Blogging on and off the corporate domain

Always delightful social media guru practitioner (and north shore Massachusetts neighbor) Chris Brogan has an excellent post on the overlap/conflict between personal brand and corporate brand: “The Big Risk for Corporate Trust Agents.” I started writing this as a comment on that post, but realized it was really a post in its own right.

Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Read more…

WPBook Updated: WordPress Facebook Plugin

WPBook, the WordPress plugin which lets you bring your blog posts into facebook, has been updated to version 0.8.1. (You can view this very blog in Facebook as an example, assuming you’re not doing so already).

The main updates were in the 0.8 release yesterday (0.8.1 is just a bug fix to that release). In 0.8, you have the option to enable an “Invite Friends” link. See this section of the admin panel:

If that’s enabled, you’ll see something like this inside your facebook app:

People can use this to invite their friends to your facebook app. (Of course you can also use it to invite your friends to your own app – 15 per day).

Grab the updated version from the WordPress Plugin Directory or directly from here.

If you’re interested in getting involved in development / support of this plugin and others (especially related to educational use of WordPress), check out Scholarpress.

Updated WordPress Facebook Plugin

(As of 8/20 – updated again, to 0.7.5).

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again.

Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the WordPress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

• Works with WordPress installs in subdirectories, using ABSPATH to ensure the right includes get called
• Fixed for the “new Facebook” javascript but remains compatible with “old Facebook” javascript as well (as described here)
• Removed hard coded reference to MyAvatarsNew(); and downgraded to WordPress standard avatars
• Fixed the (previously hard coded) offset for permalinks to be dynamic based on blog’s home url

All in all, this should be a much more stable version for most folks.

Note: If you use the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress, you must remember to copy the wp-facebook folder from /wp-content/plugins/wpbook/ to /wp-content/themes/ – it must reside at /wp-content/themes/wp-facebook in order for the plugin to work correctly.

You can get the new version from my plugin page or from the WordPress plugin directory.

Comment Fail

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them – as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

On the Internet, People Know if you’re a dog

(Update, 2pm ET: Scott Hintz from TripIt replied in the comments on the original post apologizing for the employee’s behavior – thanks Scott.)

One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker:

On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

The reality is, however, that increasingly people’s online identity can be mapped to their offline identity. (Check out Who Controls the Internet? for a well informed and very smart extended exploration on what this means from a legal perspective, and this reality checkfrom UNC).

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post about TripIt and Dopplr, two major companies in the social travel market, which people use to share information about various trips they are taking or planning. It was a perfectly innocuous post, describing some of Dopplr’s new features which make it more like TripIt, and presumably more competitive with TripIt as a result.

That post recieved the following comment, from someone identifying himself as Thomas, with an email address at Yahoo! mail, and no url:

Well, in regards to Dopplr’s generic email import approach, I’ve tried forwarding several different emails I have from my company, travel agent, and from major airlines such as American Airlines, but they don’t work one bit. For example, Dopplr thinks I’m going to different places in Europe when I send in my opentable reservation.

In contrast, most of these work “out of the box” with TripIt. And when I complained about my travel agent not being supported, they added it within a day.

What’s more, is that I don’t really want to “discover” people I do not know on a trip. All I’ve been wanting to do is to manage my business travels better and inform my family. TripIt fits that bill perfectly.

So, I don’t really find Dopplr very useful. My two cents.

Thanks for the nice write-up though.

Best,
Thomas

Not itself a controversial comment, and I almost approved it without a second thought. But then I noticed that the IP address from which the comment was posted (69.12.150.246) is mapped to a machine called wall.tripitinc.com:

jeckman$ nslookup 69.12.150.246

Non-authoritative answer:
246.150.12.69.in-addr.arpa name = wall.tripitinc.com.

(I would likely not have even noticed, but either WordPress itself or one of my plugins actually adds that info to the email it sends me letting me know that a comment has been recieved and is awaiting moderation).

So I emailed “Thomas” – using the yahoo.com address he provided – and suggested he disclose that in his comment.

I never heard back – perhaps the email wasn’t valid to begin with. So, I decided to post the comment, but also note what I had determined about its origin.

Lesson learned? It’s easier than you think to determine who you are when you do various things on the net. If you’re going to post comments on blogs that discussion your product(s), disclose your relationships. Nothing wrong with posting – I’ve had many comments from folks whose products/services I discuss in blog posts – but posting a comment like the above without disclosure is basically astroturfing, and it never works.