Got this one in the email today:

Hi Vlad,

Love your blog! I don’t believe in the community stuff but you always brighten up my day and I would appreciate your advice. I started a blog for my business but my customers are not reading it. How did you get your customers to read yours?

Love that you don’t believe in the community but have no problem contacting me for free advice. That notwithstanding, it’s a good question. I don’t know that I am a good person to answer it, considering that I have not even been able to motivate my clients to read product documentation. Blogwise, it has allowed us to eliminate the advertising budget. So, here goes nothing:

There are a few harsh, ugly pieces of reality you have to come to terms with before you can get yourself in a frame of mind where your can make the kind of a blog that your clients will read much less agree to: You are not interesting. Given an option, your clients would replace you with a robot at best or Microsoft clippy at worst. Nothing about you is authorative or expert, you just fit into the economic tradeoff window between them doing it on their own or outsourcing it to indianinabucket themselves. Given the option of watching you struggle through the third-grader level writing skills or climbing onto their desk in high heels to sweep the dirt collected on their office fan, they would probably choose the latter.

Now that we’ve obliterated any sense of supposed literary expertise and industry insight you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you posses, let’s get back to the basics. Why did the clients hire you in the first place? If you don’t know, ask them. It could be that:
1. I was the cheapest
2. I was the most qualified for their niche / vertical
3. I seemed to address the problems they were having

Now, ask why they are still your clients, could it be that:
1. We rely on you to cut through the clutter of technical jargon
2. You are the most familiar person with our network, one of the family
3. Still the cheapest, and we don’t have to learn how to speak dot

It may seem like I threw in the “cheap” options just to insult you. No way. The amount of businesses that do not consider technology to be the vital core of their business far outnumbers the number of businesses that are willing to spend the immense amount of money required to get it right. In other words, there is a ton of money to be made trying to save people money than to take their money to build a castle they don’t need. Their money is still green, so why be ashamed of that? Why not be proud of the fact that you can make miracles happen on a tight technology budget?

That is called defining your key competence. Once you find your key competence, write about it. Remember that you are not an expert, you are just talking about what you do. It’s all common sense after all, but the lightbulb only goes off once someone shares that common sense with the person that is having a problem and not seeing the common sense solution to it.

Now you have this library of stories on a particular topic, now you are in Google, now you’re starting to establish yourself as someone that has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about what they do. Now you can claim to be an expert. It still doesn’t make you an expert but who is the judge of that? The tons of people that come to your blog and look at your insight of restating the obvious.

Now you’ve got a following. Now even the people that are not your customers are interested in working with you. Now you have your customers following your blog because you didn’t have to force them to come to it, they came to you because of your blog. Keep it up.

What about the ones that don’t want to read your blog? Make them. There are many creative, sneaky or outright weaselish through incompetence ways of doing it: I started posting documentation and tips on my blog because I lost the password to our web site and didn’t want to admit it. When people asked for some info, I sent them to our blog. They read, they subscribed, now they cannot get enough of it.

The overall success comes from balance. Balance of fact and opinion. Of freebies and commercial messages. It takes discipline, it takes time and the results are anything but immediate - but wow, are the results spectacular.

After the millionth time of watching my mobile phone choking on loading quarter meg of Javascript of Shockey Monkey’s new mobile rich interface I finally remembered the pain while searching for my lost Blackjack earlier this afternoon. Not only did Katie find it (love yooou honey!) but I also sat down to finally put the pesky Javascript static-code reloads to a grave.

Here is an article on how to use Apache’s mod_expires to enforce selective caching of javascript files.

http://www.vladville.com/using-apache-mod_expires-for-faster-ajax-sites

That sounded like a mouthfull. Here is what it means: I telll your browser how long it needs to cache my Javascript code. One day? One month? One year? My call. By telling it which Javascript libraries do not change often I can force it to cache them and not have to download them every single time. Faster load times, less bandwidth, more efficient experience. And hopefully less need for a phone warranty as you watch that GPRS ghettonet connection struggling with the last few K worse than a fat man with the 26th mile of the marathon.

P.S. Yes, of course I am still working on Shockey Monkey! Lack of hype does not translate into lack of development, there are over 4,000 people using, you didn’t think I’d just let that slide did you? Geez.

Disclosure: I have been a Microsoft MVP in Microsoft Exchange category for two years, each year the reward consists of some swag and a $150 credit in the Microsoft store. How I got the award (first or second time) is beyond me, it carries no professional status value (i.e., it’s not a certification of knowledge or experience like an MCSE) and I generally do not use it. However, it is a great honor bestowed by Microsoft to the enthusiasts of their technology and I am quite grateful for it and the product involvement that has come as a result of it.

Started by the opening few minutes of Simpson’s last night, here is some food for thought..

Some of you feel that you don’t have to support MVPs or really offer any gratification in return for someone helping you. You don’t. Some of you don’t even feel thanks are in order. Fair enough. Some of you feel that the content produced on the Internet is done at the will of its creators, distributed for free to get attention and you can take it or leave it. Very true. Some of you will go to community events like SBS groups, .NET meetings, Linux user groups, bootcamps and mashups without thinking you owe the organizers a damn thing. You’re right!

Point is, you cannot owe someone something if you didn’t agree to purchase it. If it had material value, it would come with a price tag and you would judge if it was worth the monetary tradeoff or not. And since it comes without a price tag it is equivalent to a giveaway. Do you owe it thanks? Sure, if you appreciated it. Do you owe it gratitude? I suppose so, if it gives you a lasting benefit.

In a nutshell, we are a free society with an incentive based monetary system, and if someone is going to offer something for nothing you do not owe them any compensation, personal or commercial.

So you don’t have to. But should you?

Wayne brought up a great point this morning, in a nutshell saying “people can only keep on fighting the good fight whilst they don’t need to think about how to pay the bills. Once they need to think more about money than the job they like doing, they stop to do it.”

Some people thrive on accomplishment. Some thrive on money. Some thrive on personal gratitude. Some thrive on attention. Some thrive on argument and passion. Most people have something that makes them tick, something that self-motivates them to do what they do.

The Answer Underpants Gnomes Are Seeking

South Park is a world famous adult cartoon that places children in rather vulgar adult situations and exposes how in a naive fashion children expose the huge adult flaws in logic.

One of the most quoted episodes is the one of the Underpants Gnomes (wikipedia), in which children are asked to write a paper on economics. They meet the underpants gnomes who sneak into kids rooms at nights and steal underpants.  Gnomes have this colossal operation and setup, designed to make profit with just a few missing pieces. They know where they are (collect pants) and where they want to be (profit) they just need to fill in the middle. This is also known as the “every web 2.0 and dot com business plan, EVER” which is why you see it quoted on nearly every social networking site out there when reviewing questionable business plans:

So, let’s circle this back. When you hear or see someone giving something away for free, you ought to try and answer: How are they going to survive doing that? Are they giving it away to gain exposure? Customer base? Attention? What is step 2?

Same question ought to get asked of the Microsoft MVPs, group leaders, event organizers, user groups, etc. How are the leaders, in the end, being compensated for their work?

The easy answer is the question “Who gives a shit” - after all, if they have the time to write, blog, podcast, video blog, answer questions and participate in the IT events and discussions they likely need to get another job. So what if they get tired, someone else will just fall into their place and it’s not your economic duty to subsidize people with flawed business plans - you’re saving $$$ for the iPod Touch.

And for the record - I don’t blame you. I am perhaps the same. I’ve watched the Evolution of Dance video on YouTube at least 20 times and to my recollection I haven’t paid the guy, or Youtube once. I am sure the guy makes money somehow, somewhere, frankly I don’t care.

But the things I do care about, the things that I enjoy, I support. I love 2 Live Crew music and have purchased every single CD they put out. I love The Darkness, and have purchased the CD’s and even went to a concert. (yes, there is a pattern here, I like it when people do phenomenal things with so few resources / talent). I hate Michael Savage and his beliefs with a passion, but I love his delivery - so I bought his books. I could not fall asleep without Coast 2 Coast AM, and I subscribe to its Streamlink even though the program is available on the AM band and I don’t believe in bigfoot, chupacabras or the JFK conspiracies.

Point is, I support what I enjoy because I care that it survives.

End Game

If you don’t support what you care about, it disappears. If you take what you get for free for granted, it comes back as the nastiest commercial substitute you can imagine. If you can only take, without ever giving, you might get accustomed to that and when you need it there may be none left for the taking.

The loose change bin, do you ever put loose change back or do you only take?

In restaurants, do you ever compensate someone for their hard work - even though it’s their f’n job - or do you just stiff them?

Well, dear friends, it works the same way in Cyberspace. If you don’t support the things you like, they will go away.

If you are a content creator that doesn’t want to run a business but is open to a monetary contribution from the people that enjoy what you do, setup and publish a PayPal address. You can even make a subscription, by making Paypal do a reoccurring withdrawal of a few bucks a month. Whatever the case, you are sharing what you want, the public that appreciates you will send you it feels like is appropriate and it’s not a business, it’s just a way of saying thanks.

For the consuming public: Without gratitude, the courtesy goes away. For the content creators: Be honest about what you want.

If you choose to do nothing, you end up with the insults to your intelligence such as this guys site, and SPF Nation. But if you don’t care, perhaps thats the best you deserve.

P.S. Woops. Had to edit the link to coasttocoastam.com - apparently, coast2coastam.com is an amateur porn site. Thanks to Danny from Nofx for pointing that out.

Today I took the first steps towards publishing my newsletter and that of course means putting up a signup form. This is a dreadful, backwards process of creating a new template page, building a form, a processing script and then sending the user where they started out from. It involves unnecessary clicks, diminishes from design and flow of the site. But it doesn’t have to – enter jQuery and Wordpress.

Using jQuery framework and a simple backend server script you can collect data from the user and post the response inline on the same page with the minimal interruption to the browsing process and minimal changes to the layout. For example, my form prompts users for their email address in the sidebar to the right. It communicates errors or success by fading in a container with the error or congratulations text. No page reloads, no dedicated pages to design or maintain – just embed another widget in the sidebar and enable the site to be more functional. Gotta love AJAX.

I wrote a quick and simple HowTo article on creating AJAX driven forms in Wordpress: Check it out.

Enjoy!

Over the past few days the Internet has been full of the conflict of interest coverage, be it from jaded lovers or angry blog authors who thought they mattered.. and I suppose it’s a sad realization when you realize you don’t.

First up, Scoble seems to be surprised that his friends will not go on camera bashing Apple for their crappy products. It’s got nothing to do with Apple, it all has to do with self-interest: CEO’s of Web 2.0 vaporware have to be nice to everyone on the record because they want to do business or be acquired by those companies. Scoble, who gets a lot of press attention, is a blogger - not press, so he didn’t get the iPhone up front or a free PowerMac or whatever he wanted so he is calling Apple for what everyone already knows. Second, a whole slew of people seem pissed at Steven Levy, who gave a glowing review of what is one fugly, closed, DRM-ridden piece of trash product from Amazon that costs more than the competition. Who is complaining? Thats right, the guys that didn’t get a free one.

To put it in perspective, this is like me calling out Microsoft for Zune 2 sucking because I didn’t get one. And that Lamborgini Murcielago, what a joke!

So here is a lesson for the aspiring bloggers: You either have to be an undying, unquestionable fanboy, or you better hide from any camera / voice recorder / cell phone lest you be caught saying the wrong thing to the wrong people..

How do these folks sleep at night with all that ego and fear on their minds?

It’s Friday, and I figured it was as good of a time for a guest post as any. This time, however, we have someone that obviously doesn’t get it. But that’s not all, while this guy seems to be in touch with whats going on, he also appears completely ignorant of the fundamental change that has happened to the world of business. That fundamental change, in case you have not recognized it yet, is that the customer is in charge, not the corporation.

I’ll offer you his loosely paraphrased thesis, though I encourage you to read it in its entirety:
“CEO’s that ask their customers and partners for advice in public are weak “community CEO’s” whose openness leads the customer to lose faith in the product and leave the company staff without confidence in their leader.”

He goes on to further insinuate not only that the feedback should not be solicited at all, but should also only come from peers/equals and compensated third parties. Doing it any other way makes for a Community CEO who projects a weak image of the company to its customers, weak leadership to its staff and overall lack of leadership ability. He cements his opinion by citing that he has never seen a Fortune 100 CEO ask for public advice on how to run their company.

I must admit, he makes a very valid point. For aspiring entrepreneur class of 1907, that is.

Welcome to 2007. In this day and age, the companies that make it big are the companies that are in tune with their customer, their partner and their community. The good ol’ boy club of business leadership, behind the closed doors with lit cigars contemplating the collective stupidity of the consuming public, with no regard for rules, fairness or ethics… well… those days are gone, long gone, and the days of business decisions behind closed doors without public input are numbered. Those that dilude themselves with the illusion that they are not almost entirely driven by the customer are on the way out. Those that embrace their clients and open their practices are winning.

I have many (many, many, many, many) coleagues that feel the exact opposite way. To them, only the nice things are voiced out loud, the dirty laundry is kept hidden, far, far away where it is ignored because I guess they think nobody will figure it out eventually. The public image is only a positive, beautiful, glowning one meant to hug you with one hand while reaching into your pocket with the other. Yet, they are surprised when it backfires.

So, let me offer you my thesis: People don’t give a damn about you, your opinions or leadership skills. They do business with you because you have a product that fits their needs and the more that product fits their needs, the more involved they are in the process, the more they understand the outcome and leverage it to their benefit. Even if its full of holes and shortcomings, people will find a sense of belonging in it, spread it for you, offer others help with using it…They become product fans but they do so because of the product and the process, not YOU. It is not about you. It’s all about the customer:

Customer is king.
Customer has a choice.
Customer can choose the status quo that has always taken them for granted, abused and irrelevant, that has constantly been in trouble and caught red handed over and over….. or
Customer can choose a company that is open and willing to listen to its feedback.

Not only do the Community CEOs work, they are the only ones people want to work with/for.

You have no idea how often I am asked to reserve myself in these blog posts, to not talk about certain things, to sweep some things under the rug, to not say anything bad about Microsoft as to damage our relationship, to not say anything too good about them either because I sound like a fanboy, to not talk about the upcoming features because people will take them away, to refrain from snide remarks and just be the happy go lucky Vlad who can only be honest behind the closed doors, sweeping the ugliness under the rug so everyone can live in a happy, but dishonest/unrealistic/nonexistant, harmony. And I ignore them. Proudly. Loudly.

Yet my company grows exponentially beause my focus is not on what people think… because only people that get compensated based on what people think of them are the beggars who want people to feel sorry for them. I choose to focus on delivering what people want, and I’m damn proud to ask the people what they want because its ultimately the clients that pay the bills, not my fan club.

Now… Do you finally get Vladville?

Gotta love techmeme.com! I found out earlier today that Microsoft Live opened up live.xx domain for registrations and LiveSite blog urged me to sign one up along with a full list of domains available from live.com.

Click here to sign up.

Now, there is a trick to this. By default Microsoft only enables hotmail.com and live.com email domains, which is pretty lame. You’ll need to paste in this Javascript to enable the .xx code:

javascript:function r(q){} function s(q){e[q] =
new Option(a[q],a[q])}; r(e = document.getElementById(”idomain”).options);r
(d=”live.”);r(a = new Array(”hotmail.com”,”hotmail.co.uk”,”msn.com”,d+”com”,
d+”be”,d+”co.uk”,d+”de”,d+”gen.tr”,d+”fr”,+
“live.crack”,d+”xx”,d+”ch”,d+”live.girl”,d+”es”,d+”it”,d+”nl”));
for (i=0;i<a.length;i++){ s(i ) }
alert(”Success - additional domains added!”);

And there you go… That will add the .xx domain to the live signup. Thanks to Oli for the hint, I just added the .xx in the array and bam, vlad@ baby!

Last night I was bouncing a couple of emails with a fairly influential person in the small business sector, very good friend as well because he somehow managed to be more hated by Microsoft than I am, something that definitely needs an award of some sort (err, Tim… SBSBBC?)

Anyhow, we got on the subject of positive reinforcement, after yesterday’s fanmail post about LiveArchive. His comment was that it “makes me want to do more” and while I can see how that positive reinforcement applies, I have to say that over the past year my “helping the masses” spirit has been all but completely shattered (to be outlined in “Why Susan Bradley is a much better person than I am”)

Here is the thing I rarely talk about because, well, it’s my own damn fault. Not a day passes by that I don’t severely regret helping some people in this business. Why? Because some of the people that I have helped the most have repaid me the least, and/or have taken what I have provided/taught them to my competitors.

Thing is, I love to help and thats just the kind of person that I am. But having been stabbed from every angle imaginable I am finding myself asking my wife to talk me out of some of the projects because the majority of the people out there are not like me and they only look out for themselves. Why go out seeking abuse?

Finally, I look at feedback from this blogs survey and I finally understand who the audience is and why things like Vladfire and SBS Show were so popular and why people were so supportive of them – because the people that really got behind it were not greedy would-be entrepreneurs but actual IT professionals, people with jobs, people that just appreciated hearing and seeing the experts and reading how (I) some overcame the associated bullshit of being in the technology business.

Speaking of overcoming… Today is November 1st.. I’ve promised you a little something-something, I hope you are pleasantly surprised with what we’ve been able to do over the past two weeks.

From the Captain Obvious Department: Internet has changed since Al Gore invented it.

ICAAN, the international body governing the top level domain policies, is meeting tomorrow to decide the faith of the whois system, originally designed to help organizations identify domain name ownership / identity. However, as the Internet has grown beyond its legitimate residents of pornography and students (ehm, researchers) seeking the said pornography, many criminals have found the whois system to be an excellent source of b2b spam data. Imagine the freely accessible, global database of domain names matched to the identity of the IT person in charge of it – why, you could SPAM them to death, you could send them fake domain renewal requests, you could build your own database, the possibilities for evil are endless.

Over the past few years few registrars have found a way to make money off this problem by offering “Private” registrations. Now it seems ICAAN is looking to put an end to it completely, a timely decision benefiting nobody.

If you would like privacy online you might want to think of a good fake name. Vlad Mazek is taken. Just use your fake name and you’ll be set.

Here is the problem though, or at least the start of the problem, for the privacy conscious – you’ve seen nothing yet! If you think the ability to match the organization with the contact IT person is a skill you might as well move to Afghanistan an start digging a hole because if you’ve ever lived, worked, Googled or had your picture taken (or been in a public place) your anonymity is soon to be gone. That is at least where we’re going folks.

Just what do you think this whole “Web 2.0” thing is? A giant party for heterosexual-yet-inactive-but-not-by-choice residents of San Francisco? Not entirely. The “Web 2.0” and its full embrace is about replacing the traditional content of the Internet as it was in the 90’s when it was dominated by people that had something of value to say (researchers) or something of value to show (porn). But now that everyone with the keyboard is a researcher and everyone with the webcam is a porn star the Internet is elevating a little bit. “Web 2.0” is about identifying relationships.

Internet of 1999 can be summed up by two web sites – www.youtube.com and www.wikipedia.com. One is a continuous stream of crap to share with the people you barely know, the other is a loosely reliable knowledge database. And Web 2.0 is changing that. Web 2.0 is changing the Internet as we knew it and making it about connecting more than 90’s version was about linking. In plainer terms, Web 2.0 drags you to the person you want, introduces you and reads you their bio. The old Internet gives you their old business card.

That is only where the fun begins. The old privacy concerns used to be finding out where you lived and what your phone number was. Todays privacy concern is that everything you say, do, participate or enjoy becomes an immediate and accessible public property. And all the world is your neighborhood. Networks like Twitter allow people to publish their entire life, which they personally open up, to anyone that might be watching. listening and reading. You don’t even have to be a willing participant, if you’ve taken a picture with someone that uploaded it to their social network and then “tagged” you, that data is up there.

And the Web 2.0 is all about personalizing and connecting this world wide web of information that is just sitting out there, waiting to be put together…. and abused. See why people fear Google?

It’s been about a month since I logged into the Facebook. It’s been about two weeks or so since I even looked at Yahoo groups (sans one bad day I ended up wasting on the drama of Senseless & Hopeless); I have no idea just how far I have fallen back on the RSS feeds, blogs and other community lists/sites I follow but it’s been a while.

So today I did a flush – mark all unread items as read and will look at it next week when things calm down a little.

These things happen every now and then, you fall back and… well, you can either deal with depression of being behind every time you open your RSS reader or you just say screw it, I’m just going to miss out on a few things. Now, it’s given that you are going to fall back every now and then so key is to be prepared. I have a few blogs (maybe 5 total) that I check every single day because I know those movers and shakers make a difference in my world and if I miss their moves I am screwed. Then I have the hundred others “amplifying” the same stuff, so even if I ignore a few weeks of their stuff it will not be the end of their world.

I always look for tiers to help my day, and being human I only have two tiers… Important and not. Important gets done. Not important doesn’t get done today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not ever unless it becomes important again. Priorities are a wonderful thing.