This year, as in years past, the Schipulites will have a small contingent joining thousands of other marketing and technology nerds in Austin for the Interactive portion of the SXSW festival.  And… to say that we are excited would be the greatest understatement of the year

Here are the Schipulites that are attending SXSWi this year and some of the panels we are most looking forward to!  Keep up with ALL of our SXSWi-related content on our shiny  new Storme site at:  www.storme.com/sxsw

Katie Laird – Communications Manager + Cupcake Lover
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/happykatie + www.twitter.com/schipul
Blog:  http://blog.schipul.com + www.happykatie.com
Storme:  www.storme.com/happykatie

Katie’s top 5 panels:

1. Big Brother in Your Brain:  Neuroscience + Marketing
2. Content Strategy FTW
3. From Trolls to Stars:  The Commenter Ecosystem
4. Open Leadership: The Upside of Giving Up Control
5. Okay, I know it’s cheesy because it’s my panel but…  Kicking Recession Ass with a Killer Company Culture (SO EXCITED!)

Jonti Bolles – All Star SEM Manager + Fitness Geek
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/jonti + www.twitter.com/semblog
Blog:  www.thesemblog.com + www.inmybesthealth.com

Jonti’s top 5 panels:

1. Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web
2. Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery
3. Life After Wii Fit: Geeks on Fitness
4. Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends
5. Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data

David Stagg – Creative Guru + David Beckham lookalike
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/dstagg
Blog:  www.dstagg.com
Storme:  www.storme.com/dstagg

David’s top 3 panels (designers are minimalists, yo):

1. How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business Model
2. CSS3 with HTML5
3. Directing the Dead

JJ Lassberg – Brilliant Brilliant Project Manager + Earth Mama
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/jjlassberg
Blog:  www.jjlassberg.com

JJ’s top 5 panels:

1. Why Keep Blogging
2. Citizen Journalism Brigade
3. Kick-Ass cast can’t see through wall but they can kick your ass
4. How to spark a movement in the 21^st century
5. The Yelp Effect: When Everyone’s A Restaurant Critic

Courtney Pemberton – Sales Gal Extraordinaire + All Around Peppy Gal
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/cpembyrun
Storme page:  www.storme.com/cpembyrun

Courtney’s top 5 panels:

1. Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won’t Work
2. The Inside Workings of FunnyorDie.com
3. Bam! An Entire Statewide University System Goes Virtual
4. Sex Education in a Web 3.0 World (Don’t judge me )
5. Slashing Through Red-Tape to Revolutionize Corporate Communication

Caitlin Kaluza - Social Media Project All Star + Cat Lover With a Wii Problem
Twitter:  www.twitter.com/qcait
Blog:  www.qcait.com

Caitlin’s top 5 panels:

1. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our (Real Life) Social
2. Customer Support in a 140 Character World
3. Zombies, Vampires & Monsters: Fostering Loyal Genre Communities
4. Social Gaming: Lessons from the Pioneers
5. Data is Money: How Geeks are Changing Finance

What panels and events are you most excited about?  Hope to see you there!!  Be sure to say howdy if you walk on by – even if we’re busy Tweeting / blogging / video-ing

Welcome New Guys! from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

The Schipul family has grown this week with the addition of three new interns:  James Nguyen, Chris Minor and Mark Francis will be helping out the next couple of months so let’s all give them a warm welcome and watch their intro video above!

Fayza’s Last Day from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

The Schipulites bid ’see ya’ soon’ to our very own Fayza last week and now have a fun video to archive the experience

Wondering what to do with the mostly sunny, high of 68, weather this weekend?

Well, just so happens there is something pretty dang cool to do this Saturday afternoon… The Live Oak Friends Meeting Peace Festival. Think music, art, dancing, fun and food… Quaker Style.

Peace Festival: March 6, 2010

A day of celebration and networking with local and national organizations working to improve our community!

Where: Live Oak Friends Meeting, 1318 West 26th St., Houston, Texas
When: 1:00PM – 8:00PM

• Live Music by Zachary Ford, Tyagaraja, listenlisten, Much Love, Spain Colored Orange, Electric Attitude, Lapel, Macy McKinzie, Meghan Miller, Jordan Cervantez, and Micah Lamb

• Dance performance by Dancepatheater and Brazilian Arts Foundation

• Vendors & artists selling their merchandise/works (vendors/artists interested in a table, contact Peg Nosek at mnosek@bcm.tmc.edu)

For information contact Lidney Molnari at lidneymolnari@yahoo.com

SPAM can pile up in your blog. Learn how to get rid of it.

Why people Spam

Before diving into the problem of comment SPAM, I’d like to answer this question: Why do people SPAM? The biggest purpose of comment SPAM is SEO-related. One of the things Google and the others factor into their algorithms is linkbacks. A linkback is any link from an external site back to your website. In many comment forms on blogging platforms there is an option to include a website, which is then linked to your name when you leave a comment. This is a way of telling people who it is that is leaving the comment. Spammers use this opportunity to link to trashy SPAM websites that make pennies per visitor. If they rank higher in the search engines for keywords like “free viagra”, they can drive more traffic and make more pennies. Pennies turn into dollars which turn into Benjamins, and you get the picture. However, this doesn’t work very well for the spammers.

While most of the blogging platforms include comments and do send links, they include a little piece of code that prevents linkbacks. It’s called a “nofollow” link. It tells Google not to count a link as a linkback. Google doesn’t follow the link, so that website isn’t given any benefit. It’s an optional setting, but it is turned on for professional blogs as well as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com hosted blogs. We don’t use nofollow links on this blog so that we can pass along benefits to our commenters. However, spammers don’t know that we do this, and they don’t seem to care much either way. Even with nofollow links, the spammers will still attack your site. Now that we know the why, lets look into the “what” of comment SPAM.

What Comment SPAM looks like

Most people can identify the obvious SPAM very quickly. It is riddled with links to ED drugs or other pharmaceuticals, or in some cases it is written in Russian. This kind of SPAM is automated by the spammers and can be caught by filters. The other types of SPAM are much harder to identify. They look more like real comments. Here is an example (the link doesn’t work):

From Investment Ideas: Great Post! I stumble by this blog from Google and your content really speaks to me. You are an expert in your field and this post is proof. I am now subscribing to read more.

At first glance this looks like a very nice comment. It is probably one you would be proud to have at the bottom of your posts. Unfortunately, it is SPAM. The “name” of the commenter is used as a keyword to create a linkback to the URL, which in this case is also about investment ideas. The text sounds very nice, but it would probably sound very nice on any of your posts. These types of comments have a few things in common, and you can become a pro at identifying it and removing it.

How to Identify and Stop SPAM

Unfortunately, this kind of SPAM is not caught by the filters because it looks genuine. In many cases it is even entered by a real person (often overseas). They copy/paste a snippet on many sites as fast as possible. But, you can spot it when moderating your comments. Here is three-item test to identify the tricky SPAM:

1. The name looks like a description and not really a person’s name. In the example, it is Investment Ideas.
2. The link goes to a site very similar to the name. It may also include several hyphens, which are sometimes used in spam URLs.
3. The text of the comment is very generic. It doesn’t reference anything in the post and can probably apply to almost any of your posts.

Those three quick tests can help you to identify most comment SPAM. After reviewing the fake comment above, you will see that it includes all three of the regular pieces of SPAM comments. You may come across some comments that just say “Great Post!”. To determine if these are SPAM you should pay close attention to the name and link. If it is a person’s name and goes to a personal site or blog (like JMO), then it is probably not SPAM.

You will have to use your own discretion when deciding which comments are SPAM on your blog. Comments are great places to have a bit of further discussion about posts. They can add to the “conversation” in many cases, so blocking SPAM is even more important to keep the conversation fluid. While comment SPAM can’t hurt you directly, it can look ugly on your blog.

While some sites have turned off comments all together to prevent this, you may still want to keep comments on your site. Using nofollow links can help prevent the spammers from gaining anything with their garbage, but it will still pile up in the back and can clutter your real comments. Moderating your comments regularly and having a keen eye for SPAM can protect your site from the evils of comment SPAM.

UPDATE:

I have decided it to let the SPAM comments show up on this post so you can see some examples of what we get. I will neuter them by removing the link, but the text and name of the commenter will be left alone (unless it’s profane). Our first winner is “Affiliate Network”.

Awesome SPAM creative commons image thanks to freezelight.

Wait a second. The stapler wasn't a parting gift?

When I was 21, I decided to move to Los Angeles.  Out of the blue.  I’d never expressed much interest in permanently relocating out of Ohio before, but following a semester in Washington, D.C., by golly, I felt invincible enough to do just about anything.

My mother, understandably, was flummoxed.  She posed every question in the world that a parent could possibly conjure.  “Where will you live?” “Where will you work?” “What if something happens to you while you’re out there; you don’t know anyone…?” “What if you hate it there?” “What if you miss home?”  “What if your car breaks down on the way?”  “What if Gael Garcia Bernal decides he wants to marry you?”

Okay, no, she didn’t ask that last one.  Duh.  It’s obvious that he does.  He responded to me on Twitter once.  I still think it was real, no matter what his official account says.

Anyway, the thing is, my mother never once said, “Don’t go, Fayza.”  Despite her unanswered questions and despite her personal fears.  Do you know why?  Because she knew it was good for me. As hard as it was to see her eldest daughter pack up her inconsistent-at-best 1989 Honda Accord with everything she could stuff into it and head off across the country to inhabit a city she’d never even visited, my mom knew it was the right move for me.  To date, it was one of the most pivotal life decisions I’ve ever made.  In a good way.

Why did I tell you this story?  Because.  Because I like stories?  Well, yes, but there’s a point; I’ve become very sage over the years, dontcha know.  The moral is this:  Sometimes, it’s hard to let a member of your family fly. But spread their wings they must.  Because fly they should.

And taking flight from the family nest I am, again.  For today, with both a smile and a sigh, I turn in my Schipulite badge and bid the roost adieu.

“But what now?”  you ask.  Don’t worry; I’m not dying.  Nor am I leaving the city of Houston.  I know, right?

If you couldn’t tell, I’m quite passionate about writing.  This hunger knows no bounds (and, some would say, no boundaries).  I also happen to be a Twitteraholic and a Facebook fiend. And when a position as the Social Media Editor at CultureMap was staring me in the face, I knew it was my time to flap ye olde wings again.

But I don’t do goodbyes, yo.  Because the strangers who became my sisters and brothers at this company are people who will remain in my life for years to come.  And the knowledge I’ve earned, the skills I’ve learned, and the client experiences that I’ve had will stay with me and fuel my growth ’til my brain can’t hold no more.  I’ve been a lucky little person, that’s for sure. And I take that luck with me in my pockets.  Like office supplies.  Um, did I just say that?  Ignore me.

So this is not a goodbye, ’cause HEY!  Here I am, loud and clear, still kickin’!  And so are you.  It’s a see-you-later, at best, and a now-we’re-gonna-have-to-make-lunch-plans at worst.  ‘Cause you know where to find me.  So please do.

News geek and Schipul pal Mike McGuff had a great conversation with newly elected Houston Mayor Annise Parker on her use of Social Media strategy in the mayoral election and what the future holds for citywide Social Media usage.

(Disclosure:  Schipul was a sponsor in helping Mike put together this great interview)

You know those little copper disks that we leave laying on the ground ‘cause they’re worth so little.

No more bombs, no more causalities, no more terror… peace… for pennies.

That’s just what Nobel Peace Prize nominee and The New York Times best-selling author Greg Mortenson thinks is possible… and he has been focused on just that for the last 16 years.

The son of educators himself, his devotion to building schools began in 1993. After failing to mount K2, the world’s second highest mountain – an adventure undertaken to honor his youngest sister, who died of cerebral epilepsy – he lost his way and stumbled into a small, remote village in Pakistan, where people took him in, nursing him back to health. Out of gratitude, he pledged to return and build a school… read more>>

And return to build a school is just what he did… and has done 131 times over. Build schools for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan to say thank you to those generous, open-hearted, people who took him into their homes and nursed him back to health.

Mortenson has shared that,

“In my own observation, educated women tend to refuse to allow their sons to join terrorism groups,” he says, adding that about 30 of the 1,100 teachers he knows in Afghanistan are former Taliban sympathizers, who explained to him that they defected after their mothers told them it was “disgraceful.”

I had the joy of getting to attend a luncheon where Dr. Greg (as the people of Korphe nick-named him) spoke about his experiences helping to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What I took away most were not the staggering statistics or the pleas for policy change… what stayed with me, haunted me, inspired me to share with friends and family and co-worker and anyone who would listen were the stories of the people Mortenson has connected with along his journey.

Here at Schipul we are very focused on the art and power of storytelling. We help our clients craft and share their stories and we have a culture of supporting our fellow Schipulites in telling their own personal stories.

In “Half the Sky” Nicholad D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn write,

Frankly, we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.

I for one can attest to the power of storytelling, based on my experience at the “3 Cups of Tea” luncheon. One week has passed since the luncheon and what I remember most is that 1 dollar will fund a child’s education for an entire month and the story below…

Mortenson had a meeting with shura (a council of elders) in Oruzgan province in volatile, southern Afghanistan. He wanted to build a girl’s high school in this Taliban controlled part of the country and these men’s approval was the key. The shura asked to visit one of the Central Asia Institutes (CAI) schools. Mortenson shared that these very powerful men arrived with long black beards, black turbans, machine guns and belts of grenades. What these men noticed was the playground at the school and for an hour and a half these men, these fierce powerful ruling men, laid down their weapons and with turbans flying played on the swing set. Mortenson let them have their fun and when it came time to settle into the business of the visit the shura said there was no need to meet… they were satisfied. They would give him the land, the supplies, the labor he needed… he would have his high school.

What Mortenson realized was that for these men, raised in a country at war… from the moment they could walk they were taught to fight. These men, these fierce, armed, powerful men had never been allowed to be children. They had never played… and what they wanted for their children was a school where they could swing and play and learn.

If this story moves you and you want to know more about Mortenson and the Central Asia Institutes work building schools check out:

1. http://www.threecupsoftea.com/
2. https://www.ikat.org/
3. http://www.penniesforpeace.org/

Posting a message in Buzz

Unless you are a huge, die-hard fan of our favorite search engine, you probably had no idea Google was creating a new software product. And that it would take over our inboxes and (inadvertently) share our lives with everyone. Welcome to Google Buzz.

WTF is this Buzz thing?

Google Buzz is a new product from Google that lets you share things. If you use Google Reader, then you will likely recognize the interface. The two both include a list of posts with information like who it’s from, when it was shared, and a list of comments below each item. It is strikingly familiar in design to FriendFeed, your Facebook Newsfeed, and in some ways, Twitter. All include shared updates from friends with the option for additional feeds and pictures/video.

Buzz is almost identical to Friendfeed in the way it allows you to merge outside services like Blog Feeds, Twitter updates, and Google Reader shared items into one constant stream of sharing. To add these settings in Buzz, you must first have configured a Google Profile (you have that setup, right?). Then, after your feeds are added there, Google Buzz will allow you to add them to Buzz by selecting them from the Connected Sites link in Buzz. While allowing you to share things and see your friends’ shared things, you can also add comments on anything. You can follow along with the conversation and even have new comments show up in your Gmail inbox.

Google Buzz Main Entry Box. Look familiar?

The big difference in the Google service is that you already start out following everyone in your Google Contacts, which often includes people you may have emailed once or twice in the past few years. For most of us, this is a huge concern because we are now sharing things with people we never intended to share with.

If you have a phone like the iPhone or an Android phone, then Google Buzz will also share your location. This has been done by other services, but it is a major privacy concern for this opt-out service.

The Opt-Out and Privacy Concerns

Opt-out services, where you are automatically signed up, are usually not great for you (with the exception of 401ks). You get hooked into something that you never chose to use. Instead of giving Buzz it’s own URL and special place on the web, Google just stuck it in your Gmail inbox. Everyone was signed up without a great explanation of Buzz. You have to manually go in a either remove people from your contacts or block them.

Lets use an analogy. Imagine if, when you first signed up for Facebook and entered in your high school and class year, you automatically became friends with everyone else from your class. Except Facebook didn’t tell you or give you an option to opt-out of this. Facebook wants to get you started building friends so it adds some for you. They think they are helping. And now, you have to un-friend hundreds of people that you don’t care to share your life with anymore.

Google thinks they are doing us a favor, but I don’t feel helped very much. The privacy settings on Google Buzz are granular, meaning everything can be set to private, but you have to hunt and search to find out where. Harriet at Fungitivus ran into this problem. All of her Google Reader shared items were instantly exposed to anyone in her “recent contacts”, which contained many old email addresses from random past emails. Google Reader is public by default, but no one may have been viewing it if you were using it on a private email account. Buzz now exposes this to all of your recent contacts.

The privacy settings are all available to be turned off or configured specifically, but the notion of being set to public by default is not cool. Facebook has run into trouble like this before and has had to scramble to fix things. I have faith that Google is already working on a better all-out admin interface for settings, but nothing like that has been released yet.

Getting rid of the Buzz

Google Reader Sharing Settings

You can set all of your Connected sites to be private by setting them as such when adding them. To update your Google Reader settings, you have to open the sidebar, click the + on the People you follow list, and click sharing settings. Chances are your shared items are set to Public (the default). You can view a list of people following you and Block them by default if you wish. But, you must do this individually. Business Insider has a nice walk-through to make some things private.

You can also set anything you do to private, and select a group of people to share with. These groups come from Google Contacts, which many people may not use unless they sync them with a mobile device. They are editable within Gmail. By not connecting any sites, blocking all of your “followers”, and unfollowing everyone, you can effectively get off of Google Buzz. But it will still exist right next to your inbox in Gmail, at least for the time being. UPDATE: Mark from the comments tell us that you can simply turn off Buzz in the Gmail footer. Thanks for the tip!

Implications of Buzz

With Buzz, I see Google trying to be the central hub for online human interaction. It’s the place you email, chat, use documents, share pictures and links, and now bring in some of your outside services. Google is very late to the party, as many of these kinds of services have been done by other companies. The idea of having everything in one place is wonderful, but even that has been done before to limited success.

Google is a bit different, though. They already have many of us hooked into their services. If you were on Twitter two years ago, or joined facebook three years ago, then I’d bet money you are using Gmail. If you know how to subscribe to RSS feeds, then you are likely using Google Reader.  Google already has us using their services, and they are betting with Buzz that we will choose to use Google for even more.

However, not everything can be done with Buzz, which is the beginning of the problem. I recently moved to Tumblr for sharing things online, and I can’t find a way to bring that feed into Buzz. You also can’t bring in Facebook updates, but that is due to Facebook’s sharing policies and not Buzz. People that are already using other sites like Friendfeed will not come over willingly, since Buzz only replicates that service and doesn’t add much visible value. The hidden change is in using the data power of Google to decide what is Signal and what is Noise, and how that distinction is different for everyone. That will take some time to come through, which is why I’m not yet buying into Buzz.

Final Thoughts on Buzz

One of the reasons that Facebook is successful is that it connects you with Real People, not just with online personas. Almost all other services allow people to create personas and hide behind them. Facebook strips most of that away, so that who you are on Facebook is closely related to who you are offline. By tying users to their email address, Google has the opportunity to do the same with Buzz. I can “follow” celebrities and such in Buzz, but seeing the enormous string of comments will be overwhelming and unhelpful. Instead, I will follow people that I know in the real world.

This online persona/offline Real Person is a big distinction. You may be a fan of a teeny-bopper pop singer, but you probably don’t want to send them pictures of you grandkids. The privacy settings in Buzz can be used to share different things with different people, which is a great feature once you setup your groups. And after some time of seeing what your Buzz friends share, you can parse your list into a readable stream of interesting information.

I am generally a big fan of Google, but Buzz may take some time to get used to.

So what  about those who live without clean drinking water? You see them every day and more often than not, glance towards the other window in hopes of a red light turning green.

One woman not only stopped to take a deeper look, but realized the hope and inspiration a simple bottle of water could bring to those less fortunate…thus, creating the I Am Waters Foundation.

“I knew I needed to “Bring water to the homeless” and not just any water, but water with special messages delivered by powerful words such as Love, Faith, Gratitude, and Peace. These words may be the only source of inspiration for a person on the street. My goal is to fill the hearts, minds, and bodies of all of the women, children, and men who don’t have access to life’s most basic necessities.”

-Founder, Elena Davis

Elena Davis is quite a remarkable woman in the fact that it’s not just about the water…it’s about giving the homeless inspiration to succeed in life. It’s about sharing the real-life stories and the trials of day-to-day obstacles. It’s about Steven Higgins realizing his potential through one single photo…

This is the cognition of our world and it is refreshing to see a movement for revitalization.

So how can you help “bring physical and spiritual hydration to the homeless?”

Please vote for the I Am Waters Foundation in the Pepsi Refresh Project contest – rewarding $250,000 in grants to those who are creating a positive impact in their community. If I Am Waters receives the funding, they would be able to extend their efforts in order to bring a human face to the homelessness problem in America, deliver water to American’s homeless, and revitalize the homeless with messages of inspiration.

Voting ends February 28th!

To find out more information about the I Am Waters Foundation, connect with them through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube!

*The I Am Waters Foundation is one of Schipul’s newest clients and we are absolutely thrilled to be working with Elena!