Cotton Rohrscheib

Why You Should Watch Women’s Soccer!

Cotton Rohrscheib — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:16:30 +0000

Okay so I roll over this morning and start my Saturday like every other Saturday and flip on ESPN and try to find Gameday but this news story caught my eye. Apparently NCAA Women’s Soccer just got exciting, thanks to Elizabeth Lambert, wonder if she is related to Jack Lambert from the Pittsburgh Steelers?

Update: There are already several Elizabeth Lambert fan clubs starting to pop up on Facebook. This might just be the shot in the arm that Women’s Soccer has needed. I have been saying for years that they should turn it into more of a catfight and a lot less of the running up and down the field. If you haven’t seen this video yet, you have got to see this:

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#RefreshCA Meeting – November 17th on Google Wave

Cotton Rohrscheib — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:54:40 +0000

Our November Central Arkansas Refresh meeting will be on the 17th as opposed to the last Tuesday because of the holidays.

We are hoping that our November meeting will be pretty special, we are going to be discussing a hot topic, Google Wave. Instead of a single presenter type format, we have been discussing a group led demonstration w/ moderators, and would love your input on the topic.

So far Greg Henderson has agreed to be one of the moderators, if anyone else is interested in moderating let us know here. The start time for the meeting will be around 6-6:30pm in the basement of The Flying Saucer. (Everyone please say a prayer beforehand that we have enough bandwidth that night to pull off a group demo of this product!). Also, since this is one of the last meetings we will have this year, let’s try to set an attendance record that we can build upon in 2010. Tell your friends, neighbors, and co-workers, that this will be one #RefreshCA meeting that they don’t want to miss!!

If you need directions to the Flying Saucer, just click on the map below. Also, we will be sending out RSVP’s and Event Notifications via Facebook and Twitter soon, please let us know one way or the other so we can get an idea of our headcount…

View Larger Map

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Checkout the O’Reilly Answers Social Network

Cotton Rohrscheib — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:40:15 +0000

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

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Need Your Thoughts on Nov. #RefreshCA – Google Wave

Cotton Rohrscheib — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:52:28 +0000

Okay, so we decided at our last Central Arkansas Refresh meeting that we were going to hold our monthly meeting a week earlier in November due to the holidays. Our meeting date is November 17th (which is the 3rd Tuesday), so please help spread the word about this…

Since the topic that we have all pretty much agreed upon is going to be Google Wave the idea has been tossed around that we do a group or panel demo of the product for the benefit of those that have not had an opportunity to play with it yet. I think that this will also give those of us who haven’t spent a lot of time in Wave an excellent opportunity to pick up on some of the advanced functionality from those within the group that have spent some time with it.

What I have been kind of wrestling with is how do we do a group type demonstration like this? Do we station people w/ laptops at each table and just have people gather around? I am thinking that this is probably the best approach, but am open to suggestions…

Also, given the fact that there are still a lot of people waiting on their invites, and haven’t had an opportunity to really get up to speed w/ Wave, I think it would be worthwhile for maybe someone in our group (that has some experience w/ Wave) to give a 5 minute overview of what we are looking at, any volunteers?

I am really looking forward to this meeting, I think it’s going to be highly interactive, not to mention showcasing an emerging technology that is exploding on the scene, which is a the reason we do these meetings in the first place. Okay, so…

What are your thoughts on the meeting format?
What are your thoughts on having a moderator or 2 to navigate us through the demo?
Anyone interested in being a Moderator?

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7 Minutes of Blogging Wisdom – #SoSocial

Cotton Rohrscheib — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

I was honored to be one of the presenters last night at the Inaugural Southern Socials Event #SoSocial in Little Rock. The presentation format was pretty interesting, we used the Pecha-Kucha format where you basically present 20 slides x 20 seconds each. So, each speaker gets roughly 7 minutes to do their presentation, then of course the Q&A segment. While there was an awesome turnout for the event (we even had a group from Jonesboro drive over), the atmosphere was still very engaging and there was a lot of discussion within the group.

I opted to do my presentation on Blogging as opposed to Social Media because I couldn’t think of a Social Media related topic that hasn’t been covered several hundred times already by others. In case you missed my presentation, here are the slides: (warning: one of these racier slides had a few people spewing their drinks through their noses!)

7 Minutes Of Blogging Wisdom (w/ Cotton Rohrscheib)

View more presentations from Refresh Central Arkansas.

Here are a few tweets in relation to the presentation:

arlton: Had a great time @southernsocials. Thank you @bryanjones @amybhole @cottonr @downtownlawyer. Good times with good people. #SoSocial

jgreghenderson: Good quote "people who are afraid of social media are usually the ones in the business with the checkbook" @cottonr at @southernsocials

tsudo: @cottonr has now visually offended the entire room

donaldG: And @cottonr makes a good point, "I didn’t have any value to add so I kept my mouth shut." quality over quantity…

bryanjones: I’m just gonna say it – I love @cottonr.

tsudo: No doubt @cottonr knows blogging, great talk

ghidotti: Ask a question in your blog; you’ll be amazed at the increase in comments and activity. @cottonr

ghidotti: @cottonr giving the 7 minutes of blogging wisdom. This is good stuff to know in anticipation of my new blog hopefully coming soon.

donaldG: I just saw the best presidential plea thx to @cottonr, ‘obama bring back arrested development!’ #SoSocial

steventrotter: We made it to #sosocial! Just in time for @cottonr’s presentation. – http://twitpic.com/o6ufo

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About the Southern Socials:

Realizing the need for such a group in our area, Bryan Jones from CJRW took the lead and organized the group. Here’s a description of the Southern Socials taken from it’s Facebook Group Page:

Description: (Aspiring to be) A community of southern social media leaders. I’ve launched this group because, in the new world of the Social Web, authenticity and integrity can quickly be traded in for a paid blog post, or a false product/service review. The need exists for a group of professionals to face the ethical challenges together, and discuss standards and proper use of Social Media for PR & Marketing. Cheers! -Bryan Jones

Currently the Southern Socials is a closed group, more or less invitation only. The reasoning for this is to ensure that the foundation of the group consists only of people directly involved in strategic development or execution of Brand/Product/Service community management.

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Lessons on Adding Value from KISS (Yes, the Rock Group!)

Cotton Rohrscheib — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:03:16 +0000

I have been asked for advice from clients and friends alike as to what they can do during an economic downturn to keep their business afloat and their existing clients intact. I now have an analogy that I am using to demonstrate how adding value to your products and services can keep things afloat in tough times. Just a short disclaimer here, if you absolutely despise the rock group KISS, you may be so turned off that you won’t get the point that I am trying to make, so see you later. But, if you don’t have a preconceived opinion of KISS, hope you enjoy this post…

Okay, so the other day I went to Wal-Mart and picked up the new KISS ‘Sonic Boom’ CD. Now, there are two things here worth pointing out, one, I never go to Wal-Mart, and two, I never buy CD’s anymore! What made me get out of my comfort zone and routine to do this?? Also, what is a KISS Concert like in person?? Hope to answer these burning questions for you in this installment of The Cotton Club…

First Off, Why KISS??

I am an avid member of the KISS Army, have been a fan since I was old enough to carry a lunchbox to school w/ Gene Simmons on the front of it. I have seen KISS several times over the years, and while I am not a huge fan of reality television, I have even tuned into ‘Family Jewels’ a few times to catch a glimpse into the life and times of Gene Simmons. I have also read his book, KISS and Tell. (As a side note: Gene Simmons has never drank, smoked, or used drugs, that was never his crutch, a lot of people are surprised by this.)

As I have gotten older, and wiser, I have come to admire Gene Simmons business acumen. He, and his partner, Paul Stanley, are the only two original members of the band KISS remaining. The other original members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss have both had issues over the years that led to their ousting from the band. While their relationships are all cordial, and they even get together from time to time for conventions / reunions, they have not benefited from the dedication and business acumen like Paul and Gene have.

Packing in Value! $12 Set (2 Audio CD’s and 1 DVD)

I never go to Wal-Mart, I despise the whole experience. Back in my bachelor days I had a pretty good run of over 12 months where I never stepped foot inside of a Wal-Mart, but getting married quickly changed that. The reason I went to Wal-Mart was because KISS had worked out a deal w/ Wal-Mart to release their CD ‘Sonic Boom’ for them.

The CD, in case you are wondering is only $12, but wait, there’s more!!! Not only do you get the new CD from KISS but you also get an additional CD w/ about 10 or so of their Classic Tunes, a Greatest Hits if you will. I am not finished though, w/ the two audio CD’s you also get a DVD from their recent concert in Buenos Aires. All of that for $12, can you tell me anyone else in the music industry that has even come close to offering up that much value?? Here’s a link to the CD on Wal-Mart.com, and here’s a little more information about the relationship between KISS and Wal-Mart…

Packing in More Value! (Unforgettable Performance for $9.41)

Now, having seen KISS a few times over the years, I knew to expect the best concert experience imagine able. Probably the only thing I could even compare their concerts too would be the pageantry associated with the Super Bowl halftime show, but not even that can come close. Here’s just a brief summary of what we got from KISS in Little Rock at their show…

Gene Simmons Spewing Fire (a timeless tradition)
Gene Simmons Spewing Blood (another timeless tradition)
Gene Simmons on Top of Verizon Arena (yep, he was standing in the rafters playing and singing)
Paul Stanley Flying Over the Crowd (60+ years old w/ hip replacement)
Paul Stanley Playing ‘Love Gun’ on Riser (he flew to the middle of the arena, crowd all around him)
Tommy Thayer (Ace’s Replacement) Shot Down a Row of Lights w/ his Guitar (an obvious oops!)
Eric Singer Drum Solo (Peter’s Replacement) His entire drum set did a 360 w/ him on it…
Full 18 Songs (they came back and did a long set list for an encore)
Rock-N-Roll All Nite Finale w/ Confetti Guns (There was 2ft of confetti inside the arena)
Most Phenomenal Light Show of all time (Haven’t seen one that rivals it yet…)

I think it is also worth noting that during the concert, I don’t remember hearing any profanity at all, and I saw entire families w/ children at the show. KISS hasn’t backed themselves into a corner by being an all-adult show, at least in my opinion, I do realize the makeup and blood might not be every parents good idea, but hey, you see worse than this on CSI.

Now, here’s the best part of the concert, at least for me. A few days before the show they realized that it wasn’t completely sold out, so they got with a local radio station (I am not real sure how this came about) and did a promotion where the remaining tickets would go for $9.41 each. That’s right, under ten bucks!!!

In case you missed the show, here are some highlights you can take w/ you…

Paul Stanley Flying through the Crowd

Gene Simmons Solo (Blood and Flying Up Top)

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If you are not a KISS fan, I still hope you were able to pull away with the point that I was trying to make in this post, ADDING VALUE IS IMPORTANT! (and will get you talked about)…

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WordPress Exploit Scanner

Cotton Rohrscheib — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

If you are like me, you want to make sure that the software you run is as secure as possible. My partners and I even subscribe to several third party services that actually scan our servers looking for exploits that could be taken advantage of by hackers or script kiddies. Since one of the most frequent CMS solutions we use is WordPress, this plugin caught my attention.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner is a plugin that searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. While it won’t stop someone hacking into your site, it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker on previous attempts. It can also help you identify any weaknesses that you might have so you can harden your installation.

Here’s a little bit more on the Exploit Scanner plugin if you are interested:

When a website is compromised, hackers leave behind scripts and modified content that can be found by manually searching through all the files on a site. Some of the methods used to hide their code or spam links are obvious, like using CSS to hide text, and we can search for those strings.

The database can also be used to hide content or be used to run code. Spam links are sometimes added to blog posts and comments. They’re hidden by CSS so visitors don’t see them, but search engines do. Recently, hackers took advantage of the WP plugin system to run their own malicious code. They uploaded files with the extensions of image files and added them to the list of active plugins. So, despite the fact that the file didn’t have a .php file extension, the code in them was still able to run!

You can download this plugin here: http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

WordPress Exploit Scanner

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How Bing Will Rank Your Tweets

Cotton Rohrscheib — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:17:17 +0000

I blogged a few days ago about Microsoft Bing and Google’s announcement that they were both going to start incorporating our Tweets into their search results. There has been a lot of speculation as to how these Tweets are gong to show up in their search results. I have been following all of this pretty closely as it is going to directly impact our industry. I blogged earlier today about how Google’s new Social Search is going to work but I think Bing might be a slightly different animal…

Apparently Bing is going to weigh tweets according to follower counts. For instance, if you and I both tweet similar things, and I have 1000+ followers and you have 300 followers, my tweet is going to have a higher ranking. Granted, this is not the best method imaginable, but for the time being I think that is how it’s going to be. Of course, these search algorithm’s get tweaked a lot and all of this is subject to change before you even realize it, but that’s the word that I am getting right now.

I think that all of us are anxious to see how Bing and Google both are able to weigh what’s good content versus what’s bad content using only 140 characters…

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How Google’s Social Search Works

Cotton Rohrscheib — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:17:02 +0000

Google announced their new Social Search product this week on their blog. Google Social Search is still in the experimental phase but it looks promising. Once you factor in Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a Blog, most of us publish a lot of content. Some of this information can be useful to others, and even though they are connected to you socially (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and subscribe to your blog, they currently aren’t able to pull up this information very quickly. In the case of a web search, it’s highly unlikely your posts are going to show up on the first page for whatever topic they are looking for, but this is where Google Social Search is going to come in handy.

Here’s a scenario where this could be pretty helpful. Let’s say I have dinner at a great Mexican Restaurant in Little Rock and I post a note to Twitter raving about the food. Let’s also say that a few of the people who follow me on Twitter reply to me with favorable reviews of their own. Follow me so far? Okay, let’s also say that 2 months later one of my friends is thinking about trying this restaurant but hasn’t talked to anyone who has been. He does a quick Google Search for the Restaurant to see some reviews and my Tweet shows up in his search results! Since he knows me as a trusted source, knowing first hand that I have excellent taste when it comes to food, a good review from me is going to trump any review website that he would have ordinarily based his decision on…

Here’s a better description from the Google Blog as to how the social search feature is going to come in handy:

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place. That’s why today we’re rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social." Here’s a good video demonstration of Google’s Social Search:

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our help center article or watch this video:

This feature is an experiment, but we’ve been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We’d love to hear your feedback. Oh, and don’t forget to create a public Google profile to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you’re looking for (including that New York blog).

If you are interested in testing the Google Social Search Experiment, click here.
Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!

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Remembering GeoCities (1995-2009)

Cotton Rohrscheib — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:22:13 +0000

I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the fact that Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities today. If you are wondering what GeoCities was, my best guess is that you weren’t around in the 90’s. Before social networks were all over the place, and before there were even web development firms and hosting companies all over the web, there was GeoCities…

GeoCities existed as a place where you could go on and host your free website, of course they were covered up with advertising that you had no control over, but it was a free website nonetheless. One of my fondest memories of GeoCities was all of the animated gif files that seemed to be synonymous with every page, and if you saw one that you didn’t have on your page, you became instantly obsessed with stealing it and calling it your own before any of your friends beat you to it.

I can remember having one of the guys that helped out with my computer business set me up a GeoCities page for the business somewhere around 1996 or so, it was extremely new at the time. Of course, as business websites go today, this was not what you would call a “business website” but to us, it was awesome!!! I think we even registered a domain name from Network Solutions (they were the only game in town at the time too) and we pointed it to our page to make us look even more professional. I wish there was some kind of way to go back in and time and see that page and see just how far we have come, it would be like the first chapter in a history book.

I can also remember having my own personal GeoCities page which would lay the foundation for the website you are on right now. I can also recall meeting some pretty intuitive pioneers online back in the day that were using GeoCities for everything from sharing their hobbies to pornography, the web was wide open back in the day, a lot less restricted than today in a lot of ways!

Sadly enough, I don’t think that GeoCities ever had a business model that would have worked, and probably the only people that ever actually made any money off of the project was probably the group that sold it to Yahoo back in the day. Once Yahoo took over the project I don’t think they ever did anything with it either in terms of making any money. I know that hindsight is 20/20 but had they had the vision of social networking before anyone else, this might be a completely different world we live in. There was a time when Yahoo was king, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of Google, most people didn’t have a clue what it was, there was also Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista, DogPile came along later as well. It’s a shame that they weren’t able to keep this running but I am not too sad about it all. There comes a time where sometimes things have to go away to focus on new and more viable products, and I guess in the end this is what happened with GeoCities.

Just for old time sakes, here are some of the funny animated gifs from back in the day…

What are some of you favorite memories of GeoCities?

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Cotton Rohrscheib

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