Toluu

www.ryankuder.com

Adventures in Marketing and Social Media

Local Is About People, Not PlacesNovember 25

I love Matt McGee’s blog.  He’s got a pulse on local blogging and search as well as anyone in the industry.  I just stumbled upon this post he wrote about a month ago (don’t know how I missed it the first time) about the intersection of local and social.  In it, he recommends a few social sites for connecting with other local people.

But there’s one thing really missing from his list.  The LOCAL!  Yes, many of these sites have features to help you find things near you through geotagging and whatever, but what none of them do is focus on the local communities themselves.  You can hack your way through Flickr to find pictures of people near you and add them to your contacts, but none of these sites really connect people on a local level.

He does mention outside.in and Placeblogger which are two great local sites.  But as he points out, these sites are most useful for finding other local bloggers–connecting is left up to you.  And as much as we all like to think that blogging has gone mainstream, it really hasn’t.  Think of how many people you know who blog.  Now think of how many people you know who don’t.  See?

The point in all this is that while the web is becoming more and more social, it does a horrible job of putting me in touch

My First Tweet EverNovember 17

The rest of the saga starts here.

AOL: You’ve Got Comments! (And They’re Not Good)November 17

I’m about to go off on AOL.  AOL is not my favorite person right now.  I’ve got a pent up rant that I need to get out about them.

I discovered yesterday they’ve been charging me $20 per month for a service I never purchased.  A few years ago when I worked at eBay, AIM was the defacto IM for the company.  Somehow I’d had a paid account but I wanted to drop it.  So I called them up and they said that in order to keep my screenname, I’d have to pay $4.95 per month, otherwise, they’d lock the screenname and I could come back in a few weeks or whatever and try to reclaim it.  That would mean a few weeks without AIM, which I couldn’t do.  So I said, OK.

Fast forward to yesterday.  My wife and I were going through our accounts and we noticed a $10 charge from AOL.  It was a secondary account that we don’t check very often so we hadn’t noticed it.  I went and logged into AOL for the first time in…um…forever?…to see what was going on.  Turns out they’d been charging me two times per month for some premium account.  That’s $20 per month!  I have no idea how long this has been going on because they’re account center only lets you go back 5 months, so I’m going to be wasting some time on the phone with them today to try to find out how much they have fraudulently charged me and try to get my money back.  I’m guessing they owe me around $500.

And in another case of AOL incompetence, the AOL Mail Blog posted an

I Voted For Barack ObamaNovember 5

I’ve never voted for a Democrat for anything in my entire life.  I’ve always considered myself a Reagan Republican.  I believe in lower taxes, smaller government, strong defense as an instrument of peace, and above all in the power of the individual to create their own success.

Yesterday I voted for Republicans for state offices and the US House.  I voted a mostly conservative position on the state propositions.  But for the first time yesterday, I voted for a Democrat for President of the United States.

I don’t agree with Barack Obama on a lot of his policy positions.  I hope that he’s not too hasty to decrease our presence in hot zones in the middle east.  I hope that he is methodical and cautious in his engagement with hostile regimes.  I hope that his tax policies don’t disincent investment and job creation.  I hope that he takes a moderate approach to health care reform rather than a complete overhaul.  But I don’t think that policy is the solution to the ills that plague America right now.

In all walks of life, people perform at their highest potential when they believe and have faith in a better tomorrow.  I voted for Barack Obama because I believe that he inspires this faith.  I believe that what America needs most to drive towards a brighter future is a clear vision of hope in what we can accomplish.  I don’t look at Barack Obama with the messianic awe and reverance that his most ardent supporters did, but I saw that awe and reverance in them and how he inspired disenfranchised Americans to stand up and be counted.  And they did stand up in an historic show of faith and optimism.

I have mixed feelings on what an Obama presidency will do from a policy perspective.  I don’t know if the programs he’s proposed will move us forward or backward and it’s a precarious time to risk moving backwards.  But I want to believe that the power Barack Obama has is to inspire us as Americans to look forward with hope and optimism and through the collective strength of millions of empowered individuals to move America forward toward a brighter future.  A future that we all view through a lens of belief in ourselves, and a renewed belief in America.

Now, more than any point in my lifetime, is not the time to wage an us vs. them battle between the right and the left, but it is a time to recognize that regardless of our religions, our races, and our political persuasions that we need to hold a common vision of the greatness of our country and work together to see that vision through.

There is a human side to this election that we haven’t seen for quite a while.  In the past, we’ve argued about positions and policies and made our decisions as red states and blue.  But what Barack Obama has done is changed that debate.  His campaign and his message consistently focused on hope and empowerment.  And while hope and empowerment alone are not enough to make positive change, positive change is impossible without them.

I want to leave you with a video that for me captures what this election is about.  I don’t know Rahsheen, but I think he provides a powerful message about what this election means for America.

I voted for Barack Obama.  I hope I was right.

Ning SpamNovember 4

I run a social network for the Willow Glen neighborhood in San Jose.  We’ve got just under 500 neighbors who post blogs and events and discuss local issues.  It’s run on the Ning platform with very little customization.  And it’s just one of a bazillion Ning networks.

This morning, I woke up to check in on the network and the entire activity stream was chewed up by some spammer named “VideoAds” who had joined the network overnight and posted a comment on every single members page about some file sharing something or other.  When this happens, each member of my network gets an email notifying them that someone has left them a message.

I was able to ban the member and delete the content, but I’ve still got 500 emails out there advertising this guy’s spam and it’s all coming from my network.  There’s no way this could have been done by hand.  Does this mark the beginning of the Ning bot attacks?  Has anyone else seen anything like this on your network?  And what is Ning’s response?