Comment Approval Queue

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Given the increase in comment spam on this site, I have configured the comment function so that anonymous comments have to be approved before they are posted. I know that this may be a pain, but it’s my only option until I install Drupal 4.5. You should be able to log on to this site with a Drupal password (tell me if you can’t), or you can contact me and set up an account on this site.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m tired of cleaning up all the spam every day.

Update: And now everything you wanted to know about comment spam and how to fight it, from Six Apart. The recommendations are specific to Movable Type, but may be of interest to others.

The Past Year as a Free-Agent

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It’s been a typical consultant’s year for me — periods of feast and famine and never being able to plan more than a month in advance. An article by Rob Levinson in the Wall Street Journal shows that even with success, free-agents ask different questions than would a full-time employee:

In my past life as a full-time employee, compensation, bonus structure, benefits and title were all that mattered when comparing assorted job offers. What else was there? For a consultant, the criteria for determining next steps are less clear. What are the relevant factors for solo consultants trying to chart a career path?
…
That’s because I have serious personal questions for myself. Do I focus on partnering with my colleague Kate and building her consultancy? Should my consulting firm be my first — and only — priority? Should I chart a growth strategy and think about hiring employees?

From Michael Cage, I also learned business lesson #1 again, and I became seriously immersed in blogging — moving to my own hosted site after having used Blogger and Quicktopic. A blog is definitely the best marketing tool for free-agents and small businesses, and it’s not about publishing a diary, but more about the network effect that makes blogging so powerful for small business. As Jon Udell says:

We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

Probably my greatest work achievement this year was in extending my network of friends, colleagues and fellow professionals through blogging in order to expand my own scope of learning and work. Knowing that I have this extended network makes me more optimistic about the coming year, because I know that I’m not alone :-)

My First eCommerce Experience

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I recently posted a link to SmartDraw at the bottom left of my website. This is a purely commercial venture on my part, and I receive a small commission for every sale of SmartDraw that occurs as a result of a purchase though this link. Someone purchased SmartDraw7 this month (thank you very much) and I will get some cash (cool). Here are the main reasons I decided to do this:

  • I have been using SmartDraw for a couple of years, and I like the product (ask me for details if you like)
  • SmartDraw is a small company, with about 25 employees, and I like helping the little guys
  • I wanted to experiment with paid ads, and see what happens

I would appreciate any feedback on my e-commerce foray, especially if you think that this detracts from my independent consultant status. I don’t intend to add more products to my nav bar, and no I don’t get any money for the Firefox banner – I just really like the product :-)

Worthwhile Reading

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Halley Suitt, in Worthwhile, refers to the 800CEOREAD list of top 25 books for business. I have read only one of these, The Art of the Start, which I believe is an excellent reference book for any business. In perusing the other 24 titles, I noticed that there is nothing that peeks my interest. I guess I’m not your "average" business reader. For instance, here are my best reads this year, though they weren’t all published in 2004:

These are some of the books on my list to buy/read:

Any other suggestions for a free-agent, consultant, learning/business/technology guy?

de Kerckhove: Communication in Evolution

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For fans of Marshall McLuhan, or those interested in knowing more than just the phrase, “the medium is the message”, there is an excellent interview [dead link] online with Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto. There is lots of stuff to chew on, as well as a concise overview of McLuhan’s tetradic Laws of Media:

“every new medium:

  • extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  • obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  • retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  • flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)”

The most enlightening for me is de Kerckhove’s view of a new kind of identity in our inter-networked world:

The key to the new identity is what I call “selving”, that is the self in progress, in becoming, as in quantum physics where “things are not, they merely tend to be”. The new identity is in perpetual formation and reformation at the moment of use and on line it is fluid and aggregative as when people meet and change their perceptions of each other during the meeting. I sometime suspect that screens were invented only for the purpose of allowing several persons, minds, identities to meet and share thinking and speaking at a distance. The new connective thinking system is the screen. Via What is the Message? [dead link]

“Don’t let the bozos grind you down”

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A short interview with Guy Kawasaki [Author: The Art of the Start], by Blogfonk. Here is Guy’s response to the question, "what is your motto?":

Don’t let the bozos grind you down. Because the bozos will try to grind you down, they’ll tell you that you can’t do something, that something won’t work, or that something isn’t needed. The only thing worse than a bozo is a person who listens to a bozo.

Comment Spam

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I’m getting a lot of comment spam from some low-life who is sticking links to an internet gambling site on my blogs. They’re easy to find & erase with Drupal, but still a pain. I like Alan Levine’s solution to disrupt comment spammers, and perhaps I’ll enlist the help of the International Spam Counter Attack Force (SCAF):

They have tools and techniques I could never understand, but with their help, our Trackback scripts were modified to collect some interesting data from our roach visitor. The people who act as local agents for SCAF have the ability to unleash a series of strikes on this person, their assets, records, etc, and once I give the go ahead, the trigger is set to go off at a random time in the future, maybe today, tomorrow, next week, a few months from now.

I’m open to comments and criticism on my blog, but completely unrelated comments that link to a gambling site are not acceptable. Since I pay to maintain this site, it’s my editorial privilege to keep it clean. Here are the multiple hosts from which this roach posts:

61.62.229.235
165.173.60.25
212.234.28.89
195.194.158.17
12.43.53.137
198.252.39.226
81.169.133.166
66.91.206.165
68.44.79.29
193.252.229.134
136.183.135.54
62.47.166.17

17 Dec: And the roach struck again early this morning (already removed) – any Drupal experts have suggestions?

eLearning is Dead

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NetDimensions is a Hong Kong based LMS vendor. My post for today, eLearning is Dead, Long Live Learning, is as a guest on their blog. It’s not very positive about LMS vendors, but they posted it anyway.

These folks seem to have the right attitude for a sustainable business model in the learning field. They are self-financed (employee-owned), they have a real conversation going on their blog, and they say that "we don’t have to pretend to being more than we are or try to paint pictures of the LMS market as being more than it is". To me, this indicates a good client focus, and there a number of high profile clients noted on their main website. The recent blog post by Jay Shaw, CEO, on this year’s Online Educa in Berlin is worth a read.

Most Popular Content

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For the community that actually reads my blog posts, here is the most popular content since I started blogging on this site in February:

  1. Drupal Theme Garden
  2. WebCT & Blackboard vs Moodle
  3. Drupal Review
  4. Free social software sandbox for teachers
  5. Dummies Guide to Change
  6. Training vs Education (but it’s all learning)
  7. Emergent Organizational Structures
  8. Collaborate to Compete
  9. Universities and Course Management Systems
  10. Analysing Human Performance

Thanks for your interest and please excuse the low number of posts until I’m better – which should be soon :-)