidelines. Stamping documents as trade secret, or with release dates becomes necessary.

Kick off party won’t do. Bloggers increase costs, and increase risks. You need to have a real plan in place.

Which is pretty obvious to someone in IT. Computer systems, like blogs, are not rolled out with a marketing press release and a kick off party. Probably the best way to start out blogging in the a huge firm, is to start small. Give one of your CXOs a blog, sure, but find someone in your firm with a cool job, or a job attached to some interesting bit of your corporate history. If you were stodgy old General Motors, you could give a blog to the Small Block V-8 engineers, for example.

No, you do not want to miss this boat. You want to tap into blogging.

Before you throw your kickoff party and let marketing run the show, please, try imagine the fun you’d have if the 800 number on your box of soap flakes rang any phone in your firm at random.

What are you’re 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blogs?

UPDATE: Hugh talks about the lack of free will, and how a corporate blog can exaggerate it.

This open business plan is off to a good start, as people have written me aside to offer examples, advice, and to pose some challenging questions. This is kind of how I’d expect things to be, even though at first it sounded like a stupid idea to some.

And becuse is is a stupid idea. At least the way I posed it. Reading through business plans and business plan outlines at the SBA, I can’t really imagine how one would go about creating an open competative analysis, for example.

Still, as one poster known only as Paul noted on the Asterisk mailing list.

I think the idea itself is good in many ways. A generic business plan template for the hypothetical “Acme Widgets” company can be obtained from textbooks or attending the right classes. I’m sure some people have gotten rich by taking this plan they got in school and modifying it. Maybe the same will happen to some who take the free “Acme VOIP” plan available online and modify it for their unique needs.

My notion is probably more along the lines of, how to start your own Asterisk reseller business.

Why shouldn’t developers, hackers, use the same collaborative energy in business that they use in development? Why should we let someone else “monitize” our efforts?

I’ve not written lately. There are two reasons.

1) I HATE MY BLOG.

WordPress is a trial, but more importantly, this is the default theme, and I don’t feel like dicking around with PHP long enough to change it. I keep hoping to bring the old blog back, and use that, but Think New Orleans is in the critical path.

2) I’m face to face, more often than not, with different people day to day, and I’m getting into a different voice. One suitable for tectchy Ann Arborites. This is probably not good for me. Except for the checks. Those are nice.

Need to find a straddle voice.

Seriously, guys. Every time I open a composition in WordPress, I think of the different Ann Arborites that it would alientate, and I don’t want to deal with it.

Small entries, thinking aloud, until I figure out what I’m trying to say.

I’d like to go down to New Orleans. I’d like to have something to do while I’m there, some work. I don’t want to to do anything profit oriented with Think New Orleans, of course. That’s not the purpose of Think New Orleans. It does cost money to run Think New Orleans, and to live in general, however.

Sourcing (finding) programming work in New Orleans is going to be difficult. Programming for hire tends to consume a lot of energy, too. I have only so many hours a week that I want spend on programming. It is simply not good for me to spend so much time in front of a screen.

Open Business Plans?

Okay, so I get the idea to set up a retail computing business in New Orleans while I’m there, and spend part-time installing local area networks. Doing stuff that needs doing.

For those of you that are quick to judge, and slow to think, this isn’t some devious scheme to profit off of others misfortunes. The city needs it’s citizens. Citizens need jobs. I want to make my own job.

Open Business Plans?

Well, I decided that rather than do LANs, I could focus on phones, using Asterisk. It’s nothing I know about now, but the software is software. If I can build Linux servers, web servers, e-mail servers, I can build a phone server, or a Private Branch eXchange, as they call it.

It’s not my idea, really. Ron gave me the elevator pitch; A PBX in box, four copper, additional VOIP, for $2,999.99, for small businesses with less than 15 phones.

The ever connected Mohan, who I’ve been programming with, who has experience with phone stuff, Key systems, is going to help me build the prototype PBX. We’ve spoken with Cameron who is going to be the hardware supplier. There are some other Asterisk based firms in Ann Arbor, and I hope to learn from what they are doing.

The people are gathering, but how does one turn this into action?

Open Business Plans?

To my mind, this a franchise operation. I actually went and posted on the asterisk-biz mailing list, asking if anyone wanted to collaborate on a business plan. They scoffed, share our business plan with our competitors.

Uh, okay. The software is open source. The hardware is a commodity. And the big deal is?

So, I’m going to write an open business plan. This isn’t even my business idea anyway. It was handed to me.

You can steal my precious little ideas under Asterisk Business Plan. We’ll see how long I can keep it open.

I’ll be blogging more now that I’m getting out of administration, and back into development. There has been little to discuss since much of what I’ve been doing has been quite rote. It reads rote.

Life Ann Arbor has become unusually livable lately. Perhaps, this is because I’m on my way out of Ann Arbor, or perhaps it is because I’m getting back out into Ann Arbor. Either way.

Blogging itself, always requires reading other people blogs, and getting in on the conversation. I’ll probably be back to my old haunts, Ann Arbor is Overrated, Gaping Void, and Crossroad Dispatches, eh, but maybe not.

Us techies still find listserv and USENET to be the social networking software of choice, and if you were to google me, you’ll see that’s where I’ve spent my time. Asking after Postfix, SpamAssassin, and the like.

Think New Orleans has been my primary focus, these last many weeks. I’ve done some entertaining contract work, but for the most part, I’ve been picking my way through my little computer kingdom, to create an environment that is production oriented.

I’ve missed being part of the blogosphere. The work I’ve been doing is one foot in front of the other stuff. But, I’ll be getting back into fray, as best I can.

WebDAV is going to be a part of my build environment. I will use it publish web archives and Javadoc from Ant. This keeps me from having to mess around with Ant’s flakier tasks like SSH, SCP, or FTP. I’ll specify an artifact output directory that is a mounted WebDAV directory when it comes time to publish.

Problem was that I was unable to build WebDAV on Fedora Core 4.

This is the second time I’ve encountered this. I totally forgot what I did the first time.

I’ll want to restore this in a reinstall. I want any hacks to build under Fedora Core 4 to be recorded, so I can get a system that needs WebDAV up and running. I don’t want to waste brain storage, which has already provide unreliable.

I decided to take the opportunity to author an RPM, my first. Got to learn how to create patches for RPMs and apply them during the build. I added a pre install to add a startup script that will load a necessary kernel module, coda, or edit the existing startup script, rc.modules, if it exists. There is pre uninstall script that will do it’s best to put things back the way they were.

The RPM and SRPM are found in my repository of stuff at http://engrm.com/repository/davfs/. Use at your own risk. If it works for you, shoot me an e-mail message a alan@engrm.com. And any questions as well.

Must make an effort to do something noteworthy soon. There are many little things that I’m addressing in my day to day, but nothing worth blogging about.

It would be nice to be able to blog more, but I find that I’m far more productive the less I observe the blogosphere and the 24 hour news cycle. I did enjoy the exchange.

Created my own certificate authority. Here are the notes.

First off, save time and tedium by using TinyCA. The dialog boxes have the appropriate defaults, and generally do the right thing. Otherwise, I find myself pecking out complicated openssl invocations, transcribed from the mod_ssl FAQ.

My VIAO Z505 is still kicking, running W2k and FC 4 Linux. Used the latter to host the certificate authority of The Engine Room, LLC. I installed TinyCA Version 2 from the RPM. The RPM did not have the correct dependencies. I had to install with –nodeps to circumvent warnings about perl-MIME-Base64, probably a typo, and then when I ran TinyCA for the first time, it was missing perl-gettext.

Once running, it build a certificate authority in my home directory under ~/.TinyCA/ . I’d rather it were somewhere where I won’t forget it exists, but this directory appears to hard coded in the tinyca2 script.

I created a certificate authority for The Engine Room, LLC, and then created certificates for imap.engrm.com, engrm.com, and *.engrm.com. The wildcard certificate was an experiment. I’d run across the notion somewhere in my reading last week, and it is accepted by OS X Mail. I see now that proper certificate authorities will sign such a certificate for a goodly sum.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I can use the certificates, I export them from TinyCA. When I export the server certificates, I export them once as PEM certificate to a file name like imap.engrm.com.crt and once as PEM certificate, with key and fingerprint, to a file name like imap.engrm.com.key. The certificate key will be password protected. I also exported the certificate authority certificate as PEM to a file named ca.engrm.com.crt, and one as DER to ca.engrm.com.der.

The certificates for Dovecot IMAP and Apache are kept under /etc/pki in Fedora Core 4 Linux. To suppress the unlocking of the server key at server startup, I decrypted it by running the following as root.

cp engrm.com.key engrm.com.key.org
umask 377
openssl rsa -in engrm.com.key.org -out engrm.com.key

The key must be set to chmod 400. The umask above well see that it is created with read only permissions for the user only. The keys are kept in their own directory, and that directory is is readable only to root.

Adding the certificate of the CA to the OS X keychain system is not well documented, but very easy. From bash I run the following command.

sudo certtool i ca.engrm.com.crt v k=/System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors

I’m sure that the above command could be added to an Apple installer script of some sort.

I’ve also added the certificate authority to my authorities in Mozilla, but going through the preferences dialog.

Stunningly little is going on in my life right now. I’ve been working with SpamAssassin, and there’s little to say about it really, except that it works. It’s amazing that it works. I’m very pleased with it.

It’s not a blog worthy project, since this software is pretty well documented. I’m reading the SpamAssassin book from O’Reilly.

My application for SpamAssassin will have me installing it on the other side of an existing MTA/MDA, in this case Domino, about which I know nothing. I’ve not sorted out how to go about training SpamAssassin with this installation. I’ve yet to find an example of someone who has done this.

I’ve also moved to Postfix. Suddenly, a great many e-mail tasks are easier. I’m back to using procmail to filter my mail, where I’d been using a convoluted system of address extentions and .qmail files before. I’m using good old mboxes again, and mutt behaves a little better. It may be the new server, but mutt seems snappier as well. I’ve missed being able to grep my mail, or open it up in vi and search. The Postfix Book is on it’s way.

I’ve installed Dovecot in order to use IMAP via SSL, and I’ve installed Cyrus SASL to do authorized SMTP. Now I’m able to read my mail from my Powerbook, and search it with Spotlight. Got a message today with pictures Chris Kaltwasser’s new daughter, and it’s nice to be able to view attachments such as those as a slideshow. Always impressed with OS X.

I learned a lot about mail this last week. I expanded my Safari Bookshelf to accommodate more books on mail. Books are good. Safari Bookshelf is good way to get at them. They are doing an excellent job of cross-referencing, so I’ll subscribe to a selection of books on the same subject, and surf between them getting answers, learning. Ordinarily, I’m working with stuff that has little real documentation. There is only code to read, or write, or specifications to read, or conversations to follow.

I was at Amir’s on State (in Ann Arbor, Michigan) many months back, March to be less vauge, and a fellow put a postcard on my table and said, “You should come to this show. It’s a good show.” Well, that’s all I needed to hear, but unfortunately, I forgot to mark my calendar and I missed it.

The postcard has been sitting in my desk for some time, and I’m cleaning out my desk now, so I thought I’d link to Bernhard Rädle. In case he’s showing in your area, I hear the show is a good show.