According to SmartMobs, the Gartner group has declaredIM one of Top strategic technologies for 2005:
Given the popularity of instant messaging, enterprises who want to keep employees happy and more productive will need to set policies for the use of instant messaging. In the future IM will be more integrated into applications, rather than an island of online dialog that vapourises when the window is closed.
ResearchBuzz reports that The University of Arizona and UC Berkeley news sites now have RSS feeds. The Minneapolis Public Library also has an RSS news feed.
Less than a year ago I went out and looked on the news sites of all the major universities in the US and no one had RSS feeds so it's good to see that things are changing.
Will Richardson of Weblogg-edposts the news that the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun have RSS feeds. And adds:
So is there any reason why next fall we shouldn't give our kids their ID numbers, their network passwords, and their login info to their Bloglines account prepopulated with world, national, and local news, the latest sports and weather, and a few choice fun feeds for kids to follow?
...via The Shifted Librarian
Melinda McBride contributes yet another blogging article at MindJack, which takes an interesting look at the pitfalls and potentials of blogging and, in particular, some of the things that we need to remain aware of to be inclusive and to really achieve the potential that blogging promises:
As I write this, another journalist is explaining what a blog is for the first time. Quite possibly, they are describing blogging as a trend created by actor Wil Wheaton. Most likely, they're announcing how blogs have just "hit" the mainstream. Blogging authority Rebecca Blood has named this repetitive rediscovery of blogging "Blood's Law of Weblog History." According to Blood, "the year you discovered weblogs and/or started your own is 'The Year Blogs Exploded'."
inf@Vis! has an article on Digital Dashboards:
Digital Dashboards are real time visualisation tools of critical business indicators that help in decision making. Its use is spreading and advancing from the executive elite towards the ubiquity of weblogs and personal computing.
...including some links to additional information.
...via elearningpost
Darin and I recently did a talk on Computer Self-Defense and one of the points we talked a lot about was strong passwords. You should, of course, have passwords that are complex and include upper and lower case characters, symbols, numbers and are not real words (for instance, Bob, Bob01, and Bobbette are Not Good Passwords). And, really, really importantly--you should NOT TELL YOUR PASSWORDS to other people.
BoingBoing cites a survey where people gave their passwords to strangers on the street for a chocolate bar:
One interviewee said, 'I work in a financial call center, our password changes daily, but I do not have a problem remembering it as it is written on the board so that every one can see it.... I think they rub it off before the cleaners arrive."
And, of course, then there's my classic favorite where people gave their password to strangers because they were carrying clipboards.....
Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, has an interesting op-ed piece on A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer. It's a good introduction to thinking about security in practical rational ways.
Maccaws provides The way forward with Web Standards | Kit | maccaws.org, making the case for Web standards on commercial sites:
Even though Web standards are being embraced by many Web authors, some businesses are reluctant to invest in standards-based Web sites without concrete reasons to do so. To help Web authors interested in advocating Web standards, this article assembles arguments and information about Web standards into one document and explains Web standards in terms of how they affect business. After outlining what Web standards are and how they are used, the article clearly demonstrates that adopting Web standards can improve many aspects of a Web site, such as: the amount of bandwidth used, load times, providing a foundation for accessibility, device independence and quality assurance processes. The article refutes several negative myths about Web standards and describes strategies for embracing standards. This article will lay the foundation for further research by MACCAWS into the nature of the business benefits of Web standards.
David Weinberger talks about The social life of echo chambers in KM Magazine:
There is certainly evidence that Internet traffic is chunky. Work by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, for example, shows that networks, including the Internet, tend to generate clusters that get disproportionate amounts of traffic. And Clay Shirky found that traffic patterns for weblogs follow a "power law" in which a handful of sites generate a hugely disproportionate number of links. This topology isn't surprising once you think about it, although it's one of those predictions that's much easier to make afterward, if you know what I mean.Even so, that doesn't tell us that the Internet is closing minds instead of opening them. David Sifry, the creator of Technorati.com, a site that indexes and ranks 1.6 million weblogs, points out that even though there is a power curve, if you rank blogs by how many sites link to them, the 100,000th blog has five links pointing at it. Five isn't a thousand, but it still means that five people with sites think enough of that 100,000th blog to recommend it to others. Presumably, that site is important to a small cluster of people. That's a readership that didn't exist before the Net. Further, if you add together all of the blogs in the "tail" of the power curve, it's a hell of a lot of blogs and a hell of a lot of readers. So, while the head of the power curve feels familiar to us because it's essentially a bunch of online columnists, the long tail is something new and unfamiliar: a galaxy of people who are finding constellations of readers, ready for ideas and conversation.
PC Magazine presents Top 100 Web Sites you didn't know you couldn't live without, including:
...via BoingBoing
The State of Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau now has their publications available via RSS Feeds
...via RSS in Government
Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian shares a presentation on RSS, what it is and what it can do for you:
RSS is:?blockquote>
- really hard to describe
- a form of XML
- stands for
- Rich Site Summary
- RDF Site Summary
- Really Simple Syndication
- is best understood when you actually use it!
Posted by dcoates at 11:21 AM
Last week, Darin and I did a couple of presentations on Computer Self-Defense. One of the things we talked about was making sure your data is secure when you leave an organization or get a new computer.
Here's a timely article on data left on old hard drives from CSO Magazine:
...I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.
Kinja, the weblog guide has gone live, at least in beta.
Meg Hourihan talks about Kinja:
After 15 months in the making, I'm pleased to announce that Kinja, a new weblog reading tool, has launched today. We worked really hard on it and hope you'll check it out.
Nick Denton adds more detail:
Kinja, a project we've been working on for more than a year, has just gone live. Kinja -- a guide to weblogs -- springs from a simple idea. Weblogs may be the most interesting phenomenon in media in decades, but hold the enthusiasm: they've reached only a tiny minority of the internet audience. About nine in ten US internet users have never even visited a blog. It's not for a lack of content that weblogs don't yet have a mass audience. For every interest, from baseball to sex, there are thousands of engaging sites. They're just hard to find, and then hard to remember. If weblogs are to realize their potential, they need to reach beyond the pioneering communities of technologists and amateur political pundits.
Jakob Nielsen talks about Productivity in the Service Economy:
Usability is key to increasing the service economy's productivity, because only attention to the way humans work can help them work smarter. If we adjust our focus accordingly, we won't just save billions of dollars from productivity gains -- we'll also save millions of jobs and create millions of new ones.
Everytime we develop software it's important to focus not just on what reports managers want or how this fits with some outside information source, but what people need to get their jobs done. Software developed 'right'--that's useful and enhances productivity--saves training and support costs later on because it's being used and it's doing something useful.
...via elearningpost