StillSecure, After All These Years

What’s up with the SBN?

I received a few messages last night that the Security Bloggers Network and feed were down. Thanks to all of those who wrote me!  I checked with our friends at Lijit and it was just routine maintenance. The site and feed should be up this morning.  Remember you can get to the site at http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com or http://www.securitybloggers.net. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to get the content for the over 250 blogs in the SBN on the site.

In regards to the SBN, with RSA and Interop I have not been able to move ahead as quickly as I would like with all of the plans we have made with Lijit. However, summer is here now and it is time to get going.  First thing is a letter will be going out to all members of the SBN.  If they have not done so, we are going to require that all members register and display their SBN Lijit badge and search widget. If you have not done so, you can get the widget here: http://www.lijit.com/external/network_signup/sbn

Next up is expanding the SBN site to become more of a community portal and resource center for both security bloggers and the readers of those blogs.  We have lots of work to do on that. If you would like to be involved drop me a line or leave a comment.  We are also looking for sponsors to offset the cost Lijit incurs in hosting the site and feed.

Stay tuned over the coming weeks and months as some of these plans begin to take shape!

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Social Security Blogger awards video

As I wrote about earlier this was the first year of the Social Security Blogger Awards. Rich Mogull did a great job lining up a blue-ribbon panel of judges and I think the winners of the awards were very deserving.  You can see the complete list of winners and the full video on the RSA conference blog here.  But here is just part 1 of the video with Rich, Martin and then me:

This first years awards were a learning experience in many ways. I hope that we can take the lessons learned and improve for next year!

Thanking the sponsors

As most of you know, this years Security Bloggers Meet up at the RSA conference is going to be a quite a party. In addition to the usual food, drink, podcasting and mingling among the who’s who of security blogging and media, this year we also have the Social Security Awards.  The Social Security Awards are the security blogging awards and we have over 1500 blogs nominated in the 5 categories!  At the end this month the finalists will be given over to our all star panel of judges and the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony at the meet up. 

Yours truly is the MC for the awards. I had invited Beyonce to come down and do a musical number with me ala Hugh Jackman at the Oscars, but she was busy and I don’t think will be at the meet up.  But you never know.  If not perhaps Martin McKeay, Rich Mogull and I could do a “if I were a boy” musical number ;-)

Anyway, what I wanted to say before going off on that tangent is that none of this would be possible without the very generous sponsors who have donated money, equipment and services.  In these tough times putting on an event this size is not cheap.  Also though not listed, a special thanks to the RSA conference folks themselves who have given so much to make this event a reality. Thanks to all of them!

Our latest sponsor, Seagate is donating prizes for for the Social Security Award winners and now has given us a NAS as a door prize as well!  How cool!  Now if we could just get a nice package of prizes and gifts for the event organizers!

I love reading the Security Bloggers Network feed!

For the past two or three days I did not have a chance to read my Security Bloggers Network feed. It had built up to over 200 posts. The more posts that built up, the more daunting it was to confront.  Should I just mark them all as read and start clean?  But no I wanted to see what people were writing.  So I spent 20 minutes going through the posts, skimming most of them and reading those that caught my eye.

Once again I am just blown away with the content that the SBN provides!  It is amazing the depth and breath of the topics covered.  If you want to know what is going on in security, from AtoZ, you must subscribe to the SBN. If your blog is not yet part of the SBN, you can write info@securitybloggersnetwork.com to subscribe. If you are an SBN member be sure to install the new Lijit widget so that your content is searchable on all member blogs.

Thanks to the over 200 blogs in the SBN for doing what you guys do, write great security blogs!

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The SBN goes Lijit officially!

I am very pleased to announce that the SBN has officially gone Lijit. When Feedburner/Google discontinued blog networks a few months back, Todd Vernon and the folks at Lijit were nice enough to provide a home for the SBN.  More then just an aggregated feed, the folks at Lijit gave us a real home for the SBN that in the future will become we hope the home of a vibrant community. One of the unique features that Lijit brings to the equation is their powerful search technology. For some time now bloggers have been able to set up a Lijit widget to allow searches of their blog content, their network and the internet at large.  Now Lijit has announced that they are going to build out the ability to build networks including custom Lijit widgets.  On the right is a Lijit widget for SBN members!  You can get your own version of this widget here: http://www.lijit.com/external/network_signup/sbn I am urging all members of the SBN to sign up for this so that your content can cross-indexed and searched by all SBN searches.  It should result in more clicks for you, other members and the SBN!

Lijit Search

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Back from Christmas, but on my way out again

Image via Wikipedia

Just wanted to drop a quick note that I have not abandoned the blog.  Just really busy with Holiday stuff and end of quarter/year business.  New Years Day I am taking the family on a mini-vacation for a few days here in Florida, so will be AWOL again.  Lots of big news though coming up in the next week or two around both the Security Bloggers Network (check out the site for some of the new look) and some news with StillSecure as well.  Stay tuned and Happy New Year to all of my readers!

Repost: The Social Security Blogger Awards

I posted this a few weeks ago, but we are getting near the end of nominations. If you have not done so yet, please be sure to nominate your favorite security blogs for the Social Security Awards!

Another dream of mine becomes a reality.  One of the things I have longed thought of doing was starting a security bloggers awards program. With over 200 blogs in the Security Bloggers Network, some recognition for the best of the best would be great.  There are so many great security blogs out there, with so much great content, in my mind it was only natural that we have some sort of recognition for the very best.  How to do these awards without making it a popularity contest though?  Where and when to hold an awards ceremony? Logistics, statistics and such.

It all came together this year.  Working with my fellow Security Blogger Meet up committee members, Jennifer Leggio, Martin McKeay, Rich Mogul and Jeanne Friedman we have made a Security Bloggers Awards a reality!  I am proud to give you the "Social Security Blogger Awards".  Pretty cool, huh?

This initial year of the Social Security Awards will feature awards in 5 categories:

* Best Security Podcast
Who is the voice you listen to week after week?
* Best Technical Security Blog
Who is digging deeper than anyone else?
* Best Corporate Security Blog
Which vendor's contributing the most to the blogosphere?
* Best Non-Technical Security Blog
Who's got the best 30,000 view?
* Most Entertaining Security Blog
Who keeps you riveted? Or who makes you laugh?

We will allow readers to nominate specific blogs, come up with finalists and than have a combination of reader votes and a blue ribbon panel of judges.  The judges we have lined up are:

Brian Krebs
Washington Post
Bill Brenner
CSO Magazine
Kelly Jackson-Higgins
Dark Reading
Dennis Fisher
TechTarget
Jeremiah Owyang
Forrester Research

There will be awards and surprises at the awards ceremony which will take place at the Security Blogger Meet up at RSA this year. You don't have to be a member of the SBN to be nominated, but like the old man says, "it couldn't hurt". If you would like to nominate your blog or have someone else nominate you can use this picture and link to http://www.socialsecurityawards.com

For those of you wondering, I and the rest of the committee and judges are not eligible to be nominated or win any awards.  Also in case you are wondering these awards are not for sale and you can't buy your own category ;-)

Anyway, I am really proud to see this idea becoming a reality. I hope that it will be a great program that will grow better year after year.  For now though, what are you waiting for?  Go nominate you favorite security blogs!

Author's note: Martin posted some good articles on this at the RSA Bloggers meet up site and his own blog, even if he did steal my graphic.

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Attention all SBN bloggers

This post is aimed at all of you SBN bloggers out there (there are over 200 of you!).  You should be receiving a special email this week.  I know sometimes some of you have told me you did not receive SBN email.  If for some reason you do not receive an email by Wed, please drop me a line at info@securitybloggersnetwork.com.

BTW, this is just a mock up, but the latest badges that the Lijit guys are working on is pretty cool. We hope to have it available very soon!

Sorry for the cryptic email. The blogger meet up invites for RSA this year were mailed out yesterday.  All SBN members should have received one. If you have not, please drop me a line at info@securitybloggersnetwork.com.

Put the SBN feed widget on your page

Thanks to the folks at NewsGator, you can now put a widget for the SBN feed right on your own page.

Just follow the instructions under "get this". Obviously the size will be re-set. check it out on my sidebar for a better example.

SBN on fire

So it has been about a week since the new home of the Security Bloggers Network debuted.  The site is still just a spliced feed of the many great blogs that are members of the network.  But we already have a Lijit search of the site itself, a listing of all of the member blogs and a monthly list posts.  We will continue to add functionality to the site to benefit both bloggers and readers in the near future. 

Also, the picture (just a picture, don't try to search) to the right is a sneak peak of an early version of the blogger badge that members of the SBN will be able to display on their blogs. You can also search the whole SBN, join the SBN and maybe more.  It may also work across comments as well.  The folks at Lijit are cooking up even more functionality too.

In the meantime, we have about 20 new blogs join the SBN in the last week! That should put us over 200 blogs in the network.  Bloggers who are members of the SBN will also get an invite to the security bloggers meet up at the RSA event.

Some of the blogs who have signed up recently are:

1. Richard Stiennon's Threat Chaos blog

2. Dark Reading blog

3. ONDLP blog

4. SANS Computer Forensics blog

Of course you don't have to subscribe to any of these blogs individually. You can get them all and more by subscribing to the SBN feed here. You can visit the site at http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com (or http://www.securitybloggers.net).  If you have any questions about the SBN or you are a blogger who would like to join, you can email info@securitybloggersnetwork.com.

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