Checkout the O’Reilly Answers Social Network
I am typically not one to recommend a social network to my clients w/ the exception, of course, of the already established networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. My whole philosophy regarding social networking at this stage of the game is that if you want to build a community, build upon what’s already out there as much as possible (Facebook API, Twitter API) and don’t try to re-invent the wheel.
However, I have always felt that strong, reputable Niche networks could exist externally if they were packaged correctly. A good example of such a network that is currently in Beta right now is O’Reilly Answers. O’Reilly has a good vision with this network, and of course they have some really positive things in their favor already such as Awesome Reputation, an Established Following, and a Trusted Name, what more could you ask for?
You can also look at the Network and tell that there were some clear objectives put into place while developing this solution. They obviously wanted it to be user friendly, functional, and interactive. There are basically three ways you can interact inside O’Reilly Answers:
Share Your Knowledge
You can actually enter in blog posts and tag them according to your subject matter and other users can comment you on your posts. This is one area that I think they could have done a little differently. We all manage our own blogs externally, why would we want to post our content on their website as well and have 2 comment systems running at the same time to follow up w/ readers? My thoughts on this part are that they could have put into place some sort of RSS option where you could aggregate your content from your blog and have your friends inside the network click out to read your posts. Maybe I am not seeing the big picture on this, but as a workaround I posted about 3/4 of 2 blog posts into their network along w/ a link at the bottom to get to the remainder of my post on my blog.
Ask A Question
Since O’Reilly has been catering to the Technically Minded community for so long, you can rest assured that some pretty sharp folks are going to be hanging around in this community. Well, let’s say you have a question about a project you are working on, you can post that question to the community, tag it, and before you know it some of the sharpest minds in the world are answering your question. This is an area where I really see this network having value for a lot of us…
Answer a Question
Let’s say someone asks a question and you know the answer, you can provide them w/ your insight w/ ease. I think that this networking model is going to speed up the “obstacle to solution process” once the network get’s off the ground.
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Also, just a few notes regarding the Network as it is right now. There are obviously some bugs, I had a couple of errors pop up on me when I was setting up my profile, this is to be expected w/ a new release like this. Give them time, I am sure that O’Reilly will iron out all of the kinks very soon. Here’s some basic information that was forwarded to me today from our Account Rep at O’Reilly…
We’re launching the beta of O’Reilly Answers, and I’m inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O’Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O’Reilly).
Why Answers, and why now?
O’Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation. We’ve created the usual means of facilitating communication between customers, O’Reilly folks, and the outside experts we call "alpha geeks" who contribute to O’Reilly books, conferences, and websites. We can connect through reader reviews, errata submissions, book forums, blog comments, Get Satisfaction, our customer service department, and more. But too much of this conversation is siloed, and not enough is public (e.g., discussions on our internal mailing list for editors, or personal responses to customer questions). O’Reilly Answers will be the place where much of that communication happens from this point forward.Why participate?
The lofty reason: Like O’Reilly, you want to "change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators." That’s our mission, and we’ve been fortunate enough to build a community of passionate, committed people who love to learn and share their knowledge as they work towards a better world for us all.The "nice, but what’s in it for me" reasons: reputation, recognition, and rewards.
Get Recognized: "Find interesting people" is a core activity at O’Reilly, and an important component of our success. We see Answers as an important way to discover and connect with our next authors, online instructors, videographers, and speakers.
Build Your Reputation: You’ve learned a lot, why not get credit for all that knowledge? As your submissions to Answers are voted up, your personal reputation on the site increases. At launch, your reputation will be based solely on your participation in O’Reilly Answers. Soon, we’re expanding across oreilly.com, so the book errata and book reviews you’ve submitted, books you’ve registered, and conferences you’ve attended, will add reputation points. You’ll also earn badges to mark accomplishments and milestones.
Earn Rewards: Glory is great, but discounts and deals are nice, too. We want to reward your contributions to the O’Reilly community. Shortly we’ll have a point-based system in place that you can redeem for books, training, courses, and conferences. Details soon, but in the meantime, any actions you take now will count towards your total points.
This is just v.1: The best part of any project on the web is watching it take on a life of its own. With that in mind, we’re looking forward to *your* suggestions about where O’Reilly Answers should go, what features should be added, and what benefits and rewards we can offer all of you.
I’d like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books), StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others. They’re great resources, and we think the O’Reilly community can create a useful site that’s, well, a different kind of animal.
One last thing: O’Reilly Answers is in beta and you may encounter bugs. We’re still working on many improvements to the site, such as feeds for each tag, but would love to hear your suggestions for features and improvements. Please send any suggestions/questions/bug reports to answers@oreilly.com.
Until next time–
Marsee Henon
Also, if you should signup, be sure to add me as a friend, http://people.oreilly.com/cotton
Out of the Office: Pleth Corporate Retreat 2009
This weekend is our Pleth corporate retreat. Each year my business partners like to take some time away to focus on our business model. We have been successful at doing this too in some pretty cool venues, Las Vegas and Chicago just to name a few, but this year we are taking a little more laid back approach, we will be on Greers Ferry Lake this weekend on a pontoon boat, bouncing ideas off of one another that we have compiled throughout the year.
We have found that this process has helped us to refine our business tremendously. We will of course be examining our current products and service offerings, thinking of ways to improve them, and also doing the whole creative process for new directions.
All of this to say that I am signing off for the weekend and don’t expect to see me back in the office until next week! I do have a blog post on Usability that is scheduled to publish on Saturday but outside of that you probably won’t see much out of me except the occasional twitter or facebook post from me all weekend long, and trust me, I am ready for some R&R…
Oh, and by the way, once we are finished brainstorming this weekend I suspect we will have some new and exciting announcements so be sure to stay tuned to our corporate website (www.pleth.com) and our personal blogs, (www.gregorysmart.com) and (www.kegalsmart.com).
Also, if you are one of our existing clients and have ideas as to how we can improve on our existing products and services, please feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your feedback…
Quarkbase : Everything about a Website
I am pretty impressed by a link that my business partner Greg sent me this morning to a website called Quarkbase.
Quarkbase is a free tool that allows you to find out complete information about a website. It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc. I tagged it in my delicious bookmarks this morning because I am pretty sure this will come in handy sometime. One thing that I really like about Quarkbase is that it gives a pretty comprehensive social drilldown for each site as well, this is good information when it comes to evaluating where a potential client stands in terms of their online business.
Quarkbase : Everything about a Website
Cheap is not always Better!
From time to time my partners and I are questioned about our rates for things like domain registration, web hosting, etc., and often times even have our rates compared side by side to companies like GoDaddy, etc. This has always been an amusing thing for me to explain to those who are less tech-savvy because about 10 seconds into my response they are wishing they would have never asked…
Well, today my business partner Greg was asked by one of our reseller partners today to differentiate between what we offer and what they can get from other providers out there for a client that she is working with. Greg went on to word a nicely written email to the client that you can read portions of below or on his blog…
First of all we never try to hide the fact that many of our price points are higher than what you can get through services like *******.
The primary reasons for the pricing differences are related to the services we associate with our domains/hosting. First of all we consider ourselves the caretaker of your domain, we monitor all our domains for renewal status. We have had customers that have unintentionally allowed their domains to lapse and their site/email stops working. It is also possible that, in that scenario, they permanently lose their domain — even to a competitor. Pleth won’t let this happen.
Many companies also don’t tightly control who registers their domain, often times the legal domain owner appears to be an employee who registered the domain on the company’s behalf and often that employee is gone as issues of ownership/domain control arise.
Another big issue is DNS management. At Pleth we manage the DNS for all the domains in our registrar account. This relates to all the settings for the domain and email to work. Without our services this is left up to the customer who rarely has the knowledge of the DNS system to manage this for themselves.
Another wrinkle with the DNS management is based on the fact that we maintain virtualized servers. We do this in order to leave ourselves nimble in case of technical difficulties. It is not unusual for us to move around domains/servers on our side in order to route around outage issues. If the DNS is not within our service and therefore not within our control it is possible that customer uptime could be affected as we perform all the technical tasks on our side that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. We have 4 people that directly manage this on our side, full-time, and not having control of the DNS can negate a lot of the work that we do day in and day out.
So, if you boil it all down, with “warehouse” pricing in a system like *******’s you are essentially on your own. With Pleth, you should never feel like you are alone. In fact, most of our customers never realize any of our management activities are going on at all.
And this prompted me to throw my two cents in here as I always do…
Usually I will spout off no less than 20 techno-jargon laced reasons why we are a completely different type of company than GoDaddy or some of the others that are out there. Now, keep in mind that I am not knocking GoDaddy, I think they have done a tremendous job in cornering the Web Hosting and Domain Registration Market these past few years, and that took pure genius! Especially during the rise of the Internet when we were all scrambling around looking for exactly the same thing building up our own companies.
The truth of the matter is this, companies like GoDaddy are out there, and always will be, offering low-cost domain registrations and budget web-hosting plans to the masses in hopes of upselling their other various products and services. You see it’s kind of smart the way they do it, they mark their prices really low for primary services like Domain Registrations and Shared Hosting Plans to get you in the door with them, then once you are on board you will find yourself in need of their other products like Email, SSL, Storage, etc., these are the products that they have a slightly higher profit margin built into, even though their prices are still pretty low!
Now, here’s something that you don’t get from GoDaddy and the other budget hosting companies that are out there. I call it the “Relationship Factor”, this is something that our company was built upon from day one.
While we might have several hundred clients all spread out across the globe, we know their names and their businesses very well, and they know our names as well as our direct contact information in case they need something or have a question day or night, and trust me they sometimes do…
Do I feel threatened by the bigger hosting firms out there similar to GoDaddy? Absolutely not, never have. We both provide completely different services. While there are some customers out there that are a perfect fit for GoDaddy’s service offerings, there are just as many, if not more, who simply do not have the time, training, or infrastructure to utilize GoDaddy’s products or services because they are not going to have the same level of personalized service they get with a company like Pleth.
This is where we come in… Instead of trying to compete with the millions of web-hosting companies that are out there today, we have always seen ourselves as an extension of our clients businesses, whether it’s in the capacity of consulting, offering deliverable products such as software, web development, email solutions, or custom applications. We see ourselves as a hosting provider second. I will go as far as to say we probably have one of the nicest setups in terms of hosting and infrastructure as anyone else in our industry, large or small. We have so many procedures and processes in place alongside some of today’s top management software and virtualization. Our investments toward our hosting infrastructure has never been to decrease overhead or increase profits I can promise you, instead it’s always been to put into use the best products and equipment for the job, regardless of the costs related. It’s kind of like this, there are cheaper cars on the market but you still purchase a Mercedes because it makes you feel good, and you have peace of mind knowing that it’s reliable, safe, and well worth the investment!
Domain Extension Chaos!
I was just reading on Mike Muise’s Blog about the ruling that came down today from ICANN that opens the door for anyone with a little financial backing to apply for their own domain extension, example: .com, .net, .org, etc.
I caught the tail end of this report on CNN today but didn’t quite get the entire story, Mike has some good info on his blog here about the ruling and how it’s going to take shape. If you are even remotely involved with the web at all, this ruling is going to be something that you are going to want to pay particular attention to, it’s kind of crazy if you ask me, I can’t get my mind around what it’s going to look like, here’s a quote from Mike…
If you thought the domain world was a little over complicated as it was with all the various extensions already available, you are not going to like latest news to come out of ICANN meetings taking place in Paris. It appears as early as next year, anyone with a little financial backing will be able to apply to have their own extension created. I am sure some will go to good use, but I lay more on the side of skepticism here. Not only do I think some bad ideas will come out of this, I think this will just cause a nightmare for organizations looking to protect their brand names online.
Source: http://blog.dropthemike.com/2008/06/26/chaos-confusion-on-the-way/
Update on the Network Solutions Thing…
I posted an entry the other day, more of a rant I guess, about the whole Network Solutions “front running” thing. Here’s a link to that post: (http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/2008/02/22/shame-on-network-solutions/) if you want to get up to speed on it. If you are in the web development / hosting business or follow the industry any at all you have probably heard about this issue already. It infuriated a lot of folks, which is something Network Solutions has proven to do very well over the years with their business practices.
I was just reading on the WHIR where Network Solutions and ICANN both are being sued by a consumer law firm for their controversial practice of locking up domain names as soon as they were searched for on the network solutions website. Here’s a link to the article: Web Host Industry News | Network Solutions, ICANN Sued.
I am going to continue to follow this issue and see what happens next, I hope that the Law Firm, Kabatek, Brown, Kellner (www.kbklawyers.com) is able to get this thing under control.
Shame on Network Solutions!
I was on the road today heading to a meeting and while traveling I decided to break out my Zune and get caught up on some of my Web Hosting Show podcasts that I have been running behind on. I was listening in on one where Mitch was telling about the new thing that Network Solutions is doing, it made me so mad I almost drove off the road. I knew this was going on but never really thought about it I guess, once it sunk in I decided I would come home and blog about it…
Did you know that if you go to Network Solutions website and check for a domain names availability and do not purchase the name that they (Network Solutions) will automatically hold the name back and make it unavailable for a period of time. This means if you go to Network Solutions and look for the name, netsolidiots.com, and it is available and you do not purchase it at the time that you won’t be able to go to another registrar like Register.com or Enom and pick up the name because Network Solutions already has a hold on it? I think that they can only hold onto the name for a period of 5 days or so but my gosh, being able to do that just doesn’t make sense to me. Why hasn’t ICAAN stepped in and put a stop to this? I am not for sure what the technical term for this is but for the sake of this blog post I am going to call it “desperation”.
Why do I call this practice on the part of Network Solutions desperation? Simple, they have been losing the domain registrar battle for a long time now. At one time back in the day Netsol used to be the only game in town, at least that’s the only alternative I had when I purchased my first domain name back in the 90’s. A little while later a few other names showed up on the scene who offered up some real competition like Register.com and Enom. Nowadays, Enom and Register are still out there doing their thing, and doing it well I might add, but Netsol has been reduced to only a small market share. I admit, I don’t follow the registrar wars nearly as closely as I probably should, my partner Stephen handles all of our domain registrations for Pleth. GoDaddy is also a mogul nowadays that I would be stupid not to mention, they are probably one of the largest now, if not the king outright, when it comes to domain registrars.
For years I have dreaded dealing with Network Solutions when we would pick up a client that had their domain with them because it has always been such a chore to transfer their domains out to our registrar for management. I am not alone in feeling this way either, most webmasters and hosting firms that manage domain names for their clients all hate Network Solutions, or at least all of the ones that I have spoken with. It’s sad when a hosting company or web developer has to form a strong opinion like that about a registrar, it’s just not necessary. At the end of the day, they simply hold the domain name, how hard should it be to keep everyone happy?
I have probably went on about this long enough, it’s just a bad business practice I wanted to draw attention to, and one that I can’t imagine is still allowed, again, where is ICAAN in all of this??
