Based on today’s reports, it appears that the denial of service attack was a Russian attack on a Georgian citizen who had made politically charged comments about the Russo-Georgian conflict last year. As I will not use my blog to express any kind of political agenda, I will not make any comment about the incident that caused this. It is not important to the issue at hand. What is important is that hundreds of thousands of people were affected by a political argument between two people when one of them attacked both Twitter and Facebook and thereby denied service to the innocent bystanders.

Organizations around the world see social media as the future of customer growth and they are spending large sums of money on very expensive people to advance their social web marketing agendas. Anyone who knows anything about this will tell you that you cannot control the social media – you have to work with it. Your company has to learn to roll with the punches and leverage the goodwill of the networks of which you are a member. This means that your company has to use the standard infrastructures that are in place and therefore your company relies on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn among others to get its message out.

The problem with those infrastructures is that your company cannot be guaranteed of their stability. This is the second attack on Twitter in a few weeks. Facebook has been hit several times, too, and you can be sure that this will not be the last time. As these sites grow in popularity they become greater and greater targets for attack by people. The more they become objects of attack, the more they will be improved to resist the attacks, but one has to wonder how long audiences will be prepared to accept these kinds of problems. One only has to look at the radical decline of MySpace to understand how fickle people are and how quickly popularity can shift from one medium to another.

Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire once said "Better one lion than a pack of rats" in reference the impending French Revolution. What he meant is that a pack of rats cannot make up its mind and each has its own agenda whereas with one lion you at least know what the rules are. Nowhere is this philosophy more applicable than with social media. You are allowing your business to be driven by the media – the pack of rats.

Remember, though, that the French Revolution happened anyway. You have no alternative but to let social media shape your business. And therein lies the risk. As a business trying to build a marketing campaign, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion that any one of these media could be used as the primary focus of the strategy. You may even conclude that you only have to focus on one or two of them to grow your business. Some companies have gone as far as relying completely on social media as there only marketing strategy. You have to make sure that your strategy has several contingencies to deal with what happens if those forums become unavailable as happened with Twitter yesterday.

A number of people have pitched Drupal to me as a competitor to Joomla. One person wrote:

“When we surveyed content management systems …, Joomla was one of the ones we looked at, but on balance Drupal won out. I recently converted my … site to Drupal and brought up two other sites … on the same code base, but with very different appearance and different features on each. I am very impressed.”

I have spent some time evaluating both of these content management systems and while I have chosen to go with Joomla myself, Drupal could probably have done the job I wanted to get done. My initial post was in no way meant to imply that Drupal was not equaly as capable. There were a couple of things that swayed my vote to Joomla.

1. By the time I looked into Drupal, I already understood how Joomla worked. The argument that Drupal is easier to use therefore did not carry the water for me that it would for others and I felt like Joomla’s flexibility was probably better than Drupal’s provided I was willing to make the investment;
2. I am not scared of getting my hands dirty with PHP, MySQL, CSS and XHTML. That means that if I find an obstacle with Joomla, I have the flexibility to get into it with these technologies if I need to; and
3. I like what Joomla has done to address and caution against security issues within Joomla itself. Security is a very real consideration for any web-site and I think the Joomla team understand this. They may not have all the answers but they definitely understand the issues. You should at least look at the Joomla security site and their security forum before you implement a site using Joomla.

In fact, it is the latter point that made me realize I needed to take down my family site while I work on making sure that I have dealt with any potential security threats. It will be back up in a couple of weeks. 

In a discussion on the issue, someone I was talking to made the statement that they did not want a content management system that required a database because of the administration issues associated with it. To me, that argument does not make any sense because if you go with static HTML instead, you still have the complexity of managing the content and determining what the broken links are. With a good content management system, that process can be easily automated. So although you may not have the expense of the database maintenance, you do have the expense of the static HTML management. Most of the maintenance stuff around my 4 Joomla installations is all automated anyway and I simply check the e-mail that I get on a nightly basis to verify that the backup verification process worked. Moreover, there is so much functionality that you simply get for free that I would hate to have to write manually.

Finally, a gentleman by the name of Jeff Pilant pointed me at a web site that is absolutely invaluable on the security side of things. The site calls itself “Common Weakness Enumeration – A Community-Developed Dictionary of Software Weakness Types” and it enumerates 25 of the most dangerous mistakes that developers make that can create serious security threats in their code. This is a highly recommended read. The information is also available in PDF form and although a lot of this information is available in a number of the security books that are already out there, this is a very valuable and concise reminder.