Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned scholar in the field of psychology, said, “In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.” That’s one of the biggest reasons SoftLayer shares a weekly internal newsletter with SLayers in all departments and in all locations. Keeping coworkers informed of corporate activities (and “common goals”) may not be very high on everyone’s to-do list, but it’s certainly at the top of mine … literally. As Marketing Coordinator, I’m responsible for sending out a weekly update to ALL SoftLayer staff.

If you have a growing or geographically diverse team, rallying the troops around a shared message is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. If you’re not sure where to start with your own internal newsletter, I’d be happy to dissect what goes into our “Weekly Breakdown” as an example you might build from.

The Weekly Breakdown kicks off with employee birthdays. We want to make sure all 700+ SLayers know when one of their coworkers is getting a year “better,” and every month, huge birthday cakes are brought to every office to recognize the SLayers celebrating their birthdays. We haven’t written a SoftLayer version of a cheesy-restaurant rendition of the classic “Happy Birthday” song, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

In addition to employee birthdays, we’ll also call out important days (like SoftLayer’s birthday: May 5!) in the birthday section.

The next section in the Breakdown is similar to the “Birthdays” section, but it’s a little more relevant to our business: “Anniversaries This Month.” When you’re hired at SoftLayer, you basically get a SoftLayer birthday, and we want to recognize how long you’ve been a SLayer:

After we recognize the SoftLayer anniversaries, we have a section devoted to keeping employees informed of various activities going on at SoftLayer. That might be a recent press release, an update on holidays or an upcoming company event. This section is the go-to place for employees to know what’s new with SoftLayer.

The next few sections list available SL Job Openings, New Hires from the previous week, and Organizational Changes. Given that SoftLayer is still growing like crazy, we want to make sure all of our employees see the available positions in the organization so they can share with their network of friends or so they can see any opportunities they feel might better suit their talents and passions. It’s always nice to know who is helping SoftLayer grow (new employees) and how they are growing with SoftLayer, whether vertically or horizontally (organizational changes).

The next two sections are dedicated to employees “personal” lives: Classifieds and Fundraising Events. These sections let employees list anything they are selling or giving away along with any fundraising activities or events that they, their kids, their neighbor or their dog are involved in. We’ve had classified items like car wheels, stereos and animal adoptions, and you can bet that employees were voraciously reading the “Fundraising” section when Girl Scout Cookie orders were being taken.

We wrap up the Weekly Breakdown with my favorite section: SoftLayer Praise. There are so many reasons why the section gives me joy. It’s amazing how many wonderful comments our customers have about SoftLayer on a weekly basis, and it’s a “pat on the back” for teams that may not interact directly with customers on a daily basis. Sharing all of the praise is great for morale, and those little compliments here and there go a long way to making our team continue working hard … even if just to hear those comments again and again! Here are some of my favorite comments from the past few weeks:

Those kinds of comments can put a smile on any SLayers face!

If you have any wonderful comments to say about SoftLayer or an individual employee, don’t be scared to tell us … Your comment might just be featured in our next “Weekly Breakdown.” Comment on this blog, use SoftLayer’s “Get Satisfaction” page, tweet @SoftLayer or post to our Facebook page. We love to hearing from you and working hard to remain the “best hosting company [you] know of!”

As you can see, the Weekly Breakdown covers a lot of SoftLayer goodness in a given week. It takes a little work to keep a 700-SLayer organization on the same page, but that work pays off exponentially when the team is able to share accomplishments, praise and goals. I’d highly recommend you trying your own weekly internal newsletter … Now leave us some SL praise!

-Natalie

This guest blog comes to us from Distil.it, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. In this video we talk to Distil CEO Rami Essaid about how the company developed, their participation in the TechStars program and most importantly, how they can help you!

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Google’s Official Stance on Duplicate Content:

“We do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

“In rare situations, our algorithm may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission. If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Where is This “External” Duplicate Content Coming From?

Sometimes, it’s not clear how third-party sites obtain copies of legitimate work. Typically, they either steal it by manually or automatically scraping the content. The scraped content is then republished onto their sites, providing no credit or link to the original work.

What does that look like? It’s not difficult to find examples, but I tracked one down that seemed particularly ironic. Here’s an original article by PC World on Google’s War Against Scraper Sites:

Here’s a duplicate copy of the same story that doesn’t give any credit to the original PC World article:

It’s clear that we’re not looking at a coincidence here. The title, article content and images are all identical. The scraping site didn’t even attempt to mask their plagiarism with synonym changes. Why would they do that? Just take a look at the ads on the scraper site … They want to profit from the keywords and traffic driven by PC World’s content.

What Can You Do About It?

• Listen to Google
  Google provides a list of tips for using rel=”nofollow” and canonicalization to ensure they are able to identify you as the original author of content and avoid penalizing or downgrading your business’s search ranking results.
• Learn About DMCA and Use It
  If your content has already been duplicated by unauthorized publishers, you should learn more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how it can help get help remove your content from infringing websites. Two helpful resources to start learning the law and your rights are Google’s official DMCA policy page and the United States Copyright Office.
• Be Proactive About Stopping Scrapers
  We believe the best solution is to implement practices and or services to proactively prevent people or web scrapers from harvesting or scraping your content in the first place. Although web scrapers can be difficult to detect, there are tactics and/or services that can be implemented to limit certain behaviors on your website(s). Some of the quickest ways to make strides in the right direction are to implement rate limiting rules, to block traffic from blacklisted IP addresses and to use Captcha to help reduce automated web scrapers.

While none of these tactics are fool-proof ways to completely prevent your content from being duplicated, the more barriers to entry you have, the more difficult it will be for web scrapers to repeatedly duplicate your content. Distil built an enterprise-ready platform to monitor and prevent site scraping, so if you want some help in the protecting your content, try our our service. Whatever route you take, the key is to make sure that whatever tactics or services you implement, you don’t forget about your legitimate traffic … You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Be proactive, but make sure you keep your priorities on the user-experience and quality of your site(s).

-Sean Harmer, Distil

Hey F1 fans! We have the opportunity of a life time for you! We’re able to take a lucky 5 fans on a tour of the Marussia F1 team headquarters on May 31st 2012. Included in the tour are a complete tour of the Marussia F1 headquarters, where you’ll be able to see the F1 cars, the components involved in each, a free lunch, and free bag full of UK2Group F1 merchandise.

Those who wish to attend will need to be able to provide their own transportation to Banbury, England. Other than that, the tour is completely free!

As there is limited space for the tour, we ask that you email our management team at mgmt@vps.net with proof of travel accommodations and an explanation of your interest in F1.

For those interested in keeping up with the full ongoings of the Marussia F1 Team, we encourage you to subscribe to the UK2Group racing website at http://marussiaf1team.uk2group.com.

Chris Gardner (of The Pursuit of Happyness fame) said, “Find something that you love. Something that gets you so excited you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. Forget about money. Be happy.” Now I can’t honestly tell you I’m able to “forget about money” or that I’m much of a morning person, but I’m quick to tell people that I love what I do. If you click through a few of the “Culture” posts on this blog, you’ll read that I’m not alone. This week, I realized how many non-work interests SoftLayer plays a role in.

Beyond my closet-full of black and red shirts (many of which are visible in Tech Partner Spotlight video interviews on YouTube), even when I’m out of the office I find myself “checking on customers’ servers” quite a bit … I use quotes in there because that the justification I give myself for spending time (that I’d probably spend anyway) on platforms that leverage SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

Because SoftLayer operates with an “Innovate or Die” mentality, we tend to attract customers that innovate in their own businesses. Whether that trend is intentional or not, it makes sense: Why would a fast-moving platform or application with massive growth and scaling needs be hosted with a provider taking “enterprise” time to provision a solution that ends up being “enterprise” only in name? “Enterprise Class” is not the same as “Internet Scale,” and that distinction is pretty significant when a business might have one visitor on Monday and a million visitors on Tuesday. Platforms and applications that grow like that usually operate with a high level of what I like to call “awesomeness,” so when they choose SoftLayer as a hosting provider, I feel like I need to investigate their awesomeness personally … And that’s how I’ve become a die-hard user of many of SoftLayer’s customers.

One of my favorite customers to “check on” is Tumblr. If you aren’t familiar with Tumblr, I recommend that you go to their site right now and immerse yourself in their community. I actually remember the day Tumblr signed on as a customer; I was genuinely excited that they’d be hosting on our platform. Even if that excitement was because I could justify having my Tumblr dashboard open in the background at work. I don’t think anyone could have expected the platform to grow so phenomenally in a few years, but Tumblr’s numbers are pretty staggering these days: 16.7 billion (yes, with a “B”) monthly pageviews of 55.7 million blogs with 23.1 billion posts. I wasn’t one of the first accounts on Tumblr, but I tell myself I have some kind of Tumblr cred … And I use my “limited-edition” black background and Japanese dashboard logo to prove it:

Another SoftLayer customer who’s gotten a lot of press over the past month or two is OMGPOP. OMGPOP scaled “Draw Something” to tens of millions of users on SoftLayer’s infrastructure (which you probably know), but what you probably didn’t know is that as “Draw Something” started growing in the market, it was also spreading virally in our office. You’d be amazed at how many SLayers caught the bug. Here’s one of Steve Kinman‘s works of art from a recent game:

While Tumblr and OMGPOP manage to snag a good amount of my free time, my most recent obsession has been playing NomNom Combo from Eastside Game Studios. I had a chance to meet a few of the guys from Eastside Games at GDC this year, and George Karidis told me that I should download NomNom Combo to check it out before I went to the launch party we sponsored for them in San Francisco. As it turns out, he created a monster … By the time the party rolled around, I had to tear myself away from strategizing the best way to move up the game’s all-time “Top Score” leader board. Two months later, I can say that all of my efforts have been validated:

I guess if I had to make a long story short, if you have an addictive app or game that you want to move to the SoftLayer platform, it would be brilliant move from a growth and scaling perspective. One request I’d have is that you warn me, though. I want to have time to bury my head in the sand so I don’t get hooked on more SoftLayer-powered goodness … I’m running out of “free time.”

-@khazard