According to a recent article at the BBC web site:
Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory, suffering from isolation, job insecurity and long hours, research has found.
The research is published in the American Sociological Associations' Contexts magazine.
A recent article in the Chronicle describes Edward Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton and his increasing involvement in intellectual property issues:
After taking on the recording industry in a high-profile lawsuit that he eventually lost, he spent the 2001-2 academic year at Stanford University, where he studied cyberlaw with help from Lawrence Lessig, the guru of the field and a master at using the news media to relay his message. Now Mr. Felten is writing a book, meant for both computer scientists and a general audience, about how tinkering is crucial to scientific discovery. And his Web log (at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com) calls attention to people's opinions about the regulation of technology.
Among the interesting things about Edward Felten's involvement is that he's one of a growing number of researchers and communicators who are using weblogs. Felten says:
Mr. Felten says Freedom to Tinker allows him to refine his thinking about technology and law without going through the traditional academic-publishing process. "I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I've never heard of," he says. "I've access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise."
3,000 Research Essays about the Net is pretty much what it says it is, a page listing 3,000 recent research essays on topics like:
PubScience, a site run by the Department of Energy that made available information on government and academic science research shut down recently.
Here's Dan Gillmor's take.
The new BBC homepage adjusts so that what you click becomes easier to find. Links for pages you go to a lot get darker over time.
The Sociable Media Group at MIT investigates issues concerning society and identity in the networked world.
Projects include: Chat Circles, a different kind of chat space with circles to represent users, virtual movement and hearing range (conversations in the chat space can take place outside your hearing), ChitChat Cafe, a physical cafe which also allows users to be 'present' virtually, and Visual Who, a tool for visualizing the complex relationships among a large group of items.
Using Weblogs in your business environment can increase employee communication and knowledge, save time and resources, and build reputation and confidence.
So says Bill Keaggy in Are Weblogs legitimate business tools? Yes, a recent article in NetworkWorldFusion.
I agree. I use this weblog to keep track of things I used to send to one or two people in email or mention when the topic came up (usually when I could no longer remember the URL or how to find the information again).
In addition:
These blogs are not only knowledge builders, they're reputation builders. Since 1999, a targeted audience from all over the world has visited my company's Web site to read the latest postings. With help from some contributors and other blogs, we've filtered the best resources on the Web for our employees, our customers and our industry.
...this is where I see blogs taking off for Extension and other educational groups. People want trusted sources. They want someone to keep up, interpret and distill information into something that more resembles knowledge they can use. Traditional web pages have their uses, but blogs are a way for us to reach people in new ways and enhance our reputation as well.
If you enter 'http' as a search string in Google, it will list entries in order of their PageRank:
Note that 7 out of the top 10 are search engines...It seems that the web is more about finding stuff than it is about the stuff itself.
Personally, I think this is cool because it tells us that people are finding things whether they're associated with a giant consolidating portal or not. A year or two ago we thought it would be only a matter of time before it all came down to AOL or Yahoo. Weblogging, the new face of search engines provided by Google, wireless networking, and other changes have taken things in interesting new directions.
Tara Calishain has a book, Google Hacks coming out from O'Reilly in February, 2003 about 100 useful and productive things you can do with Google.
...via BoingBoing
In an article about programming and leaky abstractions, Joel on Software has a cool explanation of how 'reliable' TCP and 'unreliable' IP manage to get your data to you in an accurate and reliable fashion:
Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors. Sometimes the actors got drunk on the way and shaved their heads or got nasal tattoos, thus becoming too ugly to work in Hollywood, and frequently the actors arrived in a different order than they had set out, because they all took different routes. Now imagine a new service called Hollywood Express, which delivered actors to Hollywood, guaranteeing that they would (a) arrive (b) in order (c) in perfect condition. The magic part is that Hollywood Express doesn't have any method of delivering the actors, other than the unreliable method of putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Hollywood Express works by checking that each actor arrives in perfect condition, and, if he doesn't, calling up the home office and requesting that the actor's identical twin be sent instead. If the actors arrive in the wrong order Hollywood Express rearranges them. If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened. To them, it just looks like the actors are arriving a little bit more slowly than usual, and they never even hear about the UFO crash.
...viaBoingBoing
The Center for Digital Governement has released its 2002 Digital Government Survey. The survey evaluates how states are using technology in the areas of social services, law enforcement and the courts, digital democracy, e-commerce, management and administration, taxation, education, GIS and transportation.
States in the top ten include: Arizona, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Iowa only appears in the top 25 in the category of Law enforcement and the courts.
CIO Magazine reports on a Portal project at the Unviersity of Maryland.
Jenny Levine, with the Suburban Library System in Burr Ridge, IL (and who is better known in the blog-o-sphere as The Shifted Librarian ) has a powerpoint presentation on Portals, Blogs, & RSS: why they are your future
