Bon Voyage, Ohio

Since I launched this blog in the Fall of 2007, I have never written post about my personal life or plans. After graduating in June of this year, my family, friends and old co-workers have begun to scatter across America. That being said, this is the best way to give you all an update on the next steps in my life and career!

After graduation, I moved to Columbus and began at Northlich less than 48 hours after my commencement ceremony. I originally planned to stay in Columbus, as it is close to my immediate family and network of friends and professionals.

Now that September is upon us, I have chosen to take the next step in my career by moving to Chicago. I recently accepted a post-graduate internship position with Weber Shandwick and am set to begin October 5th of this year. For those of you unfamiliar with Weber, it is one of the world's largest PR firms and was recently in the news after MySpace selected it it's AOR. I will make the move October 1 into an apartment in the north side of the city.

Needless to say, I am more than thrilled with the opportunity. I have loved my experience at Northlich and am extremely grateful for the mentorship, exposure to new projects, and wonderful friendships I have gained during my time there. I will miss Ohio and many close friends, but am very happy to offer a pull-out couch for visitors in the Windy City!

Of course, I fully intend to work my rear-end off to turn my internship position into a long-term job within a couple months. Regardless, I will stay in Chicago for at least 1-2 years and take that time to learn everything I can while being surrounded by some of the best in my industry. Thank you to everyone who has always shown support and make a continued effort to stay connected, no matter how many miles are between us.

As I prepare to move, I am nostalgic about the networking trip I planned for Ohio University's chapter of PRSSA to Chicago earlier this Spring. Thank you to Aaron Baer for the video below!



A convenient side effect of my transition is a three week "summer vacation" during the month of September. During that time, I will be attending both my cousin's and best friend's weddings, along with a few adventures in between. I would love to share all of my plans with you, but I prefer to keep at least some information private amongst family and friends. Feel free to e-mail me or follow me on Twitter!

pauljmatson (at) gmail (dot) com

FCC socializes it's broadband launch

This week, the Federal Communications Commission decided that social media was a key component to it's submission of a plan for national broadband access. Ever since the United States figured out that it is trailing behind the rest of the civilized world in public broadband, this issue has been hot on the keyboards of programmers and politicians. Given the inherently heated debate that has been stirring, why did the FCC choose to integrate social media into their development stage?

"We want it to be a two-way conversation. The feedback, ideas and discussions generated on thsi blog will be critical in developing the best possible National Broadband Plan," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachoswki. Please note that he took office in June of this year.

I am most looking forward to see which comments and "feedback" are censored. Let the transparency war begin! Here is a quick look at what has been posted since the campaign launch on Tuesday:

Click here to follow the FCC

To be honest, I am more than a little disappointed with their "engaging" tactics. Nearly every post begins with "Broadband Update:" and redundantly links back to it's own general web address. If I wanted to read repeated advertisements to visit their web page, I would add it to my RSS feed.

A quick look at the replies to the FCC account reveals similar feelings among new followers. It seems as though Chairman Genachoswki needs to do a better job executing the "two-way conversation" he has proclaimed.

The "Blogband" blog, however, is performing much better. It only has four posts and is two days old, but has received nearly 100 comments with undoubtedly heavy web traffic. Like most successful blogs, Blogband is collaboratively maintained by the FCC internal team (including posts from the Chairman). It is still too early to tell how much the social media outlets will affect the ultimate decisions of the FCC for initiating national broadband. Despite it being in its early stages, I have great appreciation for the fact that they have created social modes for input from the American public.

The question now becomes whether the FCC will actually begin responding to its feedback publicly. Please comment or send me an email at pauljmatson (at) gmail (dot) com. Cheers!

Twitter is down! Social media Twouble

Microblog service Twitter has officially been down since around 10:00 a.m. today, preventing the tweets of millions of users around the globe. The official Twitter Status blog has published the following update:

Defending against a denial-of-service attack?! Let the battle begin! Time to summon the all-mighty Fail Whale to wage war against the cyber foes. Fortunately, the federal government has the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team to step in if needed.

So what exactly is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack? According to US-CERT:

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In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, an attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. By targeting your computer and its network connection, or the computers and network of the sites you are trying to use, an attacker may be able to prevent you from accessing email, web sites, online accounts (banking, etc.), or other services that rely on the affected computer.

The most common and obvious type of DoS attack occurs when an attacker "floods" a network with information. When you type a URL for a particular web site into your browser, you are sending a request to that site's computer server to view the page. The server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker overloads the server with requests, it can't process your request. This is a "denial of service" because you can't access that site.

An attacker can use spam email messages to launch a similar attack on your email account. Whether you have an email account supplied by your employer or one available through a free service such as Yahoo or Hotmail, you are assigned a specific quota, which limits the amount of data you can have in your account at any given time. By sending many, or large, email messages to the account, an attacker can consume your quota, preventing you from receiving legitimate messages.

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If you are already shaking from the inability to access your home page, calm down. Although this is a longer downtime than Twitter has experienced for a year or so, it has happened before. The larger the Twitter network becomes, the more computers get involved, the more likely an attack of this nature becomes. For a more in-depth explanation of this situation and how it is orchestrated by hackers, click here.

The question is this: what do we do when a major social media service breaks down for an extended period of time? What will be an interesting case study is to examine where people are turning in the wake of Twitter failure. Facebook is my first guess. Other ideas welcome!