The Applications of Our Lives
The Internet of Things will soon become The Internet of Nouns There are a few 'The ______ of Our Lives' out there: Days. Time. Moments. Love. They define who we are, where we've been and where we are going. And today, many of those days, times, moments and loves interact with applications. Both the apps we tap and the back end applications used to chronicle these events have become as much a part of our lives as the happenings themselves. The app, Life. As reported on umpteen outlets yesterday, Twitter went down for about an hour. As news broke, there were also some fun headlines like, Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue, Twitter is down. NFL free agency should be postponed, Twitter is down, let the freak-out commence and Twitter goes down, helps man take note it’s his wife’s birthday. It is amazing how much society has come to rely on social media to communicate. Another article, Why Twitter Can’t Keep Crashing, goes right into the fact that it is globally distributed, real-time information delivery system and how the world has come to depend on it, not just to share links and silly jokes but how it affects lives in real ways. Whenever Facebook crashes for any amount of time people also go crazy. Headlines for that usually read something like, 'Facebook down, birthdays/anniversaries/parties cease to exist!' Apparently since people can't tell, post, like, share or otherwise bullhorn their important events, it doesn't actually occur. 'OMG! How am I gonna invite people to my bash in two weeks without social media?!? My life is over!' Um, paper, envelopes, stamps anyone? We have connected wrist bracelets keeping track of our body movements, connected glasses recording every move, connected thermostats measuring home environments and pretty much any other 'thing' that you want to monitor, keep track of or measure. From banking to buying, to educating to learning, to connecting to sharing and everything in between, our lives now rely on applications so much so, that when an application is unavailable, our lives get jolted. Or, we pause our lives for the moment until we can access that application. As if we couldn't go on without it. My, how application availability has become critical to our daily lives. I think The Internet of Things will soon become The Internet of Nouns since every person, place or thing will be connected. I like that. I call 'The Internet of Nouns' as our next frontier! Sorry adverbs, love ya but you're not connected. ps Related Does Social Media Reflect Society? The Icebox Cometh The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2014 The Internet of Things and DNS Delivering the Internet of Things Technorati Tags: apps,applications,social media,life,availability,twitter,facebook,society,humans,people,silva,f5,iot Connect with Peter: Connect with F5:Blog Roll 2013
It’s that time of year when we gift and re-gift, just like this text from last year. And the perfect opportunity to re-post, re-purpose and re-use all my 2013 blog entries. If you missed any of the 112 attempts including 67 videos, here they are wrapped in one simple entry. I read somewhere that lists in blogs are good. This year I broke it out by month to see what was happening at the time and let's be honest, pure self promotion. Thanks for reading and watching throughout 2013. Have a Safe and Happy New Year. January Is TV's Warm Glowing Warming Glow Fading? Lost Records a Day Shows Doctors are Blasé Inside Look - Enterprise Manager v3.1 HELLO, My Name is Cloud_009... Security Bloggers Network Voting Solving Substantiation with SAML In 5 Minutes or Less: BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager Inside Look - SAML Federation with BIG-IP APM February Inside Look - BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager 16 Racks (16 Tons Parody) Is BYO Already D? In 5 Minutes Guest Edition - BIG-IP LTM Integration with Quarri POQ BYOD 2.0 – Moving Beyond MDM with F5 Mobile App Manager Inside Look - F5 Mobile App Manager Inside Look: BIG-IP ASM Botnet and Web Scraping Protection RSA2013: Aloha from RSA RSA2013: Find F5 RSA2013: Gimme 90 Seconds Security Edition RSA2013: Partner Spotlight – Websense RSA2013: Partner Spotlight – Quarri RSA2013: F5 RSA Security Trends Survey RSA2013: BIG-IP SSL/TLS Services RSA2013: BIG-IP DNS Services RSA2013: Interview with Jeremiah Grossman RSA2013: That’s a Wrap March Pulse2013 - Find F5 Pulse2013 – Gimme 90 Seconds: IBM Edition Pulse2013 – BIG-IP ASM & IBM InfoSphere Guardium Pulse2013 – IBM Maximo Optimization & SSO with BIG-IP APM Pulse2013 – That’s a Wrap RSA2013 & Pulse2013 - The Video Outtakes Pulse2013 - IBM Technology Evangelist Kathy Zeidenstein This Blog May Have Jumped the Shark Every Day is a 0-Day Nowadays Q. The Safest Mobile Device? A. Depends April Mobile Threats Rise 261% in Perspective Ride The Crime Coaster Conversation with One of CloudNOW’s Top 10 Women: Lori MacVittie Most of the Time We Get it Wrong The Prosecution Calls Your Smartphone to the Stand Targets of Opportunity F5 Tech Talk - Streamline, Secure and Optimize XA and XD Deployments May Interop2013: Find F5 Interop2013: DDoS'ing Interop Interop2013: F5 Certification Program Interop2013: BIG-IQ Cloud Interop2013: Partner Spotlight - Big Switch Networks Interop2013: Partner Spotlight – ICSA Labs Interop2013: DDoS'ing Interop Follow Up Interop2013: That's a Wrap 50/50 Odds for BYOD Interop2013: The Video Outtakes FedRAMP Federates Further iRules - Is There Anything You Can't Do? June TechEd2013 – Find F5 TechEd2013 – Network Virtualization & Cloud Solutions TechEd2013 – Secure Windows Azure Access TechEd2013 – The Top 5 Questions TechEd2013 – NVGRE with Microsoft’s System Center 2012 VMM (feat. Korock) TechEd2013 – Gimme 90 Seconds Betcha Didn’t Know Edition (feat. Simpson) TechEd2013 – That’s a Wrap TechEd2013 – The Video Outtakes Small Business is a Big Target Is 2013 Half Empty or Half Full? Inside Look - PCoIP Proxy for VMware Horizon View In 5 Minutes or Less - PCoIP Proxy for VMware Horizon View BYOD Behavior - Size Does Matter July The First Six Remix BYOD - More Than an IT Issue BYOD 2.0 -- Moving Beyond MDM 20,000 For Every 1 Big Data Getting Attention Corporate Mobile Data and BYOD Infographic(s) August Hackable Homes Back to School BYOB Style DNS Doldrums VMworld2013 - Find F5 VMworld2013 - F5 VMware Alliance VMworld2013 - Defy Convention VMworld2013 - VMware NSX VMworld2013 - vCenter Orchestrator VMworld2013 - That's a Wrap VMworld2013 - The Video Outtakes September You Got a Minute? Are You Ready For Some...Technology!! The Malware Mess World's Biggest Data Breaches [Infographic] BIG-IP Edge Client v1.0.6 for iOS 7 BYOD Injuries October Bring Your Own A-Z The Hacker Will See You Now The Million Mobile Malware March Privacy for a Price Identity Theft Hits Close to Home November DNS Does the Job F5 Synthesis: The Reference Architectures AWS re:Invent 2013 – Find F5 AWS re:Invent 2013 - Cloud Bursting Reference Architecture (feat. Pearce) AWS re:Invent 2013 – Cloud Migration Reference Architecture (feat. Pearce) AWS re:Invent 2013 – F5 AWS Solutions (feat. Pearce & Huang) AWS re:Invent 2013 – Cloud Federation Reference Architecture (feat. Pearce) AWS re:Invent 2013 – LineRate Systems (feat. Moshiri) AWS re:Invent 2013 – That’s a Wrap AWS re:Invent 2013 – The Video Outtakes Behind the 'ALOHA!' December The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2014 Gartner Data Center 2013: Find F5 GartnerDC 2013: DDoS Reference Architecture (feat. Holmes) GartnerDC 2013: Application Services Reference Architecture (feat. Haynes) GartnerDC 2013: Intelligent DNS Scale Reference Architecture (feat Silva) GartnerDC 2013: That’s a Wrap GartnerDC 2013: The Video Outtakes And a couple special holiday themed entries from years past. e-card Malware X marks the Games ps Related Blog Roll 2011 Blog Roll 2012 Connect with Peter: Connect with F5: Technorati Tags: f5,devcentral,blogs,silva,social media,2013,video,cloud,security,mobileYou Got a Minute?
Like most of us, I try to read the entire internet on a daily basis but for some reason, these slipped through. They both came out in 2011 and I am sure the numbers have changed in many cases. For instance, the graphic shows 70+ domains registered every minute and for Sept 3 (thus far for today), on average 78 per minute have been registered. Yet for twitter, the chart indicates 320 new accounts per minute but my look up today, if my math is correct, shows 94 new twitter accounts every minute but with 546,000 (vs. 98,000+) tweets per minute today. Regardless, the somewhat, slightly dated info is still mind boggling and it is always fun to see historical data. Things that happen on the Internet every 60 Seconds circa 2011. And the products we use: ps Related: 60 Seconds – Things That Happen On Internet Every Sixty Seconds [Infographic] Technorati Tags: data,60 seconds,stats,internet,web,social media,application delivery,silva Connect with Peter: Connect with F5:The Best Day to Blog Experiment - Day 1
Welcome to Monday, typically the day most workers dread but with that extra hour of sleep yesterday, you’re amazingly refreshed aren’t you? I don’t mind the ‘practice Sunday’ for the spring forward event but wonder with the fall back, what if you waited and changed the clocks on Sunday eve – how early everyone would be for work! But I digress. Also, Welcome to The Best Day to Blog Experiment; you are now a participant. I toyed with The Great Blog Experiment, but ‘great’ might be stretching it. Nevertheless - I do hope to get some decent data to report back next week. I’ve read various stories about when is the best time and day to get the most readership exposure from a blog post. Now of course, content plays a big role in what readers are interested in but, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found that something I think is awesome, sometimes doesn’t always translate to a huge pick up in the blogosphere. So I figured I’d do my own little brief, non-scientific experiment to see. I’m curious that way. I’ll probably just use Google Analytics to track trends. The idea is to blog everyday this week and track the results. I normally only blog once or twice a week so this will be interesting – not like Mrs. MacVittie who can crank out 9 or 10. You go Lori! Maybe I’ll ask her to compare data when this is done since she does have a wide readership. We participate in a lot of social media activities here at F5 and like most SM conscious companies, we analyze our content and look to ways for increasing our reach. Statistically speaking, Monday is not a bad day to post a blog. I would have thought that Monday might be challenging to get an audience since folks are focusing on the work week, catching up on things that got left behind the previous week and going through email. It might also be a time when people are looking for stories or solutions to the things they need to complete that week. You might also be checking your favorite blogger, one that you read often or subscribe to since it is part of your weekly reading anyway. As far as times, some feel that after lunch (Pacific Zone) is one of the best times to post. It’s toward the end of the day out East and maybe those West-coasters need some reading dessert before cranking out the afternoon. The other thing about Monday is depending on your worldwide audience, Monday might be their 2nd day of work for that week since some countries start the work week on Sunday. Well, that’s about it for Day 1 and I’m really not sure yet what I’ll write tomorrow, except that I was thinking of including the best songs about the particular post day – yeah, maybe that’ll generate traffic. So, here are the top 10 songs about Monday according to The Y! Radish, who also says that the average person will experience 4040 Mondays in their life. I Don't Like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats Blue Monday - New Order Monday Monday - The Mamas & The Papas New Moon On Monday - Duran Duran Monday – Wilco Long Monday - John Prine Manic Monday - The Bangles Monday Monday Monday - Tegan and Sara Blue Monday - Little Milton They Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday's Just As Bad) - T-Bone Walker and my addition, Monday Morning – Fleetwood Mac ps
The Soft Risks of Social Networking
Just about every large organization, a whole lot of startups, are trying to leverage the potential of social media in their marketing efforts. We all read great articles containing tips and tricks regarding how to use social media for business purposes, and how to gauge whether or not we are successful. The discussions often ignore the risks, especially the soft risks, of engaging the market and so-called citizen journalists at the Internet's watercoolers. Soft risks are always part of the equation of the return on investment for a product or piece of software. Soft risks are usually nebulous, incalculable costs that are not necessarily directly related to the function of the solution we are purchasing. These are often things like the potential for the vendor to survive a tougher economy, the investment in learning a new skill or programming language required in order to leverage the new technology solution, and the unknowable costs of integrating with the rest of the infrastructure. Like investing in a solution, investing in social media has risks, but unlike solutions that are purchased to do a specific thing social media's risks are almost all soft. They are immeasurable and, often times, not obvious. A recent article, You Better Think Before You Twit, highlighted one of the potential soft risks of social media: the always uncomfortable foot in mouth. Interestingly, this article, while pointing out the potential negative aspects of being always connected to others at the Internet watercooler, kept the focus personal. But the risks involved in engaging social media in such an informal way can adversely affect the company you represent, and it's important to recognize that risk - and give guidance - before your employees are out tweeting or powncing or plurking or uploading pictures of the company's Christmas party to Flickr. It's not just the potential slip of the tongue that reveals upcoming product plans or launches, or that gives away potentially sensitive corporate information. Most employees understand the potential harm to the organization such actions can cause and are careful to ensure they don't cross the lines they know exist. But they aren't so careful about expressing themselves on other subjects because it is, as it were, like hanging around the watercooler. We're just doing it electronically instead of physically. This can be great for remote office and tele-workers for making them feel like a part of the organization, but when the conversation turns to topics of a more personal and sensitive nature, it can backfire on the organization. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt decided to publicly endorse a political candidate, he may have meant to do so personally, but because he used his position at Google while doing so he made one of the first faux pas of social networking on the job: getting political. Discussions around the web indicated a mix of reactions, some good and some bad. Similarly, Apple's donation of $100,000 to the "No on Prop 8" campaign raised similar objections and support at Internet watercoolers around the country. In both cases there were reactions that included "I am not buying/using their products anymore because of this." Right or wrong, the reactions were real. Both companies lost customers - or potential customers - over their decisions to dabble publicly in politics. Sure, that number might be minimal, but it might also be more far reaching than either considered. Conversely, their support might have gained them customers. That's why it's called a soft risk, because the effects can't be easily, if at all, quantified. A long time ago we taught folks that politics and religion had no place in business; that discussing these taboo topics within the confines of the business world was a no-no and dangerous. It was a risk. The same is true for organizations who, unlike Google and Apple, certainly can't afford the negative hits on their reputation across the Internet based on any given employee's public discussions of things best left at home. The line between professional and personal life is indeed blurring, especially for those who are considered corporate spokespersons, as their opinions on subjects that are outside the realm of technology can be taken as reflecting corporate culture and views on those subjects. It's easy to forget when you're hanging out on Twitter that you aren't just you, you're representing your organization. At the beginning of the hype cycle for the election, @prnewswire lamented a bit on this fact, but wisely decided that not commenting on such things was the only logical thing to do lest the person behind the avatar risk damage to the corporate entity it represents. And no matter which side you take on divisive topics, someone is going to be angry with that opinion and may choose to take their business elsewhere because of it. And you kids out there, remember, Google is forever (or at least it looks like it will be) and what you say on the ever-archiving web and how you say it will certainly be discovered in 5 or 10 years when your (next) potential employer searches you out to aid in their decision whether or not to hire you. Before you get all bent out of shape about the potential restriction, remember that when you choose to make yourself a public figure of any kind to any size audience that you are giving up a lot of your privacy and personal flexibility. Becoming an Internet personality sounds great until you realize it can be (and I would argue in many cases should be) a soft muzzle on your personal opinions on touchy subjects. The rule of thumb when you are engaging folks 'out there' is simple. We call it "social media" for a reason, after all. If you're commenting on blogs, or tweeting, or powncing, or just generally engaging in conversation electronically, it behooves you to remember the "media" in social media, and treat everyone like a potential member of the press rather than as "that cool guy/gal I met on Twitter". If you wouldn't talk to the press about political or religion or other potentially divisive topics, then you probably shouldn't be tweeting about them, either.Corporate Blogging: The Fallacy of Quantity vs Quality
As a corporate blogger I rarely post "off topic". There's a reason for that, and a reason why I'm doing so now. The core reason for doing so now is that it's a subject that's near and dear to me, having spent the majority of the past eight years writing and blogging in publishing and on the corporate side of the table, and I see far too many posts out there offering advice about blogging that's focused solely on "getting more hits". While that might be sound advice for personal blogs, it's off-key when it comes to corporate efforts. There is a belief, and it's wrong, that more is better - whether it's more posts or more hits - when it comes to corporate blogging. In fact, the opposite is true: quality is more important - whether it's readers or posts - than quantity. To understand the fallacy of quantity vs quality you first have to understand the history of trade publishing, and why it's suffered so much financial pain. Don touched on this briefly, having also spent a lot of time in the publishing industry (we like to work together, thank you, I know it's weird, but that's the way we are) but I'm going to expand further on the topic. Back in the old days (print) trade publications and, if we're honest, newspapers, were all based on one of three revenue models: advertising, subscriptions, or a hybrid of both. Magazines that subsisted on advertising only managed to do so by qualifying their circulation base, thus ensuring advertisers that they were paying those high rates because the reader-based was primarily their target market. When the Web exploded everyone demanded "free" content, including from trade publications and newspapers. The publishing industry was a bit confused and wasn't certain how to respond to the move to the web because the revenue model wasn't the same. An anonymous page view of an article is hardly equivalent to a well-qualified reader, and thus advertising revenue on the web was seriously impacted. Advertisers were no longer willing to pay the same rate for "views" because they couldn't be certain of the value of that page view; they couldn't qualify it as being part of their target market. Advertising rates plummeted, and trade publications - and newspapers - began to drop faster than the waistlines of girls' jeans over the past few years. The publishing industry as a whole floundered for a time, until it started to implement more gated content. Gated content requires you to provide certain pieces of information during the registration process before you're allowed to see the content. Some of that information is, not coincidentally, similar to that traditionally found on a qual card - the card you filled out to see if you're qualified for a "free" subscription to a trade publication. This model breathed new life into publishing, as advertisers are much more willing to sponsor micro-sites or pay higher rates for advertisements on specific types of gated content because they are more confident about the quality of the page view. Corporate blogging is becoming nearly a mandate for many organizations. Its value in promoting brand awareness, thought leadership, and market education cannot - and should not - be underestimated. But it is easy to fall into the trap of correlating quantity of hits to success; e.g. a thousand hits on a blog post is better than a hundred hits on a blog post, posting every day is better than two or three times a week. Quantity is often considered more important than quality. As the publishing industry has come to understand, and as corporations should already know because they drove the industry to understand it, the quantity of page views is less relevant than the quality of the reader, and a few good posts are better than many mediocre or irrelevant posts. It's actually fairly easy to write a post that will make the front page of Digg, or make it onto Slashdot and generate a ton of hits. Unfortunately for most corporate bloggers the kinds of posts that generate that kind of traffic and interest are rarely related to their industry and thus do not forward corporate blogging goals of brand awareness, education, or thought leadership which, in most cases, should be relevant to the industry in which a corporation operates. Unfortunately, a post exhorting the benefits of a CRM or an application delivery controller or a BI suite are just unlikely to engender that kind of attention. Relevant, engaging content that educates and forwards corporate goals should be the goal for corporate blogging efforts. Hit counts, while certainly nice, have been proven by the trials and tribulations of the publishing industry to be an unreliable measure of success and do little for the corporation unless it's well understood where the hits are coming from. Yes, writing relevant content often results in a lower hit count, one of the challenges discussed by Jeremiah Owyang in "The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging". I write primarily on the subject of application delivery - from security to optimization to acceleration. It isn't, for the most part, controversial, nor is it as exciting as politics so its reach and audience is much smaller than, say, something of interest to the masses. But I've learned from long experience in publishing hits from the masses aren't likely to help "forward the cause". A page view from Sally in finance is unlikely to ever really be of value because she isn't involved in IT, would likely not understand the relevance of application delivery to the applications she uses at work, and isn't likely to discuss high availability or load balancing with the guys in IT or even be able to suggest or influence the option - she probably doesn't even know IT is looking into it. The page view from Sally is virtually worthless in terms of achieving corporate goals. The problem is that it's impossible to know if a page view came from Sally or from the CIO or IT manager responsible for architecting an application delivery network. Targeted, relevant content does a much better job of qualifying readership than general, unrelated topics. Readers of a post on cloud computing or virtualization are likely to be interested in the technology and thus their hits are both valuable and desired. But what about brand awareness? Don't we want to get our brand "out there"? Yes, and no. You want your brand out there, certainly, but you want it out there amidst people who will actually do something with that knowledge. You want to attract and educate non-customers who could be customers, not non-customers who will never, ever in a million years be customers. Mass advertising and blogging might work for a brand like GM or Apple, whose products are targeted at, well, everyone. But while John Q. Farmer might enjoy listening to an iPod while he's out riding his combine, he isn't likely to give a hoot about application delivery or information security or how awesome the latest SSL VPN might be. Blogs cannot - and should not - go the way of traditional publishing. We can't gate the content, that does us and readers a disservice. But in order to quantify success of corporate blogging initiatives it is important to qualify, somehow, whether we're reaching the audiences we want to reach. The best way to do that is to artificially gate readership through relevant, quality posts. Choose quality over quantity. Qualify through relevancy. Let's not repeat the painful process publishing had to experience to arrive where we're at today. Don't get sidetracked from your goals by lower hit counts than you'd hoped. If you're writing quality posts and seeing little growth, you may need to reach out to your audiences rather than let them come to you. Syndication, participation in appropriate social networking sites, link and bookmark sharing, etc... are all ways to reach out to and get your content in front of the appropriate audiences. What you want to see is consistent growth - even if it's small - over time in not only hit counts but referrals and returning and new visitors as well as lower exit and bounce rates. Hit count is only one factor that contributes to a complex calculation quantifying "success". As long as you're staying on focus and growing, you're doing it right and adding value and you can be more sure that the hits you are getting are worth the effort you're putting forward.
