Archive for February, 2006

To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It’s All About Me

To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It’s All About Me - New York Times
At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

Here is a pretty interesting article about how e-mail is changing the student - professor relationship. Some of it is for the good and some if it not so good. I personally remember one experience, years ago, with a student who was having some issues during the semester. I worked and worked with the student, but class requirements can’t be changed. In frustration the student sent me a nasty e-mail claiming that I was insensitive…I simply replied, let me think about your e-mail and get back with you. This caused the student to think about what they said, they quickly apologized. It seems that I was one of the few professors working with them through this tough time and a problem with another professor caused them to strike at me. I had more than 70 e-mails from this student at this point in the semester, so I knew that I was doing all that I could, but e-mail enabled the student to strike before thinking.

We all need to spend more time thinking about what we write in e-mails…I know I do.

24 February, 2006 | No comments

Reuters Financial Glossary Wiki

Reuters Financial Glossary Wiki

Reuters is hosting a Financial Glossary Wiki, a fascinating case study for the way enterprises will host professional communities.

Neat idea and the way they rolled it out makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to watch this one develop.

21 February, 2006 | No comments

One if By Land Two if By Blog

One if By Land Two if By Blog

Google has come out swinging, defending their stance in the DOJ search data matter.However, they did not issue a press release. Rather they went with a blog post by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel.

Now that is pretty interesting. If anyone has any ideas how one might measure the number of press releases let me know. I would be interested in looking into this question.

21 February, 2006 | No comments

Guinness Launches Weblog

Adrants » Guinness Launches Weblog

Another company creates a blog. I think it will do quite well. Especially since they have devoted fans.

18 February, 2006 | No comments

Blogs, wikis make a home in the enterprise

Blogs, wikis make a home in the enterprise - Yahoo! News
San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Blogs and wikis have moved past the tech bling phase and are settling in as core fixtures in the enterprise collaboration infrastructure. Two enterprise content management vendors are helping drive this evolution, bolstering their platforms with security and auditing functions designed to preserve the sparkle of blogs and wikis while making the content safe for the enterprise.

Another good article about blogs and wikis in the enterprise.

 

17 February, 2006 | No comments

New York Magazine - The Blog Issue

Table of Contents - February 20, 2006 Issue of New York Magazine

New York Magazine is running an issue with a cover story about blogs (link above). There are some interesting stories including a nice time line. Definitely worth checking out.

17 February, 2006 | No comments

The Inside Story on Company Blogs

The Inside Story on Company Blogs - NewsFactor Network

The numbers are downright puny. According to The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (a list of blogs provided by employees about their companies and products), only 22 of the 500 largest U.S. companies operate public blogs from their executive suites. That amounts to a measly 4.4 percent. Has the blogging sensation passed corporations by?Not by a long shot. Instead of public blogs, think about blog technology. That’s the focus for many leading companies around the world. From McDonald’s to Cannondale Bicycle, corporations are using the software Relevant Products/Services from Insight to revamp internal communications, reach out to suppliers, and remake corporate Intranets. Often the site doesn’t look much different from what it’s replacing. Sometimes there’s nothing particularly bloggy about the results.

But these corporate initiatives are interactive and cheap to deploy — making them an attractive form of communication. “Blogs are a way to bring our knowledge together,” says Dave Weick, chief information officer at McDonald’s.

Great article which looks at how companies are using blogs and uses a couple as examples.

17 February, 2006 | No comments

Bloggers give view of House Web hearing

Chicago Tribune | Bloggers give view of House Web hearing

Allowing bloggers in “challenges the traditional views about what constitutes `the media,’” said Sam Stratman, communications director for Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill). Hyde is chairman of the International Relations Committee, which held the hearing.

Bloggers continue to challenge “traditional media” and in this instance take a huge step forward.

17 February, 2006 | No comments

Software pioneer Bricklin tackles wikis

Software pioneer Bricklin tackles wikis | CNET News.com

In 1979, Bricklin released VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers. Now he’s close to finishing the beta for WikiCalc, an open-source, browser-based collaboration tool that mimics the functionality of a spreadsheet while leveraging the technology of wikis, which let anyone, anywhere manipulate data across the Web.

Now this is really cool. Bricklin was one of the original creators of the spreadsheet and becasue he and his partners were not motivated by profit other companies like Lotus and MicroSoft have made millions…make that billions. So while I thought it was neat the he is involved with the Wiki Calc, I found it quite appropriate.

17 February, 2006 | No comments

Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation

EFF: Breaking News

San Francisco - Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password.

Wow, as if Google wasn’t scary enough already!

13 February, 2006 | No comments

World Wild Web

USATODAY.com - World Wild Web

Massachusetts newspapers disclosed last month that staffers for Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., had polished the boss’s Wikipedia biography. Deleted were references to a long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms and to his whopping campaign war chest. The new version was a virtual copy of the glowing bio on Meehan’s own website.

Could people be literally rewritting history? This has some interesting implications and supports the idea that open is not always a good thing when there are people with agendas.

8 February, 2006 | No comments

Blogging Continues to Grow

Blogging Continues to Grow

New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

Looks like blogging has staying power…but we knew that already

8 February, 2006 | No comments

Credibility Of Analysts

Optimize Magazine
Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and others insist their output is squeaky clean, yet they also rake in millions providing services to the very same companies they monitor, heavyweights like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Which leads to a question that continues to dog the research firms: How much influence do technology vendors have over their work?

Good article on the vendor - research firm relationship. These questions need to be asked and should continue to be asked.

7 February, 2006 | No comments

NWC’s Daily Spin: Testing Enterprise-Class Wiki Tools

NWC’s Daily Spin: Testing Enterprise-Class Wiki Tools | | Feb 6, 2006 | Network Computing
In today’s Daily Spin, we offer a look at three enterprises using wikis behind the firewall, as well as a sneak peak inside NWC’s own upcoming test of enterprise wiki solutions. Plus, a round up of the week’s networking news. All that and more in today’s edition of Network Computing’s Daily Spin.

A good look at several companies working with wikis on the enterprise level. We will see more of this in the future I am sure.

7 February, 2006 | No comments

Amazon.com wants its share of search dollars - Feb. 6, 2006

Amazon.com wants its share of search dollars - Feb. 6, 2006

Jeff Bezos wants some of Google’s lucrative ad dollars. Amazon.com has been signing up websites to carry contextual advertisements that will work very similarly to Google’s (Research) search-related ads. The online retailer is testing the program with members of its Associates program, who currently get paid commissions for driving traffic to Amazon’s website. The new advertising program would pay website owners for driving traffic to third-party advertisers…

More competition for Google Nonesense, I mean Adsense, this can be a good thing. With Yahoo! and Amazon taking on this area, will Google remain king? I suspect so with their MS type tactics, but we can only hope.

7 February, 2006 | No comments

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