Scott Hanselman

This blog, my twitter, my YouTube are all part of my online presence. While my day job is ensuring that Microsoft's web developer tools work well across many cross cutting concerns, my passion remains teaching.

When I went to work for Microsoft 5 years ago I made it clear that the blog, it's content, and my online voice would remain mine. I also told them I would do 'side work' in social media. Often I blog about the things I'm working on, but I also blog about family, diabetes, gardening, culture, diversity, languages, gadgets and lots more.

One of the things I enjoy doing besides programming and teaching, is helping folks in other industries manage their personal brands and use social media effectively. I've spoken at conferences and to many different blogging special interests from interior designers to bloggers of color.

The things I've learned - largely by making many mistakes - in the last 10+ years of blogging apply not just to the technical world, but to anyone with an online presence.

• Related Link: A Social Media Brand Primer: Managing your (personal) brand with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Last year at Blogging While Brown I presented the technical keynote along with my very close friends Luvvie Ajayi and Adria Richards. You may know Luvvie from our podcast Ratchet And The Geek. Adria works for SendGrid and you may have seen Adria on Channel 9 with me at the BUILD Conference this year.

The audience was filled with bloggers of all interests. Tech, Culture, Social Justice, Entertainment, Cupcakes (yes!), Yoga, Green Lifestyles and hundreds more. Luvvie, Adria and I have three very different online styles but each is effective in its own way. We combined what we learned into what we think is an edutaining and useful talk.

Together we discussed how to effectively present a clear Voice online, how your Medium affects your Message. We explore different ways to Reach and audience, but then how to reach them in an authentic way. Then we cover consistent Visuals and what Results look like.

The keynote was split into three segments. You can jump between them directly with these links, Luvvie starting at 2min in, Adria around 14 min and me about 31 min, or watch the whole thing as it was intended.

I hope you enjoy it. We had a wonderful time creating and presenting it.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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It needs to be said again, perhaps this time more strongly. Your Blog is The Engine of Community. Dammit.

Blog More

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don't care about permalinks, don't make your content portable, and have terms of service that are so complex and obtuse that there are entire websites dedicate to explaining them.

I've presented at a number of "town hall" style meetings and often presented (for YEARS now) talks on "Social Media for Developers" where I've said "Every developer should have a blog." Put yourself out there and make it findable. And still you tweet giving all your life's precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn't love or care about you - to a service that can't even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.

Where are people writing?

My friend Jon Udell is asking "Where have all the bloggers gone?" and watched both he and his wife's "Blog's Heartbeat" reduce to an almost comatose level. Tim Bray notices this pattern as well.

Now more companies and consortiums are popping up claiming to be "reimagining writing" or "rethinking publishing" or take the concept of a simple "draft post" and, according to Svbtle "[allow] ideas to start abstractly, to ruminate for a while, and then, as I work on them, to become more and more concrete until they’re ready to be published as articles." So, reinventing drafts? Regardless, Svbtle and it's new design has since attracted a who's who of Silicon Valley thinkers and is now on its way to becoming the digirati's Economist, except with bylines.

Here's the thing though, it's still RSS. It's just a blog.

Own Your Words

I've been blogging here for over 10 years. On my domain, running my software pushing out HTML when you visit the site on any device and RSS or ATOM when you look at it with Google Reader (which 97% of you do.) I control this domain, this software and this content. The feed is full content and the space is mine. Tim nails it so I'll make this super clear. If you decide to use a service where you don't control your content, you're renting.

Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper. - Tim Bray

In a time where we are all gnashing our teeth about Twitter's API changes that may lock out many 3rd party developers, Google Plus's lack of content portability or lack of respect for the permalink, as well as the rise of country club social networks pay-for social networks like http://app.net we find ourselves asking questions like:

• Why doesn't someone make a free or cheap social network for the people?
• Why can't I control my content?
• Why can't I export everything I've written?
• Who owns what I type?
• Why isn't there an open API for my content?
• Why can't I search posts over a month old?
• Why can't I have this or that username?
• Why am I not verified?

All these questions are asked about social networks we don't control and of companies who don't have our best interests at heart. We are asking these questions in 2012? Read those bullets again. These were solved problems in 1999.

You want control? Buy a domain and blog there.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My wife is quite a bit smarter than I am. She is also more educated that I am. Frankly, I'm happy she talks to me at all.

She put a photo on Facebook last week of she and a friend and was careful to double-check that the photo was set to "Friends only."

A few days later she rushed in and told me that she thought the photo was public even though it was set as Friends only.

"Why?"

"Because random people that I don't know are commented on this photo! Like, who is this guy? I don't want him to see this - I don't know him! Why did they let non-friends see it?"

I looked for a minute and noticed that she had "tagged" her other friend in the photo as in this example photo below:

In this photo there are four people tagged. When you tag someone they are notified that they've been tagged and they can remove the tag which removes it from their "photos of me" list. The photo above is totally public but let's say it was posted by me and I tagged my three friends and marked as "friends only."

Who can see the photo of me and my 3 friends? Who can see the photo of my wife and her friend when the photo is marked Friends?

Answer: The union of all the friends of everyone tagged in the photo. If someone else sees the photo and tags some more people, the circle of visibility for that photo or post expands.

This may seem obvious to a software engineer or someone with a background in set theory but it's not obvious even to smart regular folks. It certainly surprised my wife although she gets it now. Here's the thing, though. Now she says she really is less likely to put photos on Facebook and certainly less likely to tag folks in photos.

Confused a little? There's more. Recently my programmer man crush and favorite Canadian Reginald Braithwaite wrote a post called When you share personal data with Facebook friends, you're sharing your personal data with every app your friends use. Read that title again.

Remember that when you aren't paying for something (like Facebook), someone is paying. The advertisers are paying and you, your friends and all your info are the product.

Reginald points out that when you grant an application (Farmville, etc) in Facebook access to your profile you are often granting that application access to your friends personal information. That means that your annoying friend who is always pushing the Mob Wars invites has likely granted an application access to your information by proxy.

UPDATE: When you are sharing something note that you can pull down the privacy dropdown, select custom and make changes then hover your mouse over the gear to get a plain English tooltip showing the resulting visibility of this update:

Your Homework - and pass it on

Go log into Facebook and in the upper right corner click Privacy Settings:

Then, spend some time in these two areas of Settings. Timeline and Tagging and Apps and Websites.

Under tagging you can choose what happens when someone tags you and tags that friends add to your own posts or photos. You can also control tag suggestions. You can lock this down as much as you want.

Next, click on Apps and Websites and freak out when you see how many you (or your teen) has added. You can remove them as you like. Most importantly, click on "How people bring your info into apps they use."

How much of this info to you want your friends sharing with their applications? Turn this stuff off.

And finally, check out the Public Search option. Do you want Facebook and your public timeline to show up when someone Googles for you  or your child? If not, turn this OFF.

You can also go back in time and "limit old posts." This will take posts from years ago when you didn't know this information and make them visible to friends only.

Facebook will likely try to talk you out of it. Use your judgment.

Now, for a fun over-dinner exercise try explaining this to your 14 year old and why everyone should be careful about information leakage. Seriously. At least try.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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WARNING - This post will ultimately lead you to sites using offensive racial terms.

My Twitter friend Wesley pointed me this apparent Abercrombie and Fitch website advertising a pair of N***** Brown Pants. Here's a screenshot if that link dies. After the shock and frustration wears off, you ask yourself "How could this happen?" This link is spreading all over Twitter and the social web right now, and I'm sure that the Abercrombie PR machine will jump on it when their Twitter person wakes up.

Let me walk you through a few things.

• First, what a technical-type person does (or should do) in this situation.
• Second, why the internet is WAY WAY more screwed up than you ever thought
• Third, why no one should really be buying anything on the web.

The Technical Details

While it's possible that an idiot at Abercombie entered the N-word text, my eye immediately went to the domain:

Note the dashes and the "and?" No internationally-known and copyrighted brand would have such a lousy domain. I'd expect Abercrombie.com, full stop. In fact, it is.

I loaded up Domain Tools to see who owns this obvious knockoff. Like actual physical knockoffs of pants, there's no good way to tell what's real and what's not. I hit: http://whois.domaintools.com/abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com

Registrant Contact:
   su ye
   ye su 
   +86.095156230147 fax: +86.095156230147
   NO.217 North Street, Yinchuan Qinghe
   yinchuanshi ningxia 750000
   CN

The domain is registered in China. OK, this is NOT Abercrombie's site. It can also be confirmed by the poor English on the site's about page as well as the throwaway reference to Chinese piracy:

A&F is the favorite brand of American college students, a lovely deer printed on the front of the youth fashion. Its fashion and personalized style always the certain reason some youngsters follow. Nowadays, Abercrombie and Fitch piracy in China has spread to unimaginable proportions. Soft cotton is comfortable in the apparel.

OK, so how much of a problem is this and these pants? The combination of the N-word along with a unique brand-name like Abercrombie makes for a good hash. That means these words together, especially if you add "pants," makes for a search term that is unlikely to happen in the wild.

It's worse than you think

If we then Google for the four words together (forgive me) you can see hundreds if not thousands of fake domains. For Example:

• newabercrombies.com
• abercrombieandfitchoutletsale.com
• abercromibesaleonlione.com
• marvelousabercombie.com
• afsonlinesale.com
• cheapabercrombiestore.com

You get the idea. There are at least hundreds. All with the same pants, all registered in China. I can't imagine, sadly, that there's ANYTHING that Abercrombie could do about this except try to get the domains shut down - one by one.

How could your Mom possibly know this?

These are automatically generated sites, like "splogs." Splogs are spam blogs. They aren't real stores, there aren't real people behind them. They are almost like computer viruses, except they make stores. In this case, it appears that someone in China at some point designed a system that could churn out fake stores from a single database. That's why these pants keep appearing on hundreds of other sites.

Imagine if you just wanted a regular pair of pants and didn't see this pair? How could you possibly tell if this the site you want? There's no good way. Here's what you CAN do.

1. Make sure the URL starts with https:// when you are checking out.
2. Click the lock in your URL and see if the company name looks legit. Sadly, these can be faked also, but it's a start. HTTPS (SSL) doesn't mean "I can trust this site," it means "this conversation is private." You still might be having a private conversation with Satan.
   
3. Even better, if your Address Bar is green, click on it! This is a special "high trust" certificate that says you are really talking to who you think you are. This screenshot means "I am having a private conversation with a company that is KNOWN to be Twitter." Banks and big companies often use these special certs.
   

Ultimately, you, me, Mom and the Web need to develop a better "Internet Sense of Smell." The bad guys want our credit card numbers and will do everything they can to get them, even make ten-thousand fake Abercrombie and Fitch sites.

UPDATE: Thanks for the comments! If you (or Mom) had the Web of Trust installed, this is what you would have seen when visiting an evil site like this. I'm installing this free tool on Mom's machine today.

Good luck out there. It's a messed up web.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There is a fascinating "storify" (a list of tweets with commentary that make up a story of what happened on Twitter) by Charles Arthur about an uncomfortable back and forth on Twitter between Shanley Kane, an engineer at Basho, and Christian Sanz and Reuben Katz, the founders of Geekli.st.

UPDATE: Here is a link to Geekli.st's apology.

The nutshell is that Shanley came upon this ridiculous video (photos here) of a girl in her underwear dancing around with a Geeklist T-Shirt. According to the Geeklist site, it is an "achievement-based social portfolio builder" for developers. Programming is an intellectual pursuit and any kind of "-ism" is totally inappropriate. In this case, immature sexism is a huge turn off. It's been a week of sexism in technology on the Internets.

But this post is less about that, as we can all agree that girls dancing in their underwear is a poor way to promote programming. I want to talk about Twitter, your Customers, your Brand, and Bile.

Shanley tweeted to the founders of Geeklist a totally reasonable question.

@csanz @rekatz why the ads with a woman in her underwear dancing around to dupstep?

— Shanley Kane (@shanley) March 22, 2012

At this point, Geeklist should have recognized what Shanley was really saying. This was a chance for them to re-notice the video in context and be reminded it should probably not exist. Instead, they replied with a non-answer answer with no recognition of the underlying question.

@shanley @rekatz oh that was super old ad created by a friend,we need an updated version that shows less skin! :)

— Christian Sanz (@csanz) March 22, 2012

@shanley @rekatz ? why the agressive tone

— Christian Sanz (@csanz) March 22, 2012

Boom. Stop there. You've got a customer who is upset, rightfully so, about an -ism, also a hot button. She's reaching out to you to validate her frustration AND most importantly handle your business. Every time a person reaches out to you on Twitter, it's a chance for you to put your best foot forward. This is the first impression. Get it right. You have only 140 characters.

At this point there's no turning back. It doesn't matter at this point that the video in question was made by a friend of Geeklist. It doesn't matter that Geeklist is/was a good product. What matters is that the founders were thoughtless in their response on Twitter.

Twitter is not chat, it's not IRC. And even it it was, the thing that I see companies forget over and over and over again is this. Companies need to know: You're on the Internet. Things that you say here matter and will be archived forever and repeated.

Shanley then nails it with this tweet:

@csanz @rekatz sorry my "tone" is offensive but a video that objectifies and sexualizes women in the context of "geek culture" merits anger

— Shanley Kane (@shanley) March 22, 2012

This is Geeklist's last opportunity to fix this. They should watch their tone, fall on their swords and handle their business. Surprisingly (or not) they go on for two dozen more tweets. It's really hard to read. Good on Shanley for not backing down. Note Charles Arthur's commentary:

[Shanley] Kane complained about a video. [Geeklist's Christian] Sanz took offence because of how he was addressed, rather than treating it as a legitimate complaint about content. Now both he and his co-founder are subtly signaling that they will make life difficult for her and her company

Stop here. Note. You will never win an argument on Twitter. You think arguments on the Internet are hard? Counting the characters until someone invokes Hitler? Pardon me while I quote myself, via Twitter.

Why argue on Twitter? Try speaking to someone in person in monotone short sentences while blindfolded without context.

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 20, 2011

Acknowledge your mistakes, be kind, stay positive, respond with respect and thoughtfulness. You are in public  and you are teaching people how to treat you. You likely cannot win an argument on online, and you can never win one on Twitter.

This story is a great example about how not to manage your brand on Twitter. Of course, in this case they were also totally wrong, but trying to argue their point in 140 characters just dug the hole deeper.

Related Links

• Don't Give Bile a Permalink - Finding Balance within The No Asshole Rule
• Profanity doesn't work
• On Pie Chart Diversity at Technical Conferences

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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