"Small Business Conversations by Network Solutions" - 2 new articles
Personality Leakage: Involuntary Exposure to Friend / Follower BeliefsIf your Facebook career is anything like mine, this has probably happened to you a few times: You’re casually perusing your Wall posts or status updates, when all of a sudden *WHAM* you run into some ridiculous position or opinion, only to be surprised — sometimes even dismayed — to see that the person spouting the foolishness (which is contrary to your own, naturally) is a friend… or more usually, an acquaintance of some sort. Sometimes you get past it, sometimes you don’t. This is nothing new: There are plenty of analogous situations in the offline world — you see a bumper sticker that expresses an opinion on some controversial political or social issue. Or, you’re just talking to someone and they come out of left field with a statement like, “I think that rocks should have the right to vote.” Or in my own case, there’s a nearby house with the same number as mine — I occasionally get their mail, and I’m pretty sure I can guess their politics, just from the type of solicitations they get. (Hey, it’s printed on the outside of the envelope.) Most commonly, these kinds of surprises happen when we cross societal contexts — you’re hanging out socially with someone whom you only know from work, or some other situational relationship: dog park, vendor, delivery person, storekeeper. Of course, they’re real people with full-fledged personalities, but you’re only exposed to a small bit of it, and your image of the person is formed around that particular aspect. So the unexpected disclosures are a form of TMI — call it “personality leakage” (a singularly unappealing name), because other aspects of their personality sneak out and become visible to you. Again, this is an example of where the online, social, networking component simply makes a real-world behavior more visible, distributable, searchable, and archivable. Now, this isn’t specifically a Facebook post, though I guess it is related to the recent changes to Facebook privacy setting (where the default is shifting to “default public”). I think it speaks to the desire for socialization that occurs even in specialized online networks, and it also ties into the kind of overall democratization — the blending of social contexts — that happens when you link siloed communities together in a kind of federated network (a fancy way to describe what happens when multiple single-interest group– say a Facebook group, Twitter list, or less formalized grouping — all publish to a common space: Your Wall.) Does this mean that you should dump everything out on the table, and do a full disclosure the first time, every time? No, that would be silly. Does it mean you shouldn’t express any opinions? Ditto on the silliness. What it boils down to, I think, is that in a general-purpose platform (like what Facebook has turned into — a kind of personal CRM dashboard for a lot of folks) one still needs to tread down that tricky middle path, where they continue to be a real person, while at the same time, being aware of what you say (especially in the hot-button areas of sex, politics, and religion), and how it might be seen by other folks. Again, since most of us aren’t that good at compartmentalizing our personalities so we can tailor them to specific audiences and locations, we all have to deal with some amount of personality leakage. Have your own experiences with personality leakage, either on the giving or receiving side? Leave a comment. Building My Online Store: Understanding SSL CertificatesFor those of you just joining this series “Building My Online Store”, I outline the Five Key Elements Needed to Build an E-Commerce Web Site and after getting the merchant account and payment gateway setup, it was on to getting our SSL certificate. Why would someone need this “SSL thing”? Well, the primary reason is to provide security and encryption but the consumer reason is to show people you are who you say you are. There are many phishing scams out there and it is most important to provide this security so people trust you and buy from you. I came across this survey from GMI research that asked “What concerns online shoppers when making an online purchase?” and it had this interested if obvious results:
The SSL certificate give us our "https://" on the front of the web address and the padlock that shows that the transaction is encrypted and secure. The two main things I wanted to figure out was how this encryption stuff works and how the whole authentication works. How It All Works
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the transaction security protocol used by websites to protect online communications. The most common use of SSL is to provide protection for confidential data, such as personal details or credit card information, entered into a website.  The SSL Certificate provides two primary functions:
Once a secure transaction is initiated, (i.e. click the Submit or Buy button to begin a transaction on a website), there are four basic steps taken to establish a secure connection:
So we went to the Network Solutions site and evaluated the three types of packages and despite there being many different levels of certificates and we selected Network Solutions nsProtect Basic since we are small non-profit and didn't need much. Once we were authenticated, we assigned the SSL certificate to the sub-domain of our site, in our case https://secure.browncoatsmovie.com and connected this with my shopping cart configuration program. The shopping cart is our next step and in our next post we will discuss the configuration and testing of the purchasing process along with the SSL certificate in an active state. More Recent Articles |
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Keep a civil tongue.