To figure out which rule ID is being triggered, run the following command:

tail /usr/local/apache/logs/modsec_audit.log

This will return something like:

--97a7c73b-H-- Message: Access denied with code 500 (phase 2).Pattern match"(insert[[:space:]]+into.+values|select.*from.+[a-z|A-Z|0-9]|select.+from|bulk[[:space:]]+insert|union.+select|convert.+(.*from)"at ARGS:content. [file "/usr/local/apache/conf/modsec2.user.conf"] [line"355"] [id "300016"] [rev "2"] [msg "Generic SQL injection protection"][severity "CRITICAL"] Action: Intercepted (phase 2) Stopwatch:1233185129379248 482649 (109716* 122107 -) Producer: ModSecurity forApache/2.5.7 (http://www.modsecurity.org/). Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix)mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8b mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.6


[id "300016"] is what you need and refers to the rule to disable. Create a .conf file at the following location to be complaint with cPanel (note the directories past “conf” did not previously exist):

/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/<user>/<domain>.com/<whatevernameyouwant>.conf

Inside this file place the following:

<LocationMatch "/">
SecRuleRemoveById 300016 
</LocationMatch>

Add whatever cPanel scripts you need to make sure that it will accept the custom vhost entry and that the new entry will be persistent through various apache reconfigurations/recompiles.

Restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Thanks to the fabulous folks at LiquidWeb who originally helped us with the solution.

Startup Equity Distribution

Notice that I used the word allocation above. Allocated means not vested. In my mind all founders stock should have either a milestone or time based (or some mixture of the two) vesting schedule. If you want to know why find someone to tell you a story about a cofounder who walked away from the company and is still holding a 25% ownership stake. Trust me. It creates problems. Personally I prefer 25% one year cliff vesting with 6.25% quarterly vesting thereafter combined with individual milestones.

It’s all about K.I.S.S. Lance argues against equal equity distribution and for dividing it based on contributions of time and expertise. One approach is to determine the valuation of the company, and then use a function of proposed wages and time contributed to divide up ownership.

Equity distribution amongst startup co-founders?

Technically, equity distribution is proportional to the “value contribution” by each stake holder. In general, tangible contributions (investment, land, resources) are considered much more important than intangible contributions like experience/expertise.

The options seem to be 50/50 or distribution as a function of contributed value. People answering the question lean more towards the latter and offer some suggestions as to how to do it best.

Calculating Partnership Equity Splits

Potential formula for equity distribution: break down money to be invested, time to be invested, and experience of partner into percentages, and then determine percentage contributions of each partner. This breakdown then determines overall split of shares.

How do I survive when starting a business without a paycheck?

There are very creative ways to live cheaply if you’re dedicated. The best response in my opinion is to live out of your car and buy a gym membership for exercise and showering.

Equity-Split Results, Part 1: When Do Teams Split Equally?

Interesting chart comparing different situations. An equal split is more likely amongst smaller teams coming from similar backgrounds that divide equity at the start of the project or company.

Dividing equity between founders

One thing I’ve also noticed is people tend to overvalue past contributions (coming up with the idea, spending time developing it, building a prototype, etc) and undervalue future contributions. Remember that an equity grant is typically for the next 4 years of work (hence 4 years of vesting). Imagine yourself 2 years from now after working day and night, and ask yourself in that situation if the split still seems fair. Another consideration is if one founder has had greater career success and will therefore significantly improve the odds of getting financed at an attractive valuation. One way to figure out how much this is worth is to estimate how much having that founder increases your valuation at the next financing and then, say, split the difference. So if having her means you can raise $2M by giving away 30% of your company instead of 40% of your company, let that founder have an extra 5%.

Variables to potentially consider include: past and future contributions, career success, and who had the big ideas (and whether those ideas have any technology or intellectual property associated with them).

What ever happened to the Populous Project, and the Knight Foundation’s smooth $275,000?

Why this is an important story to be told: The Knight Foundation espouses “informed and engaged communities [that] lead to transformational change” except, apparently, when it’s inconvenient. A significant portion of college media is locked to a proprietary publishing platform that takes most, if not all, of their online advertising revenue. In order to build financially viable businesses online, these publications need to take control of their technology. Stories like the Populous Project don’t inspire the trust required for organizations to collaborate on their technology and benefit from the effects of a network of innovation.

Leave specific questions you want answered in the comments.

Money quote on Romenesko today from a Chronicle article covering the techies doing it in-house.

Right off the bat, I’d like to say that the most awesome bit about the conversion script is its ease of use. Granted, you do have to run it on the command line and it does often throw mythical, unintelligible errors if your data is screwy, but it’s about 100 to 1,000 times easier than what Sean Blanda or Brian Schlansky had to go through. Furthermore, it spits out WordPress eXtended RSS files that WordPress imports natively. Depending on the size of your archives, you could even do the entire migration in less than a half hour.

There are detailed instructions in the README I encourage you to read thoroughly but, in screenshots, here’s how you’d migrate your site.

Backup your database using Sequel Pro. This is a critically important step, as you’ll definitely want a clean version to revert to if the import goes awry.

Place the conversion script and your archives in a folder you can access from the command line. Both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 migrants should receive an articles file that will need to be renamed “stories.csv.” Publications migrating from the former will have all of their image references stored in a file that will need to be renamed “media.csv.” Navigate to that directory from your terminal prompt and run “python CoPress-Convert.py.”

Once the script is running, you’ll be asked a series of questions to configure the conversion process. Most options are self-explanatory, and all are explained fully in the README file packaged with the script. The most important thing I’d like to note in this post is that, unless you have less than 500 authors in your archives, I’d highly, highly recommend importing your authors as custom fields instead of users. WordPress is not optimized to add a large number of new users through its import process. We learned this the hard way migrating CM Life‘s database last summer.

When the script is done, you’ll have a series of WordPress eXtended RSS files you can easily upload into WordPress.

Mad props go to Miles Skorpen for the long hours he spent on the conversion script, and to Albert Sun, Will Davis, and Max Cutler for their later contributions.

Feel free to send along any suggestions for improvement, bugs, fixes or general comments. I intend to maintain it for the indefinite future, it’s good Python practice when everything else I’m working on is PHP, but code contributions are always welcome. There is a short list of upgrades under consideration in the top of the script.

The question isn’t what are we going to build, but really what aren’t we going to build?

Open Assignment Desk

The Open Assignment Desk (formerly known as the Virtual Assignment Desk) is a tool for leveraging openness in the story creation process. Hat tip to Jay Rosen and Dave Winer for talking about the left side of the same idea in episode #12 and episode #18 of Rebooting the News.

It brings the funk in stages.

The first is to fulfill the needs of the newsroom in regards to managing story workflow. Stories can start as pitches, get approved and become drafts, and, once completed, go through the editing process to become published pieces. The Open Assignment Desk fills things in by tracking all of the meta data associated with this process, including when the story is due, whether there will be associated photography, the location of the story, etc. Each newsroom would be able to fine-tune their workflow as well. If the publication was going for speed, then their editing process might just be one stage. If the newsroom was more concerned about the accuracy of their content, then they might have a three stage editing process. This idea isn’t really that unique; Max has a product he’s working on for the Courant News CMS called Nando, and CoPress has a currently stalled project called Edit Flow that will soon be back on its feet.

Once the newsroom has adopted the tool, then you roll out stage two: the ability to make this editorial flow public. The newsroom has granular control over which parts of the editorial process are transparent. If they decide to be open about the decisions within the newsroom, the news organization can build engagement with their community and, ideally, the community develops a greater sense of ownership of its journalism as process.

The third act is to allow the community to contribute to the reporting flow in a meaningful way. There are two specific things I’m considering at this point:

1. The editorial process is exposed in such a fashion that, at any point along the way, the community can contribute content they think is relevant and useful. “At that concert last night?” the news organization asks. “We’re working on a story about it and would love to feature the best of the photos.” The community can also submit notes and opinions on the story in progress much like commenting on the final product. The comments they add when the story is in progress can be used (and linked to) as sources for the story.
2. The community is able to pitch story assignments. If they see something they don’t think is being covered, they can pitch it as a story and start on the reporting process by identifying the questions that need to be asked, attaching images, and so on. One positive side effect of this functionality would be the ability to dump “all” of the stories that the community thinks need to be covered and then deduce the percentage that the news organization is actually covering. The abstraction of this is the ability to identify all of the information the community thinks it needs, and then use that as the foundation for the reporting process.

News Community Relationship Management (nCRM)

News CRM acts as an open, participatory rolodex. The goal is to capture common knowledge about sources based both on what the journalists of a news organization know, as data generated by how the source interacts with the news organization.

The best way to describe this is by doing a mental fly-through. When a journalist is interviewing someone the system has never seen before, they create a new profile in the system. The profile contains fields for contact information, location, occupation, etc. and a free form wiki text area for notes about the person. The journalist doing the interview can also create an association between their text notes, audio file from the interview, and other content within the CMS to the source profile. By doing this, journalists who need to pull information about the source in the future will have access to the sum of news organization’s knowledge.

Assuming the source interacted digitally with the news organization on a regular basis, the CRM application would also be responsible for extending their profile by tracking those interactions. For instance, in step one the journalist would record any or all email addresses regularly used by the source. If the source comments on an article where they are quoted, then the comment could be flagged as a clarification in relationship to their profile. If the source comments on another article, then the tags of that article would be applied to the source profile as topics of interest. Based on how the community reacts to the comment, by voting it either up or down, the source’s authority on the topic would change dynamically.

The goal with this tool is really to structure information about a news organization’s community such that when the reporter needs to do interviews on, say, water, they have an entire database of the “right” people to seek out.

Case in point: The Daily Emerald, I believe as a part of their magazine edition for IntroDUCKtion, created a campus directory. The directory includes dozens upon dozens of email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers for student organizations and sports at the University of Oregon. In the print magazine, which I don’t have access to because I’m in Portland, I’m sure this list of contact information is beautifully presented in an approachable, useful format. Unfortunately, this same list made its way into the website as a long, ugly, flat text file:

In my humble opinion, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

What if, instead, we approached this directory as the database that it really should be? This web-native directory would have profiles for every student organization much like students can have profiles on Facebook. I’d be able to search for organizations based on the name, the location on campus, people currently involved, the mission of the organization, tags, etc. If I found a organization I was interested in, I’d click through to their profile. The profile would then give me access to all of the contact information I might need in addition to the most recent or popular articles, images, videos, updates from the campus’ microblog, etc. There’d be a small wiki section for the organization or sport where I could read up on its history and know that the information I was getting was true because it had been curated by the beat reporter.

I see at least two advantages to this approach, in addition to making all of the information much more accessible (versus the flat text file). One, you’d only have to build this once. Two, you’d save the reporter or designer a lot of time having to search for the most up to date contact information because they could just pull the information from the database as they’re creating the print product.

Think of role of the student news organization less as a newspaper and more as a platform for impartial, accurate community information to be shared.

I did my best to explain my understanding of how the business is changing, the forces driving the change, and what trends are solidifying for the future. Newspapers and journalism are under the influence of longer-term change because of more ubiquitous ICT, but the current cacophony of crisis is largely due to the biggest recession in half of a century and over-leveraged debt. A lot of the discussion has been centered around the lack of leadership in redefining newspaper business models, but I think Michael Nielsen deserves merit for saying that newspapers might also be failing because their institutional structures are too optimized for an old paradigm. They are too good at what they used to do, and the jump into experimental and uncertain territory is nigh impossible.

That was Nielsen’s most visible takeaway. More obscured, although equally important in my opinion, is his opinion the successful companies of today, Google, Apple, etc., have a foundation of “technological innovation, and most key decision-makers [are] people with deep technological expertise.”:

If you doubt this, look at where the profits are migrating in other media industries. In music, they’re migrating to organizations like Apple. In books, they’re migrating to organizations like Amazon, with the Kindle. In many other areas of media, they’re migrating to Google: Google is becoming the world’s largest media company. They don’t describe themselves that way (see also here), but the media industry’s profits are certainly moving to Google. All these organizations are run by people with deep technical expertise.

This is one of the paradigms we’re trying to instill in student newspapers at CoPress. It’s no longer acceptable to outsource your CMS to a third-party company who doesn’t care about innovation; technological innovation has to be at the core of your business. Granted, CoPress does offer competing hosting and support with WordPress, an open source publishing platform, but our ultimate goal is hold the hand of student newspapers as we help them develop their internal capacity to create.

Let’s take a 10,000 foot view at this, however. In my opinion, there’s a deeper technological shift happening that eventually will affect all industry and every facet of society. The internet is becoming a utility, much like electricity, and those who don’t have the utility at the core of this business operations will seem as backwards as businesses today that don’t use electricity. Simplistically, the disruption the internet is causing first hit the music industry, then the movie industry, and now the newspaper industry. I assume that it will also affect at least healthcare, politics, and education, industries that Andrew observed “have deeply entrenched positions of power.” I also assume that those with power don’t generally enjoy giving it up, instead preferring to try and manipulate public policy with the likes of France’s “three strikes” legislation and Connie Schultz’s attempt to make copyright even more restrictive and ban linking on the web in certain situations. Lastly, I assume that this type of reactive behavior is beneficial to the monopolists only and damages general society on a whole.

Given these assumptions, what general lessons can we learn from the music, movie and newspaper industries such that our society is less seriously disrupted when healthcare, politics, and education face the same type of deep transformational change? Keep in mind, too, that these are industries which will likely also shed thousands of jobs as they go through at least structural, and maybe even technological, unemployment. This is history in realtime.

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen in the 12th edition of Rebooting the News explore a concept Dave refers to as a “coral reef” for local information. The importance of a coral reef in the sea is that it is a habitat for many other species to prosper. His argument for starting In Berkeley, what he thinks is the first local blog for Berkley, is that it might provide a coral reef for a lot of tremendous local data to grow from. Given the right formats for information storage, it can become a repository for community knowledge that everyone within the community can both contribute to and benefit from. What got me thinking, though, was what these formats might be.

The obvious one is the article slash blog post. There really isn’t any distinction. The blog post is the big bucket in which you can drop any sort of community data. The unfortunate thing about the generic blog post, however, is that the data you put in the post generally isn’t structured in such a way that the aggregate of the posts offer value too. If I report on a crime, lost dog, or house for sale with a given location, a given time, and other common values, the information is presented to me as readable, but not enhanced.

A local blog as a coral reef, or many different types of data sets for information to hangout around, would offer a vibrant, growing, and evolving habitat for a community’s collective knowledge. For instance, an article about rent prices going up, something I used to be concerned about as a student, would be closely related to a database of community-contributed rent rates. This information would be a part of a larger, community-created housing data set that included rating of landlords, whether utilities were included or not, etc. The rental rates mashed with location, however, could generate a interactive heat map that offers timeless value.

I think the key point I’d like to make, however, is that the data shouldn’t get lost within its framework. In a blog post, there’s much information that, if presented in a hybrid structured/readable format, could be be useful as an aggregate as well. Projects like OpenCalais do this by taking a brute force approach to deriving data and relationships from unstructured, block text. Posts could be published as semi-structured information however, in a manner I’ll write about when the idea is better fleshed out.

Building off this coral reef concept, Dave and Jay started talking about the virtual assignment desk for the NY Times hyperlocal blogging experiments. It’s a blog post and an email address right now, nothing better than what could’ve been done, had newspapers been this forward-thinking, with GeoCities in the 90′s.

We’ve started a project called Edit Flow [PDF because the wiki is currently down] under the CoPress umbrella that might create a nice intersection between the coral reef of information and distributed assignment desk. The goal the project is to enhance the editorial workflow capabilities of WordPress in five stages: custom post statuses, meta data for posts, workflows and user groups, a pitch system, and then windows for visualizing the aggregate of the information. Each stage provides a nice foundation for the next. The pitch system is how you’d enter all of the information, or assignments, into the system, and it would be just as easy to build a public interface to that data as it would a private one. In fact, easier because you’d be free of the WordPress admin. It’s a coral reef because it’s a whole bunch of editorial hooks you can hang information from, and it’s an assignment desk because, well, that’s exactly what we intend to build.