Center for Citizen Media

Engadget, the electronics blog, has a detailed iPhone 3G review today. Good overall, but then, near the top, is this whopper:

And its 3G network compatibility finally makes the iPhone welcome the world over, especially after Cupertino decided to ditch its non-traditional carrier partnerships in favor of dropping the handset price dramatically. $200? We’re still a little stunned.

The 3G makes it mostly world-wide in coverage, but the notion that Apple has dropped the handset price to $200 is absolutely, totally bogus.

Apple did nothing of the kind. The company calling itself AT&T is subsidizing the device. But cheaper? Not on your life. In fact, you’ll pay hundreds of dollarsa minimum of $160 more, and maybe lots more during your subscription period of you buy this thing. (Yes, you’ll get the 3G that the company calling itself AT&T offers as part of the deal, but not many other serious benefits unless you’re desperate for GPS.)

Engadget got suckered by the hype this time. A correction is in order.

For the past several years I’ve been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.

One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It’s called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it’s gaining adherents all the time.

Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has a growing and passionate user base.

The philosophy at 37signals is to do a few things — the ones that users truly want and need most — really well, and skip the rest. Basecamp exemplifies this notion. It’s not nearly as powerful as some other project-management tools, but it’s proved to be indispensible.

I’ve used Basecamp in a number of things ranging from a class project, where we worked on creating a website for the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (alpha site here); planning and operating a nonprofit center; and organizing and operating the development of a for-profit startup.

There’s enough flexibility in the service for lots of different uses. I’ve found the messaging; to-do lists; and milestone planning especially valuable.

You can create RSS feeds of almost everything, and there’s a nifty email method for handling message. Recently, Basecamp added the ability to respond to an emailed (via Basecamp) message in an email reply.

There’s also access to “Writeboards” — where you post documents you’re sharing. This is modestly useful, but doesn’t come close to matching Google’s online document collaboration system; if several people in a small organization are tweaking a spreadsheet, for example, Google or a round-robin email is far superior to the Basecamp method.

The system has its flaws. One that drives me nuts is the inability to add new people to projects in “batch mode” — that is, more than one at a time — forcing me to do each one separately, a time-consuming process. I asked the company in a support email about adding the feature and got the kind of non-committal response that I took to mean, “We’re not interested in doing that, so don’t hold your breath.”

More problematically for me and others who are offline (typically in airplanes) a lot: There’s no offline mode. By this I mean there’s no way to suck down the entire project to your personal computer, make changes and then have them reflected back to the online project when you reconnect. Admittedly, this is difficult, and can cause versioning problems, not to mention oddities in online conversations where the thread can get confused. But it’s not impossible, and I’d be much happier if Basecamp had this capability.

Overall, however, Basecamp has proved to be a great tool for small-team collaboration, and expecially so when people are distant geographically as they are in several of my projects. There’s a free, limited-feature version. Monthly charges for the more extensive features range from $24 to $149; I pay $49 a month for capabilities that include SSL encryption security and as many as 35 active projects at once.

The McClatchy Washington bureau series, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, puts to shame almost all the other reporting by other news organizations. It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported.

One other paper has noticed. The Boston Phoenix asks, Is anybody paying attention to McClatchy’s powerful Guantánamo exposé?

Apparently, no. Another example of Washington journalism at work, or not at work.

(This is the thirteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The last Citizen Media Business Issues post concerned the first step to establishing a website: registering a domain. A domain, however, is nothing more than a name to help people to identify and remember your site. The next step, then, is to make something for that domain to display. These two steps are separate, and treating them as such is advisable (see Registering a Domain for more on why).

Web content is stored on servers, computers with substantial connections to the Internet that map what a user types in their web browser to a file you’ve created. While it’s technically possible-with a bit of know-how-to make almost any computer function as a basic server, using your home PC and broadband connection to host a website is a bad idea. It won’t save you much money (if any), takes a lot of time, poses a security risk, and will be unreliable at best. Even if your ISP is one that doesn’t forbid web hosting (as Comcast does), the connection you have almost certainly isn’t robust enough to serve small amounts of content to more than a handful of people. Considering the cost to get a more reliable connection-such as a “T1″ line-runs at least a few hundred dollars a month, you’ll probably be better off going through a web hosting service.

But where to start? There are thousands of companies who want to sell hosting to you at wildly varying prices. Should you go with a free host because you “have nothing to lose?” Should you use the biggest, most populous company for its reliability?

A good first step is to make a list of what you want in terms of specs and features, starting with the three most important…

Bandwidth, Storage Space, and the Ability to Upgrade

Bandwidth refers to how much data can be sent to or from users. If your bandwidth allocation is 1GB/month and your average page is 100k (rather large), then you will be able to deliver approximately 10,000 pages before service is stopped or you’re hit with a surcharge. Every time a user looks at a piece of text, image, podcast, Flash program, JavaScript, video, or any other file, it is transferred to them and subtracts from your bandwidth allotment (embedded or linked multimedia like YouTube videos don’t count).

Once you’ve started and have a feel for the amount of traffic coming in, a common formula for determining bandwidth needs is to multiply together the average daily visitors, average page views per visitor, and average page size, multiply that by 31 (days in a month), then double your result.

[Web statistics like page views and daily visitors will be more deeply covered in a later post.]

Storage is the amount of hard drive space on the server you will have available for all of your text, media, and programs. How much you need depends on the sort of content you’ll be offering. If you plan to only link to third-party sites for multimedia and won’t be storing large files, you probably don’t have to go overboard, but you also don’t want to be in a position of being forced to delete old content because you’ve run out of space.

The ability to upgrade is key. Launching a new site, it’s hard to know exactly what it’ll look like down the road and even harder to determine how much traffic it will attract. Use your best guess in the beginning (a couple hundred MB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth will usually be fine starting points for most), but be sure that whatever host you pick will allow you to bump these up if necessary without incurring additional set-up fees. When comparing prices, take note of the differences in storage/bandwidth levels above what you’re initially looking for. You might find that some companies offer a basic plan at low cost, but increase prices sharply for upgrades.

Other Features to Think About

Subdomains are what come before your domain name in a URL. They are primarily used for organizational purposes. For example, you may wish to point a user to http://news.yoursite.com for news instead of http://www.yoursite.com/news/.

eCommerce web hosting refers primarily to shopping cart software and on-site credit card processing. Some sites give you the features (like a static IP and appropriate language support) to bring in such software and set it up yourself, but it’s difficult to do so. Getting an eCommerce hosting package usually entails everything being done for you. Having a shopping cart and processing credit cards right on your site certainly feels more professional than redirecting users to third party sites, but if selling a variety of things is not your site’s raison d’être, you probably don’t need this.

You will have to decide which operating system you want to run: Unix or Windows. Whether or not you run Windows at home is, for the most part, irrelevant, and unless you know of a particular reason you have to use Windows (such as being an avid Visual Basic programmer), Unix is the more popular choice-and probably the better choice for citizen journalist types given the much wider array of free software available for it.

Most websites today use more programming languages than just html. For example, if you want to have a forum or blog, you’ll need to use database software like MySQL, which is almost always part of the deal. Language support will in some part depend on which operating system the server is run on, but Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL compatibility is a good standard.

FrontPage Extensions if you will use Microsoft FrontPage to create your web pages.

Multiple email addresses. Email is a standard feature, but if you want to create addresses for several people (members of an organization, users, contributors, and so on), you’ll need to make sure the limit is high enough.

The level of customer support varies wildly from host to host. Phone support is helpful, but don’t get too excited about 24/7 call centers. It can increase your out-of-pocket cost and many of them are staffed overseas by people who may be better trained at selling additional services than being able to help you without the aid of an administrator who doesn’t work 24/7. Make a call at an odd hour and send an email with specific questions about the services beforehand to see how it’s handled. How long did it take to get a response to the email? Did it answer your questions well? Did a knowledgeable person pick up the phone?

Server Use

When shopping for a host, you will see large price differences between dedicated, virtual, and shared server space. These terms refer to usage of a single machine-you share a server with others, have one dedicated to you, or use a server that has been partitioned into separate “virtual” servers. Dedicated servers are, of course, much faster than shared servers, but if the main reason you want a dedicated server is for the technical control/administrative flexibility it allows, virtual servers will function the same way without the increased bandwidth. The vast majority of web pages are run on shared servers, which is a fine place to start. Very few of you will really need the features of a virtual server, and if you do at some point, you can always switch over. Likewise, a dedicated server is almost definitely overkill, but you can always upgrade if you need to.

Reading Marketing Material

Look for money back guarantees. As with most good business transactions, you should be allowed to cancel and get a refund within a certain timeframe if their services aren’t up to par.

Beware the word “unlimited!” So many bargain hosts advertise “unlimited bandwidth,” but fail to point out that your bandwidth is limited by their bandwidth. If you’re on a crummy server packed to the gills, your “unlimited bandwidth” could be substantially slower than other companies’ “limited” bandwidth. Remember that the people you’re sharing the server with have the same unlimited bandwidth. Should one of them decide to become a popular place to download huge files, with no bandwidth cap you will suffer.

The more a company talks (brags) about its server specs and tells you exactly what to expect, the better. One useful such metric is an uptime percentage, which is literally the percentage of time the host’s sites have been up. Hosts themselves are not typically keen on releasing this (though some do, and deserve credit for it), but there are a number of third party programs that will measure it over time. A common marketing tactic is the “uptime guarantee.” This “guarantee” is not actually a sure thing, but a promise that if the the stated measure is not met, you will be compensated. To what extent you are compensated and how difficult it is to prove, however, are another matter. GoDaddy, for example, has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, but a look into the GoDaddy Legal Agreement reveals the way it really works:

If Go Daddy fails to maintain this level of service availability, You may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of Your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes.

Cost

While free/bargain hosts sound attractive, there are almost always huge disadvantages. Most will force you to display some sort of advertising, which can make your site look very unprofessional (see, for example, any free Geocities page). They are also typically less reliable, slower, have little or no support, may not be around long, and have far fewer features. You should expect that a good host will cost somewhere in the vicinity of $10-$20/mo.

Blog-Hosting Services

The most notable exceptions to the “avoid free hosts” rule are blog-hosting services. These are, as the name suggests, companies that will host your weblog-usually at little or no cost. The next post will go into more detail as to the pros, cons, and differences between these services, but basically, blogs are a cheap, easy, and fast way to get your content out to the world. They come with a variety of features, but are constrained by the blog format and can’t pack dynamism that a regular website can.

While basic templates and the use of subdomains like http://yourblog.wordpress.com can give off an amateurish vibe, most of these services can be extensively customized visually and subdomains can be rendered somewhat invisible by a forwarding domain name (see post on registering a domain name for more on this). Or, even better than forwarding, some of these sites allow you to treat them like normal little web hosts, “mapping” your domain to their servers and skipping the subdomain altogether (Blogger provides this feature at no cost, but most require an upgrade).

Mega Hosts, Resellers, and Everybody Else

So you have your list of desired features and you know about a few things to look for or avoid, but there are still so many choices. Mega hosts like GoDaddy and 1&1 Internet host millions of sites. They’re good because you know they aren’t going anywhere, will be fairly cheap, and will have giant user bases to draw from for help should customer support not provide what you need. On the other hand, their primary concern is to pump out as many sites as possible, often cramming too many sites on a server. They also are less likely to bend over backwards to help you and less likely to think twice before taking down controversial content.

Note: If free speech protection is important to you, the Citizen Media Law Project has a great section on free speech in its Legal Issues to Consider When Getting Online section and Dedicated Hosting Guide has a list of “11 Web Hosts that Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy.” GoDaddy has a problematic reputation in this regard.

On the other end of the spectrum are resellers. Similar to the reselling practice in domain registration, hosting resellers are people or companies who buy space from hosts wholesale, then market and sell it to you. The upside to doing business with a reseller is that it’s cheaper and they tend to have decent interfaces. However, they don’t have physical access to the server and you will frequently have to rely on them to act as middleman (and you’ll have to rely on the host they work with). Reselling is an easy business to get into, so they can be unreliable and many are just there to make a quick buck or as a hobbyist project. While there are, of course, many reputable and reliable resellers out there, the cost of web hosting has come down so much over the years that deals you get through a reseller are probably not worth the risk.

Your best bet may be to find something in between-a mid-sized host that offers the features you want, the ability to upgrade, and that you’ve properly checked out. Finding a host is kind of a big deal; you don’t have to do it often (hopefully never again), and picking the wrong one could cost you readers and a great deal of time, so put a little effort into it. A great forum for finding reviews (not to mention deals, advice, and technical how-tos) is WebHostingTalk.com. Avoid what looks too good to be true, do your homework, leave some options open, and read the fine print.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

(This is the twelfth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The first step to establishing a website is registering a domain name. This will be your address-and to some extent, your identity-on the Internet.

Technical Overview

A domain name’s function is to neatly label a computer on the web, so that someone looking for a website doesn’t have to remember a string of numbers (the IP address) in order to find it. To make this process work without conflicts, domains are registered for periods of 1-10 years at a time. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers manages this structure, known as the Domain Name System (DNS), and keeps it stable, overseeing registries (directories) and accrediting registrars (those with access to registries). In effect, the registrar acts as an agent between you and the registry and will generally collect a fee for doing so.

Naming Your Domain

Though there some exceptions, an ideal domain name is short, catchy, and intuitive. It looks good written down and sounds good when vocalized. It also helps if it is the same as the name of the site itself. If there is a business, product, print newspaper, or other specific entity that the website will be supporting, it probably makes sense to pick a similarly named domain.

Beyond the basic name, you also have to pick a Top Level Domain, the most popular of which are .com, .net, .org, and .info. In most cases, .com is best. If someone tells you to visit a website called “CityNews,” odds are good that the first thing you enter into your browser will be “CityNews.com.” It’s so popular that the term “dot com” has become synonymous with “website.” An exception to the preference of .com may be the use of .org when you want to put emphasis on the public service nature of your work (nonprofits, community organization, and so on).

If the domain you want is available, grab it ASAP, but be prepared for many or all of the first names you think of to be taken-especially if you’re looking for a .com. Along with this bad news, most registrars will show you whether or not other Top Level Domains with the same name are available. For example, if CityNews.com isn’t available, it might offer you CityNews.info. If you end up going with an alternative like this, make sure to visit the existing .com of the same name first. You wouldn’t want a misdirected potential reader going to the wrong place and finding something unrelated and offensive.

If you’re stuck and looking for name ideas, you could do what the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship did: enlist the help of a name generator like MakeWords or NameBoy. These tools don’t just rearrange the keywords you feed them, but provide all sorts of new ideas and allow for a bit of flexibility, allowing you to specify how you want the domain to start or end, whether or not it can use hyphens, etc. The generated ideas are accompanied by charts that give you a pretty good idea what’s currently available to buy. When I go to NameBoy and enter “news” as my primary keyword and “city” as my secondary, it returns, among hundreds of other available options, newscitycenter.com, updatecity.org, newsmetropolis.com, newsandcity.com, and infocitiez.com.

Choosing a Registrar

A key informational website, InterNIC, is home to the accredited registrar directory, which lists hundreds upon hundreds of places to get your domain name. Beyond these, you can get a domain through a reseller-a company that has partnered with a registrar in a sort of affiliate program so that it can sell registrations to its customers. So how does one choose from these thousands of possibilities?

As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of differences.

Although there are plenty of reputable resellers out there, it’s probably best to go straight through a registrar. Sometimes you’ll be able to get discounts through resellers, but the cost to register a domain name has dropped so much that these deals are pretty insubstantial unless you’re buying domains in bulk (saving a few dollars a year in most cases, with domains direct from a registrar going for about $7-$18). Those discounts might also be accompanied by a different kind of expense: you may be required to buy hosting from the reseller, you may have to display advertisements, or support may be lacking. A registrar is also more likely than a reseller to be around years from now. If nothing else, you’re paying a couple bucks for peace of mind and to do away with the extra layer of paperwork and additional terms of use.

Even though ICANN has set up some strict rules for ownership, registration, and transfer of domains, you should still read all terms of use thoroughly before signing up. There are stories all over the web of illegal or unfavorable terms of use, required additional services, and hidden “transfer-out fees,” among other gotchas.

DomainTools has compiled a size-based ranking of all registrars with at least 1,000 domains as of the end of 2007. This may be useful if you want the to compare the established big-name services.

One other factor to consider is how various registrars deal with matters of free speech. The world’s two largest registrars, GoDaddy and eNom, have both been in the news in the last year or so for suspending accounts based on content (see here, here, here, and here). News.com surveyed 12 large registrars as to their suspension policies and found the “most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspension” with Gandi and DirectNIC. You can find the completed surveys (only 4 of the 12 actually responded), at the bottom of the News.com story.

Registrars, Hosting, and Ownership

A Web host is where the data of your site is actually stored. Hosting will be covered more thoroughly in the next Business Issues post, but I mention it here to make the point that registering your domain name and finding a host are two distinct steps. Some registrars offer hosting in order to sell a complete website package.

Having both in the same place may make things a little easier for you in terms of setup and getting support, but in the long-term it’s advisable to separate the two. Some companies will register the domain in their name, giving it to you as a “feature” of their web hosting or as a package deal. This could mean that you have no rights to the domain should you want hosting elsewhere or if the company goes under.

If you do decide to use one company for both domain registration and hosting, be sure to get in writing a guarantee that you will be able to transfer your domain without fees should you choose to go elsewhere. You can follow up on this by doing a WHOIS query through InterNIC or EasyWhois, which publicly display who a domain is registered to.

On a related note, some registrars offer a feature known as Private Registration for those who don’t want their personal information available through a WHOIS. This can shield you from spam and other unwanted contact and can help to prevent people from knowing your online activities (for example, business competitors who might be interested in the domains you register). To do this, the registrar completes registration under its own name and sets up a written agreement with you to ensure you retain ownership rights. While this is normal practice and there is always some sort of legal agreement involved, it’s a good rule of thumb to retain as much direct control as possible (like having your name on ownership documents).

Domain Forwarding

Domain forwarding is the simple act of pointing your domain name to another location on the Web. There are generally two reasons to do this. First, many people don’t want to bother finding hosting and designing their own website, content to instead use a simpler service like Blogger, Geocities, or LiveJournal. Addresses for sites like these usually look something like http://yoursitename.blogspot.com or http://www.geocities.com/yoursitename. This sort of URL is harder to remember than a dedicated domain name and can make it harder to separate yourself from the crowd. People often have preconceived notions of cookie-cutter designs and content based on which of these popular sites you use. There is an air of credibility and professionalism that you get with your own domain name that is lost when you’re piggybacked on someone else’s.

With domain name forwarding, people visiting it might not even realize they were sent somewhere else. This is especially true if your registrar has a service called “masking,” which keeps your domain name in the user’s browser address bar even after forwarding. This, however, only works for the main page. So if, for example, a user were to click an “archives” link, the true URL will be revealed.

The second reason for domain forwarding is to direct traffic to your site from alternative spellings, incorrect top-level domains, and typos. For example, Google.com has also registered Google.biz, Google.net, Gogle.com, and Gogole.com. These are not independent sites, but rather redirect you to the main site. Even still, Internet marketers have made millions registering misspelled domain names like Giigle.com, Goggle.com, and Guugle.com. The same is true for alternative spellings. Rhode Island newspaper the Providence Journal made sure to forward providencejournal.com to their online presence, projo.com, but they missed theprovidencejournal.com, which has been exploited via ads and news-themed affiliate links.

This practice of registering alternative spellings, called cybersquatting, used to be a much bigger business. In 1999 it was made illegal in cases that met the following three criteria: the trademark owner’s mark is distinct or famous, the domain owner acted in bad faith to profit from it, and the domain name and trademark are either identical or confusingly similar. Unfortunately, since these three criteria all have to be satisfied, cybersquatting can be a tough case to make, so do register as many alternatives as you can.

Miscellaneous Tips

*Keep your whois data up-to-date. You don’t want a notification that your domain is about to expire or was suspended sent to the wrong address.

*Register the domain under your name, not an employee’s, not the registrar’s, and not a pseudonym. The name on the page owns it.

*Do a WHOIS query through InterNIC or EasyWhois when you register and after each renewal to make sure the information is correct. In particular, look for your name and the expiration date. Some registrars have conducted transactions through which you pay them for an extended period, but they only register you for one year at a time, keeping the rest effectively like a loan. This makes for a big problem if you stop doing business with them and they stop renewing.

*Keep your login information secure. This is obvious, but your domain could potentially be your livelihood.

*Unless you’re in the middle of transferring it, “lock” your domain. This prevents you from accidentally falling prey to one of a multitude of transfer scams (a fake notice to renew actually transfers it to someone else).

Additional Resources

The Citizen Media Law Project’s Legal Guide has a wealth of information pertaining to these matters, including sections on trademark law, anonymity, and evaluating terms of service.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Free Press and Public Knowledge have put out a report claiming that “NebuAd Wiretaps Consumers and Hijacks Web Sites.” Quote:

Consumers are having their Web browsing intercepted and Web sites are having their computer code altered by NebuAd, a company that provides targeted advertising for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), according to a technical investigation by Free Press and Public Knowledge.

This is remarkably sleazy behavior, if it’s happening the way the report suggests — and the technical ability of the researcher wins him high credibility.

If this is happening, and if it doesn’t violate some federal and/or state laws, then it’s long overdue for Congress to deal with it.

This kind of stuff gives digital media entrepreneurship a bad name.

Take a look at the great “Video speech matching” project at TheyWorkForYou.com. They’re combining BBC video of the British House of Commons and official text transcripts, and asking people to match keywords and phrases with the videos, to create a time-stamped archive of important debates.

Tom Steinberg, one of the organizers, says the community has responded in force, and people keep signing up to help. There’s no way to do this (at least not yet) with machines, he says, because machine speech recognition can’t (yet) handle all the different accents and dialects in one bite.

This is reminiscent of NASA’s wonderful ClickWorkers project, which relies on human perception to handle what machines can’t do as well. I love it.

At a “Future of Journalism” conference at Harvard, where median age is surely >50. Uh oh…

Others have said this better already, but the Associated Press is on a fool’s errand with its new program in which it aims to charge others — including some bloggers — for making what is blatantly fair use of AP stories. (See the wire’s (unintentionally hilarious) rate details.)

Issuing take-down notices to the Drudge Retort (a community driven site) is obnoxious, plain and simple. Also wrong.

Not only won’t this fly, but it’s a remarkable demonstration of how not to play well on the Web. I know some of the AP folks involved, and I have to assume they’ve been told what to do by their bosses, because they aren’t nearly this clueless.

Meanwhile I’m taking a breather from linking to AP content, at least until sensible people prevail. Good grief.