Why I’d Make A Good Social Media Club Board Member
July 14, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
—Please Vote For Me, Jonathan Coffman for Social Media Club Board Member by clicking here (voting is open until Thursday —
I’ll try to keep this post short and sweet, but I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and my ideas for the SMC.
If you weren’t already aware, I am a candidate for the final open seat on the founding Board of Directors of the Social Media Club. The SMC is a national non-profit organization that is working toward standarization, simplication, and openness in social media.
Members include people like me who live, work, and breathe social media professionally as well as people who support the ideas of an open and inviting social media landscape. I’ve been a member since about a month after they opened their (online) doors.
As someone who understands and works in and with social media daily for a major media company, and as someone who supports and honestly believes in an open and safe Internet I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to assist this great organization in getting off the ground.
My current employer is PBS, also a non-profit with beliefs above and beyond most American media brands. While I work each and every day to spread and enhance social media adoption and usage across the system I also devote a large amount of my personal time to research and participate in conversations surrounding the best practices and most inclusive ways to foster online community building. Here at my personal website I publish and evangelize my own personal beliefs outside of my professional capacity.
Social media is more than a job for me, it’s a way to look at world. My vision is for a social media landscape that we don’t even have to call social-media. Social media should become as ubitquitous as the Internet itself.
My vision and passion for social-media and online communities is why I’d love to assist and be a part of the Social Media Club. I feel like I can bring a lot to the table for them and help to not only evangelize current and emerging standards, but also serve as a beacon to newcomers in this exciting time.
Please feel free to contact me via any method that’s efficient for you and I will gladly answer any questions or clarify any information.
Lessons In Social Media
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Social media doesn’t have to be intimidating, in fact it’s very easy to get started and build a base of information and conversation upon which to learn and grow. As an active participant, researcher, and social-media based employee, I use social media for both my personal life and professional growth.
There are numerous opportunities to get out there and explore, by reading through these basic lessons and tip sheets I hope you can take better advantage of the soon to be ubiquitous social side of the Internet.
I wrote these tip sheets and information pages as one of my final projects at the Missouri School of Journalism in the spring of 2008. They are written toward an audience who may have heard about social-media but isn’t sure how to get started.
There will be follow up and additional information added to this resource as I have time to expand the series. If you have any questions please contact me. And as always, comments are open, leave your thoughts, edits, and changes below.
Lessons In Social Media:
- The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
- Social Networking Quick Tips
- How To Get Hired Using Social Media
- Google Alerts For Personal Branding Management
- More to come!
Crossing The Skills Divide
April 3, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
There is an almost constant drone of phone calls and emails in my life right now, I’m right in the thick of finding a job for when I become available in May. It hasn’t been an easy road, but I’ve made great strides in my approach, the types of jobs I apply for, and the way I manage my personal brand.
I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have the help of all you out there, my favorite bloggers, my Twitter followers, my family and my friends. I am very thankful for all of the support I’ve gotten so far in my search and am very thankful for the education I have and the life experiences that have prepared me for this experience.
I’ve been using my support network a lot lately. Part of the reason is that I have a very diverse skill set, not only am I good with producing and editing content, but I also hold technology skills that allow me to create things like this blog, Smart Decision, Contributr, and more. But even beyond that, I have an entrepreneurial spirit that lends me new ideas, new inspiration, and new ways of looking at old and new problems.
I feel like this variety of skills that I have is hard to explain and describe in the limited contact I’m given with potential employers. Doing my best to convey those thoughts, ideas, and skills is getting easier as I do it more of course, but it’s a different way of looking at the world that’s for sure!
Typically I think that people possess one side or the other, they’re either very good writers and thinkers, or they’re very good programmers and developers. Both are on an equal standing as far I’m concerned, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.
But then, where does that leave me? I’m someone who loves to think of new ideas, concepts, and products but I’m also aware of the technical abilities of current technology tools as well as their weaknesses. Taking that a step further, I also am able to clearly explain, teach, and lead developers to create technology tools that don’t exist yet.
The biggest problem I’m having during interviews these days is making sure that I convey my abilities and varied skill set while emphasizing that I do in fact prefer the idealization, and content side of the world.
Sure I can build web sites, blogs, Facebook applications, and other tools, but I recognize that there are people who can do those things much better than I can. It’s hard for people (including myself) to describe and explain how that works, yes I can DO those things, but no I’m not completely comfortable starting from nothing and building up on the programming and development side.
I feel like I have a good variety of skills and that I exert my leadership and entrepreneurship skills well, but I have to be careful not to pigeonhole myself into over-exerting my technology skills just because I think it’s cool that I can do both.
This post is a sort of stream of consciousness for me as I try to work out these details for myself. Be sure to visit again tomorrow as I look at the type of jobs and employers that I’m most interested in.
4 News Companies Ally to Sell Ads on the Internet - New York Times
February 29, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
4 News Companies Ally to Sell Ads on the Internet - New York Times
Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, and the New York Times company are joining forces to try to sell more advertising. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. This was release about two weeks ago but I didn’t get a chance to read into it further until now.
Basically, they’ve joined forces through a company called QuadrantONE which is providing a Google AdSense-ish experience where an advertiser can contact them, and place ads in news properties of each of those companies.
The focus of the agency is on local ads only, presumably to not step on the toes of the sales people at those organizations who acquire and foster the large national contracts.
Pie In The Sky - Comparing Current Offerings
February 21, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Comparing Current Offerings
Amazon:
- Very Inexpensive (+1)
- Very powerful (+1)
- Recently had its first major downtime event (-1)
- Very flexible in terms of OS, applications, etc (+1)
- S3 storage service provides a good platform for archive storage (+1)
- Bring your own Machine Image is a good thing, use what you’re familiar with (+1)
- You cannot upload and download files using FTP/SFTP as with standard web hosts (-1)
- You’re probably going to need an outside management firm unless you’ve got a very smart admin on staff already. (-1)
Score: B, the biggest loss here is the usability factor, it’s not usable for your everyday web hosting needs. If there were a control-panel and management provided by Amazon this would be an A.
Mosso’s Hosting Cloud:
- Higher starting price point (-1)
- Very fair overage fees (+1)
- Multiple smallish downtime incidents have been reported (-1)
- Being a startup, they’ve got heart (+1)
- Usability is high with their easy to use control panel (+1)
- They haven’t been able to truly solve RoR scaleability (null)
- Reseller friendly, if you have an account you can sublease your resources to friends and clients very easily, including billing (+1)
Score: A-, Mosso has gotten closer than anyone else to being what I would consider a true cloud computing provider. The get bonus point for being usable and for being around more than a year or two. I hope they can implement a plan with a lower starting price point, and someone has to figure out RoR, hopefully it’ll be these guys.
MediaTemple:
- Low starting price point (+1)
- High overage fees (-1)
- Recent significant downtime, both scheduled and unscheduled (-1)
- “Container” technology and usage is effective, and usually efficient (+1)
- Beta (cs) Cluster Server is in the works that promises to ‘fix’ many of the problems with the current (gs) Grid Server (+1).
Score: B, MediaTemple is attacking the lower end of the clustered server hosting arena and are doing a good job of it too. Much of their early success is attributed to being featured on the popular TechCrunch site right after launch. MediaTemple is where my own sites are currently hosted and I’m very happy with them.
Others:
There are other cloud and utility computing providers out there, see Monday’s post for more information but I do not have direct contact or experience with them like I do the above providers. I encourage you to take a look at the others in the field, which are mostly on the enterprise (higher) level than any of my current projects.
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Pie In The Sky - Mosso’s Hosting Cloud Launches
February 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what I thought “The Cloud” should look like, well my dream may just be coming true! A couple days after the post I was contacted by Mosso, which is the grid hosting component of RackSpace.
Mosso is releasing a new service that promises to have the stability and security of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud service, with the ease of use and support of a managed hosting environment.
I spoke with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce last week about the possibilities and the plans and what follows is what he had to say.
Basically, Mosso has worked over the last few months to shore up issues and enhance the features available to their customers. The ‘Hosting Cloud’ as they are now calling it is the end-result of that work, with a new emphasis on billing for actual usage.
Mosso currently supports over 37,000 web applications on their cluster, so they’ve got some experience in enterprise scaling. Right now cloud computing is dominated by Amazon’s services, but what Mosso has done is take the power of the cloud and simplified its use, allowing customers to use standard web development tools and transports to build and update their web sites and applications.
One area that Amazon has taken a hit is their lack of control panel and controls in general, there are a couple companies who having created business around providing management for EC2/S3 controls, but Mosso has wrapped up everything you need into a familiar looking dashboard control panel environment.
In just a few clicks, and in 5 minutes you can setup a new web application on their grid selecting from Windows/Linux, PHP, MySQL and other technologies. Your application is then created on the SAN and virtualized to several servers to begin with. It’s then ready to be virtualized onto additional servers on the fly as demand and load increases.
Mosso has always been setup with the reseller in mind, and their new focus on The Cloud doesn’t change that, customers are still allowed an unlimited number of applications and databases and 3rd party billing support.
The pricing and marketing is where The Hosting Cloud really changes the business, they’re keeping the current $99 per month hosting fee, but dropping the overage charges to much more reasonable levels.
For your $99 a month you get 3 million requests, in and out. If you go over that, there’s where the power of the cloud kicks in, addition requests are only 3 cents per thousand (a very reasonable amount).
In addition to processing power, SAN storage space and bandwidth are also included in the base fee with low overage fees (25 cents per GB over your allocation of bandwidth, and 50 cents per GB of SAN space).
I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on Mosso’s announcement and I’ll share some links to other posts about the launch from the blogosphere.
–Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.–
Why Adium Works For Me
February 11, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I admit it, I’m an Instant Messaging Addict, in fact if you want to get a hold of me, it’s usually the efficient way to get a real answer. I’m not so good with the phone, I just really don’t like using it unless you’re someone I REALLY enjoy or don’t mind talking to.
Not even my iPhone can save people with blocked Caller IDs from getting das’ boot.
Which leads me to this post, I use Adium all the time, I mean my computer is rarely turned on without having it open. It’s a great little piece of software that’s (for the most part) light weight, rarely crashes, and does a great job of making itself easy to use.
If you’re using Mac OSX and not using Adium you really owe it to yourself to check it out and try it out. While I do like Adium a lot, if iChat ever gains the same feature-set I would probably switch back and use iChat almost exclusively. The chances of iChat being that forward thinking feature wise is highly unlikely though, Apple just doesn’t roll updates to it outside of OSX updates.
In a nutshell, Adium brings all of your instant messaging handles together into one harmonious unit, I personally use AIM, MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, and ICQ. If you hit the Contact link up above you’ll see my usernames for those services, look me up sometime, unlike using the phone, I really enjoy chatting with people.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-02-06
February 6, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- The Interwebs are broken! Leave it nediacom to fry modems on an update! #
- Good Morning Twitterland, I’ve been awake for a while, but its just about time to head to work #
- btw, I subscribed to WAY too many new blog/RSS feeds yesterday, it’s overwhelming #
- I don’t have my iPhone on me today (left it at home), so I’m largely disconnected from the world. #
- Cleaning out my main web server, it’s a mess in there! #
- I put a new contact form on my web site http://www.jonathancoffman.com and someone already used it! #
Contact Jonathan
February 6, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
You can contact me any number of ways, the speediest and most efficient way to get a hold of me is via Email, I’ll receive the message instantly and reply as soon as possible.
Email: jonathan (at) jonathancoffman.com
Instant Messenger Handles:
- AIM: jonathandcoffman
- Google Talk: jonathan . coffman (at) gmail.com
If you would prefer, simply fill out the form below and it will reach me instantly:
cforms contact form by delicious:days
Conversations
January 23, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
To start, you should check out my blog and add the RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. While you’re doing that, you might also subscribe to my Podcast which I update on occasion with pieces of journalism. I welcome comments and suggestions on each of my posts on my blog, and you can also find me participating in conversations on the following social-networking sites:
I recently started posting a daily link blog with news, information, and resources all relating to social media. Check it out and submit your own links!
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