University presidents, that is. Some of them are blogging as a way to communicate and keep up with the times:
While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide, starting their own blogs.
Veterans of campus public-relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; "an insane thing to do" is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.
"When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,'" recalled McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. "Here's a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody."
Here at Iowa State Extension, Jack Payne, Vice President for Extension and Outreach, has started a weblog. It's particularly interesting to see the comments it generates and where people come from who find the blog.
It's all about the 'self:'--networks that are self-aware, self-configuring, self-healing, self implementing.
...via Smart Mobs
Researchers at MIT are working on a system to power electronic devices without power cords:
...the researchers designed an emitter to make use of long-lived resonances with "non-radiative" objects. This keeps the energy close to the antenna until another object with a similar resonance comes within range—no broadcasting into space is necessary. The two resonating objects can sync their frequencies easily, which would then cause energy to "tunnel from one object to another," Professor Soljacic told the BBC. When not transferring energy to another device, "most" unused energy simply gets reabsorbed into the emitter.The MIT team's system is designed for use in a home or office, as it can transfer energy to other devices within 3 to 5 meters of the emitter. However, the antenna's range doesn't have to be limited to just that, says Professor Soljacic. "This would work in a room let's say but you could adapt it to work in a factory," he said, adding that it could also be scaled down to be used on a microscopic level as well because the range would be determined by the size of the emitter.
New research from Akamai and JupiterResearch indicates that the average online shopper waits about 4 seconds for a webpage to load before abandoning the site. Also:
Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:
--The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
--Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.
--JupiterResearch recommends that retailers make every effort to keep page rendering to no longer than four seconds.
Additional findings in the report show that more than one-third of shoppers with a poor experience abandoned the site entirely, while 75 percent were likely not to shop on that site again. These results demonstrate that a poorly performing website can be damaging to a company’s reputation; according to the survey, nearly 30 percent of dissatisfied customers will either develop a negative perception of the company or tell their friends and family about the experience.
You will be unsurprised to know that PayPal and eBay are the top two places that phishers falsely claim to be representing.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank are also in the top ten.
Verizon and others are starting to offer dry-loop DSL or DSL without a telephone landline:
If you've got a cell phone and/or use Skype, Vonage, SunRocket, or one of the other VOIP providers, it's officially time to cut the cord, guys.
They're so embarrassed about it that they haven't told anyone, but Verizon is rolling out 'Naked DSL'.
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It's less evocatively known as 'Dry-loop DSL'. You can now drop your land-line, but still get DSL from them. Verizon experienced *cough* technical problems issues for about a year with this.
Folk less generous than me might suspect that their marketing and accounting people were totally freaked at the implications of people no longer being forced to pay for their buggy-whip technology to get DSL?
...via BoingBoing
Vista and Office 2007 are set to be released on November 30th:
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the planned release dates for Vista and Office are indeed November 30 after all, fulfilling Microsoft’s promise of delivering Vista in 2006.That said, the general consumer versions of Vista are still planned for a January 2007 release, with the rumoured date of January 30 said to be on the verge of confirmation over the next few days.
Some tips for starting an 'activity-centric' wiki:
- Pick a project or activity you are involved with or leading - ideally, one that is current and has several emails going back and forth amongst the team members (and others, if appropriate).
- Collect all the relevant emails you can get your hands on including the document attachments.
- Based on the emails, the project objectives, etc, draft an outline of the project as if you had to give a presentation to someone as to the project purpose, history, status, next steps, current activities, issues, ....
- That outline is your wiki HomePage (or FrontPage or MainPage or whatever depending on the wiki engine you're using). Copy it into your workspace Page. (Optionally, take a key phrase from each line of the outline and make it a page link.)
- Now - copy the content of each email somewhere into that outline OR Pages you are linking to from the HomePage.
- Don't start editing yet. You want it to look familiar to your audience. If anything, you may want to preface some of the email content with the person's name who sent it ('Jane wants to know >', Carl commented >', 'Here's my suggestion >', .....)
- Before you invite the audience in, take a step back and ask yourself "If I was looking at this for the first time and someone was expecting me to understand it or contribute something, would I get it?" Probably not, so start tweaking it a little and add some introductory comments on the HomePage
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Here are the top 10 most common passwords (though it's a bit UK-centric):
10. Thomas (person's name--always popular, so easy to crack)
9. arsenal (football--soccer--team, the UK-centric part)
8. monkey (almost my favorite)
7. charlie (oh, look, another person's name)
6. qwerty (and we all know where that one comes from)
5. 123456 (*totally* my favorite)
4. letmein (you know, 'let me in')
3. liverpool (another football team--apparently they're a very popular one)
2. password (yeah, this just screams--I forgot my password and the admins had to reset it for me)
1. 123 (which beats out '123456' but you know when all the '123' people are forced to go to 6 character minimum passwords they're going to use '123456')
If you are using any of these passwords or anyone's first name, or anything that resembles these passwords--wow--change now because these have all been Dugg.
From Ionut Chitu:
1. If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.
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3. A better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.
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7. Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.
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9. Find the color of a word. "Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color."
eBay uses 2 petabytes of storage daily and adds 10 terabytes of additional storage every week.
Think about this:
All the information in the world? I'm not entirely sure, but I have to say that this article is actually more fascinating than the one that prompted this post in the first place.