Current Storage Option Costs:

The following prices were located between May and June 2008 using bhphotovideo.com and Apple.com.

1. $900 = 16GB P2 Card
2. $1,550 = 32GB P2 Card
3. $1,999 = 200GB Macbook Pro ($1,799 after student discount)
4. $1,099 = 120GB Macbook ($999 after student discount)
5. $1,529 = 60GB P2 Store
6. $1,999 = 160GB Firestore

Using the firewire tether mode with a Macbook and your HVX is rather simple once you get the right configuration set up in FCP (Final Cut Pro). Start by booting up Final Cut Pro and then go to Final Cut Pro > User Preferences. Then uncheck the “Abort capture on dropped frames” option. Unfortunately using the firewire method will occasionally result in a drop frame and this option will allow the computer to continue recording even if it comes across a dropped frame, but it will still notify you of any dropped frames as they occur. To reduce these drop frames you should make sure that your laptop is on a flat, solid surface. You should also try to keep as much as much drive space free as possible. I noticed that when I was down to 10GB of space it would greatly increase the drop frames because the hard drive pin has to seek farther to find free space to write to. I’m guessing that defragmenting your hard drive might also help in reducing drop frames, but Apple doesn’t have a built in utility to handle defragmentation.

Advantages of using a Macbook:

• You get a computer, not just a recording disk
• You can use the screen as an external display
• Edit on set when not recording

Disadvantages of using a Macbook:

• Occasional skipped frames
• Have to keep computer within arms length of camera

P2 cards are great, but only if you have deep pockets and and excellent on-site loader who knows what they are doing. The cost of P2 makes it an unrealistic option for film students and many independent film productions who are trying to keep a tight budget. The benefits mostly remain in the portability of using the cards.

Avid last year was supporting a documentary film project that was going to be shot in three separate locations around the globe. I believe they were shooting the Nile, Amazon and Mississippi rivers. There was a meeting at Avid headquarters where they briefly instructed the heads of the crew on how the workflow would work with the HVX and P2 cards. They used P2 cards because they are durable and small enough to transport or mail back to the post-production office in America.

Panasonic demonstrated their P2 workflow at the NAB 2007, which I had a chance to check out. I recall them demonstrating the ability to edit directly off of a P2 card without having to capture it to your computer first (using Avid Media Composer). This saves you the time of capturing the footage and dealing with upconverting to the source resolution later on in post-production. The flaw to this method is that you would need to be working with either a few very large P2 cards that contain all of your captured footage, or you would need to have a lot of smaller P2 cards. Economically it would never make much sense to edit straight from a P2 card unless you are working with a very small project that can only fit on 1 or 2 P2 cards.

Advantages of using a P2:

• Hotswap capable - When one card slot fills up you can pull it out while it transfers to the second slot and then put it back in for continuous recording.
• Extremely durable - I’ve met someone who used 30 P2 cards to film the Iditarod in Alaska because it was the only storage medium that would be capable of handling the cold weather and bumpy path.

Disadvantages of using a P2:

• Indexing to computer takes extra time, unless you edit directly off of the P2 cards
• Expensive

This last option is one that I have had only a week to experiment with, and I am glad that’s all the time I had to deal with. I was given a Firestore for demo purposes during NAB 2007 in Las Vegas. I was interning for Avid Technology at the time, working at their booth recording interviews at the show then editing the video in the Avid booth. We were working with the Canon XH A1 hooked up to a Firestore device.

I can’t recollect many details from that week, but I do remember banging my head against the wall when the Firestore kept acting up. I was with a team of 4 film students, surrounded by Avid technicians and even representatives from Focus Enhancements (the people who make Firestore) and nobody was able to get a handle on why the workflow wasn’t working. I think we eventually gave up and shot HDV to tape in the end. What I learned from this experience is that if you’re going to invest over $1,500 in a storage option other than P2, you might as well get a laptop. There are too many horror stories about people losing footage because of an unreliable Firestore.

Advantages of using a Firestore:

• Slightly more portable than a laptop
• More gigabytes per dollar than P2 cards

Disadvantages of using a Firestore:

• Horrible interface
• Compatibility issues with some cameras
• Expensive

User registration are a real turn off for most readers. Everyone is sick and tired of registering for sites and possibly one day a solution like OpenID will solve this problem. Until this issue of data portability is solved the best way to gain new users is to offer them an incentive to sign up and give them useful tools as a member. An example site that offers beneficial features is Digg which allows you to track friend activity and voting history. The user profile on Digg also allows you to customize your site settings for displaying only certain topics that you are interested in which is covered in the next feature “Content Subscriptions”.

One of the most useful features in sites that I rarely see is the ability to subscribe to the content that you are interested in. I think that the reason that so few sites provide a way to filter out news I’m not interested in is because sites have either a lack of content or a very specific niche that they don’t think that users will benefit from disregarding certain categories. Let me give you an example of how this feature could be used on a “green” news website like TreeHugger.com.

Currently TreeHugger doesn’t offer any way for a user to sign up for their global site, instead they have a separate forum, a Digg-like site (Hugg was previously built on Pligg) and comment system that don’t to carry over any data from one area to another. If users were able to create a site-wide identity that carried over between the segments it would encourage more participation from the audience and make them more interested in navigating around the site to make use of all the features available to them. Now that they have a profile, allow them to select which categories they wish to follow so they don’t have to spend time scanning through the homepage or individual category pages. Someone might be all about green politics, technology and cars, but they don’t care about fashion or travel. As long as you have enough fresh content being served to the website daily it makes sense to let people choose which categories to follow rather than making them scan through it. While I’m talking about TreeHugger I have to mention how much I love their jump menu on the right side of their site that lets you quickly skip articles.

The new website Newspond handles comments in a brilliant manner, allowing users to start new threads not attached to news articles and also comment on articles like other sites. Unfortunately the site doesn’t have enough financial backing or marketing to really make it big. The most useful and interesting feature that the site provides is their comment system and I really wish they had a steadier stream of news articles.

To develop a great comment system you should at a minimum have permalinks for all comments, have a way to reply to existing comments, a way to flag for removal bad comments and a way to promote good comments. There’s a variety of other features that will make your comments more interesting, but the basic formula that I just spelled out has proven itself to be the standard for a reason. The last two features I mentioned for promoting and demoting comments is used mainly as a way to sort through comments by quality, much how Digg and Pligg currently offer.

Having a way to contact other members of a site is a great way to encourage users to keep on your site rather than using email or instant messaging services. Most of the great social networks have a built in private messaging service, MySpace even offers it’s own instant messaging client that launched two years ago. You should take a look at existing models so that you aren’t working from a clean slate if you are planning to develop your own private messaging system. I suggest looking at forum software such as vBuletin or PHPBB along with the big social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Don’t force private messages on your users. Some people (myself included) don’t want to be bothered by every message that appears in their inbox. Don’t require that they receive an email on every new private message. You should even consider having a way for users to create a contact list of users that they want to receive notifications from.

As I mentioned at the end of the Private Messages section, contact lists for your friends are pretty important to sites. On sites like MySpace everyone has a thousand friends, but not all friends should be considered equal online. There should be a way to discern real world friends from online friends. I think we can all agree that nobody really has over fifty real friends, but for some reason fifty seems like a small number of friends online.

Image by Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade

Groups are an extension of the friends feature. Groups function as a way to make new friends by meeting people with similar interests. An extreme example of a site that uses group is Facebook. If you are a fan of a music artist, non profit group, political party or whatever your interest you can join or start a group on Facebook. I call Facebook an extreme example because everyone on the site belongs to 30 or more groups, but I feel that the ideal number of groups someone should belong to on most sites should be 5 or less depending on the activity level of the groups.

Social bookmarking tools have become a standard across blogs and even many forum content management systems recently. The simplicity of adding a button is such a great marketing gimmick that its difficult to argue against. There are limits though for what you should provide on your site. You don’t need to support 50 different social bookmarking sites, try to limit it to 5-8 of your favorite sites. Its another good idea to try to make those sites relevant to your site. For example, if you have a marketing blog you should include a link to a social network like Sphinn which specializes in online marketing news.

A site doesn’t become very social unless users are able to submit content to your site to share with others. Forums and newsgroups were one of the first social spots on the web and the model of threads and posts worked so well that they still exist today. Forums are probably the most common example of a social content submission site because users are able to post new threads and others can then post replies creating a conversation. By giving users this ability to submit their own articles to control the direction of the sites content you are giving them what they interpret as a responsibility to participate on a regular base which makes them feel desired.

RSS feeds aren’t just for keeping up with the latest articles on your site. They should also be used for keeping users up to date with their friend’s activities. This feature goes along with feature number ten, portable data, because RSS feeds can be displayed on other sites using other easily available web scripts. Digg has this feature built in to their user profile pages so you can follow anyones history using RSS.

A lot of blogs out there don’t provide much original material out there, they instead just regurgitate other blog content and offer a link to the source article. The semi-social networks Digg provides a similar idea where users share links with each other and provide a short description of the link’s content. This habit of recycling of information through summation can provide fresh content to your site when your users lean toward being more passive readers rather than original content authors.

This item is another tool that your marketing department should be pushing hard to get developed once your social network is up and running smoothly and has gained an audience. The ability for users to take their data off of your site and use on their own blogs or other social networks that they belong to is a fantastic marketing tool. By providing useful widgets with a small watermarked link in the corner pointing back to your site you are encouraging users to advertise your site for you at no cost.

Nothing annoys me more than sites that refuse to let me take my data and use it elsewhere. This rule not only applies to social networks, but many sites that provide a service to a user. I’ve been using the service price!pinx recently to keep an eye on items on wedding registry items that are going on sale, but I can only view the items after logging in and navigating to a page on their site. I would love it if I could take the data from that page and use it on an external url to share the deals with others.

Have a feature that I forgot to mention? Leave a comment below and let me know what I’m missing.

vBulletin is probably the best commercial solution for starting a forum available today because it offers a wide variety of features, an excellent administration panel and a variety of both free and commercial plugins and “products”. I have been using vBulletin’s software for the Pligg Forums for nearly two and a half years and through that time I have had to deal with a lot of spam, especially in the past few months. At first it was a rare enough problem that I was able to maintain the spam by manually removing a thread here and there once a week. Through a vigorous program of spam bot registration prevention and keyword monitoring from new users posts I have been able to keep most spam off the general forums, but it’s taken a lot of plugins and continuous work to do so.

The first tip that I have is that you should turn on email confirmation for new user registrations. This in combination with the captcha system will stop most bots at the gates before they even have a chance to post anything on your forum. Unfortunately some servers and users will have issues with sending and receiving emails, so email verification isn’t always the answer.

The next step is to prevent users who use “one time” email accounts. These types of email accounts are set up to prevent users from receiving spam email from suspicious websites, but they can also be used by spammers and just plain lazy no-good users. I prefer that users give me a legitimate email address when signing up, not one of these spam prevention email services. Users who bring quality content to your site should at least be willing to offer a valid email address. Spammers can also abuse these free short term email services so I decided recently to ban the use of many “short term” email domains for all future registrations. You can do this easily by navigating to your vBulletin administraton panel, click on “vBulletin Options”, then select from the drop down menu “User Banning Options”. The second field should be for inserting “Banned Email Addresses”, here you can just copy and paste my domain blacklist below.

Banned Email Domains:

The “Restrict usernames to alphanumeric and underscore” plugin for vBulletin lets you have better control over username character options. I suggest not allowing spaces in usernames (vBulletin default) and I haven’t seen any spammers using underscores thus far so I have left that option on for now. I believe that I installed this product originally to make the usernames compatible with Mediawiki integration.

This is the latest an probably the most difficult spam problem that I have had to deal with. It’s a rather clever trick that spammers came up with to improve their site’s search engine performance and get better search traffic. Spammers sign up for dozens of accounts using keywords like “Buy DrugX Here”, where DrugX is replaced with a variety of prescription drug names. They then place as many links as they can fit in their user signature directing to their sites. The reason that spammers have been using this method is because my site is seen as reputable through the eyes of Google, so placing text on my site for the traditionally disreputable pharmaceutical drug websites gives more credibility and they often appear high up on search results because of my vBulletin SEO methods (Thanks to vBSEO).

What’s so tricky about this problem is that there’s really no way to easily see when a user is doing this, unlike traditional thread or post spam that appears on the general forum where users will often flag it. The only way to check for this type of spam is to go through each days user registration log looking for suspicious names. I have about a hundred signups each day, and it would be a waste of my time to check each name and signature for this type of abuse so I had to find a better method. The two methods for fighting this type of spam is banning certain words from usernames and stopping new accounts from being able to place links or even text in their signatures.

Similar to the above topic of email spam, a blacklist is probably the best option for preventing username abuse. Under the vBulletin Options >> User Registration Options, you will have an “Illegal Usernames” input box. There you can list a space separated list of usernames you don’t want to allow. A new user will be denied any variation of a username with one of those words.

To prevent signature spam from non-active users there are two options. The first method is built into vBulletin, just create a new usergroup for users with 0-however many posts and don’t give that usergroup permission to have a signature. The downside to this method is that it isn’t retroactive and past users will keep their existing signatures. The second option comes in the form of a simple vBulletin product SM Limit Editing Signature Before X Posts product (pictured above). It stops anyone with fewer than X threads from creating a signature. The vBSEO Conditional Signatures product allows you to set more precise settings to prevent signature spam abuse in your threads along with other useful features.

Spambuster is a plugin that checks all new threads and compares the content to a list of keywords that are marked as spam-like. Each keyword is given a number to rank how spammy it might be and if the total number of keywords tallies high enough the post is held for moderation and moderators are alerted to it. This is probably the most advanced and useful plugin for vBulletin spam prevention and it has been extremely helpful in stopping spam appear on my forums.

One of the downsides to Spambuster is that it doesn’t come with the best list, but it offers a good starting point. You will want to modify the list so that it doesn’t flag common items and add a few words yourself. To help you out I am offering my modified Spambuster Keyword Definitions. I suggest using this list and setting your spam trigger level to 10 and the Post count threshold to 5.

Even though Pagerank Sculpting/Pagerank Leak are debated concepts among SEO professionals, I find it useful to use nofollow formatted links for less important links among my sites. Forums and blog comments are abused just to get search engine traffic, so I will often use plugins or design elements to automatically parse urls with a nofollow attribute to prevent search engines from following the links off my site. To do this automatically with vBulletin, it just takes the NuHIT URLs plugin. This plugin can also be set to open external urls in a new window. An intro guide to the theory of Linkjuice is covered through this video entry on SEOmoz.

I imagine with all of these tools, spammers will have a difficult time taking advantage of your site. It may not be necessary to run all of these plugins, but I have learned from experience that it’s better to not give a spammer a fighting chance or else they will exploit every hole possible.

If you know if any other useful vBulletin tricks, tips or products that I might have forgotten please leave a comment. I’d be glad to learn about some other great tricks for stopping spam before it starts.

One final bonus trick is probably something that you should do sooner rather than later. This tip will save you from a lot of the above problems because it will stop search engines from indexing member profiles which makes spamming your profile pages useless for spammers. Open up Notepad and copy/paste the code below and then save it to a file robots.txt, then upload that file to your forum root. This file will remove several vBulletin tools that Google doesn’t need to index and should ignore when it crawls your site. Most important are the members.php and /members/ lines which tell Google to ignore the member profiles. The other lines are optional with the exception of the first.

My Robots.txt File:

This post is dedicated to those who aren’t familiar with what free scripts are available and I will do my best to describe what each content management system is capable of and what they are best used for. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I try to address many of the more common CMS solutions and demonstrate some of the more interesting ways to use them. I will not cover forum software, since they will be covered in their own post in the near future.

Just because a script is open source and free doesn’t mean that it’s not an option when starting up a website for marketing purposes. By choosing an open source solution you are saving both time and money on development. You will find it will be easier to find competent developers who know the systems in and out and because of this they will work faster. I also encourage you to hire developers who work at one of the open source projects because they are sometimes available to work on outside projects.

Most content management systems support plugins that offer additional features provided by first and third parties. Because these plugins are constantly being added and removed with each revision it would be impractical to list all of the additional functionality gained through plugins on this post. Additionally plugins rarely offer the same quality features as the features built into the content management system.

Did you really think I would start with anything else? Pligg is my baby and I know more about it than any other CMS out there because I have come up with the ideas for many of the features and helped develop it over the past two years. What I find to be so great about Pligg is how versatile it can be, even though most people who download and install it choose to think outside of the box. I have seen a great deal of sites using Pligg in interesting ways besides the usual “Digg clone” use that Pligg was originally founded on. One such example is RottenNeighbor.com, uses Pligg’s lesser known 5 star voting method for rating neighbors.

Example Sites Using Pligg:

• Intel Cool Software
• Sphinn
• HealthRanker

Pligg was originally designed to provide an open source solution for users who want to create a site where anyone can submit an article, whether it be a written news item, image, video or audio clip. Unlike other content management systems, Pligg is designed to be a community of hundreds or thousands of authors rather than just a handful. Pligg has yet to see many dedicated software solutions to really compete with it at this point. Some other scripts offer similar capabilities through plugins, but nothing really compares to Pligg because it was designed from the ground up to operate as a multi-author social network system.

Largely the most popular blogging software available, Wordpress was one of the first popular CMS solutions available on the internet. For the purposes of setting up a typical one to ten author blog, Wordpress can work great. The Wordpress community offers a lot of great templates and plugins that provide additional functionality and support.

Example Sites Using Wordpress:

• TechCrunch
• CNN Blogs
• Other notable sites

I have used Wordpress on a variety of sites, including this one, because the plugins available for it have allowed me to tweak each install to suit my needs. I highly suggest it for anyone who wants a typical blog format for delivering their message, but for some more advanced sites featuring a more professional newspaper-type template for publishing articles I would suggest another system such as Drupal or Joomla.

I’m going to make a generalization about the rest of these content management systems because my experience with them is much more limited and they are all used in similar ways. Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Geeklog and a plethora of other content management systems all perform the same job all about as well as each other. The only differences between them is the level of support offered for each and the amount of plugins and templates offered through the community.

Example Sites Using Drupal:

• Spread Firefox
• MTV UK
• The Onion

Out of the next three CMS’s I have the least amount of experience with Drupal. It is obvious from looking at some of the example sites running Drupal that it is more than capable at running a corporate level site using Drupal. I’m not too keen about their administrator panel usability, it requires a higher learning curve than other systems.

There’s a long complicated story behind how Joomla came about, but all that I will mention about it in this post is that Joomla was originally based on Mambo. I have used Joomla in the past for a couple of projects and find that its capable of creating an easy out-of-the-box website if you have former CMS experience.

Example Sites Using Joomla:

• Brightrev
• Grande Real Villa Italia Hotel
• Móveis Estrelícia

I only mention Geeklog because it was the first content management system that I used several years ago to start Yankidank.com. Geeklog provided an excellent system to author content at the time, but they have slowed development and have been lost in the clutter of similar systems such as Joomla or Drupal. They intend on releasing a major new version (1.5) sometime over the next month. Support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection and other features through a plugin system.

The past three content management systems are designed as an article-based solution for news sites like CNN, The New York Times and UX Magazine. There are typically three types of content management systems: Blogging, Article Management and Niche. Typically blogging platforms aren’t used in the same way as article management CMS’s and it takes a little experience to develop an eye to identify the differences. Niche CMS solutions offer more of a specific service like how Pligg creates a site similar to Digg out of the box or how Ekklesia 360 (commercial software) offers a content management solution specifically built for Church websites.

Most content management systems can be customized through plugins or additional development costs to perform just about the same things, but the idea of this article is to help you choose which CMS comes closest to meeting your needs out of the box. Rather than starting on square one with the improper CMS and taking ten steps to finish the project, you can often skip half the steps just by choosing the appropriate CMS.

While considering this at the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I started to write down some ideas that I would like to share with other online marketers. I have debated with others these three ideals for online marketing and they are only a few of the values that I hold onto when preparing a marketing campaign for a company or product.

This rule is generally something that I apply as a measuring tool when I am considering email marketing people. Many companies abuse email marketing campaigns by tossing out a mile long net and hoping to catch a few new customers, but in doing so turn off many other potential customers. Companies use techniques such as purchasing email lists from disreputable sources or gathering addresses themselves through tricking users into it. We are all familiar with sites that attempt to get us to sign up for their newsletter by slipping in a check box in a corner of a form that they hope you ignore so they can have your permission to market to your email address. Email providers such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail now make it so easy for users to flag email as spam and users are not hesitating to tag your emails as such.

Examples of Great Newsletter Marketing:

• Christian Book Newsletter
• iVillage Newsletters
• Kayak.com Newsletters (see also this review of Kayak Newsletters)

Something that companies can do to give a face lift to their email marketing campaigns is to offer a more customized newsletter, offering users to choose certain items that interest them. Rather than sending them the latest electronics deals that covers everything from televisions to the kitchen fridge, have them sign up for a more specific department or even a singular product. If a user is looking to buy a new home theater system and a flat screen television, let them subscribe to receive the latest deals and updates for that department. I know that you might feel that by removing those other items from your email you will lose sales on items that people aren’t even thinking about, but I promise you that your audience will begin to trust your brand more through your new marketing techniques. I must also mention that this idea of newsletter categories isn’t always appropriate because sometimes marketers offer too many categories or don’t emphasize the appropriate ones.

Being open with your customers about certain things can have its benefits and often lead to a more harmonious relationship with your customers. I try to nurture an honest relationship with customers in many cases because it is a method that builds great brand loyalty. Another idea that relates to being transparent about your company is being open to new ideas that your customers might have. Give customers a way to voice their opinions, even if you want to keep their opinions confidential.

Recently a computer programmer created some audio drivers to make older audio cards manufactured by Creative Technology Windows Vista compatible. Rather than applauding his efforts and thanking him, Creative accused him for “stealing their goods”. The result of this action caused a backlash online where Creative customers became outraged and many of them promised never to purchase Creative products again.

I will admit that this rule won’t apply to everyone. Companies who in the tech industry for example aren’t able to be as transparent about their operations and flaws because it will benefit the competition. I don’t expect to see Apple have a sudden change in mind about their loose lips sink ships policy where the few rumors that escape Cupertino end up landing someone in a court case.

There’s something new going on with companies now that online presences is becoming more and more common. Companies are beginning to have conversations with their audience, and this results in a lot of good and bad publicity. As many marketers have said in the past, there is no such thing as bad publicity. For a new brand this idea might fly with me, but for an established brand it can hurt your image immensely. The last thing you want your marketing department to do is tarnish your image through bad customer relations. Actually, this idea not only applies to your marketing department, but any department that mingles with the customers. Make sure that everyone in your company knows how important it is to treat everyone with respect and hire only those who have proven to be honorable and generally nice people. Cut throat is great when it comes to taking on the competition, but make sure your people know they can’t take that type of attitude out into the world with them.

I’m about to head out the door and catch a plane for a 5 day retreat to the Disneyland for grown up web nerds, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. While I’m away I will be attending the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. For 4 days there will be conferences, panels, open discussions and meet-ups all about current and upcoming web applications. If you’re an attendee you can request a meet-up with me through the Web 2.0 Crowdvine site. If you are interested in seeing what I’ll be up to, check out my Web 2.0 Expo schedule and Twitter page.

I’ll be taking a lot of video and still images while I’m away, so expect a follow up post with some more stimulating content and a wrap-up.