Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Where have all the A List bloggers gone?

A stark blogging reality check from Don Dodge; see the full post for more details

When I started blogging about 4 years ago there were a handful of 'A-List" Tech bloggers that dominated the blogosphere. Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer, Marc Andreessen, Steve Rubel, and a few others were everywhere...every day. It was much smaller then, but they were the recognized leaders and continued to be until recently.

Mike Arrington was, and still is, the king of tech bloggers with his TechCrunch blog. But this week Mike decided to step away from blogging for a while after repeated attacks from other bloggers. Jason Calacanis quit blogging about a year ago because he was tired of all the "haters" constantly harassing him. Jason now shares his thoughts on a highly successful email distribution list. Robert Scoble still blogs occasionally but is much more into making web videos, Twitter, and FriendFeed. Dave Winer calls himself one of the most hated people on the Internet.

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Where have all the A List bloggers gone?

Yahoo drops its Briefcase | Webware - CNET

Reminds me of some classic Bubble 1.0 data roach motel stories, from a decade ago…

The service will be shut down on March 30, the company said Wednesday. Yahoo is warning users to retrieve or delete their documents before that date.

Briefcase, which offered 30MB of online storage, was launched almost 10 years ago. However, "usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities," the company said in a statement.

There are now many alternative online storage services to Briefcase. Notable rivals include Microsoft's SkyDrive, a Windows Live service that offers 25GB of free storage.

Yahoo drops its Briefcase | Webware - CNET

Joe Davidson - Joe Davidson's Federal Diary - washingtonpost.com

Monster.com’s nightmare continues…

The federal government's online database for job seekers has been hacked.

As if Uncle Sam's hiring process is not in enough of a mess already, now comes word that the pocket where he keeps job applications has been picked.

USAJOBS, the government's database, is powered by Monster.com, the Internet employment service.

Joe Davidson - Joe Davidson's Federal Diary - washingtonpost.com

Your Money - American Express Watched Where You Shopped - NYTimes.com

A delicate data mining dilemma for American Express – check the full article for more details

In recent months, American Express has gone far beyond simply checking your credit score and making sure you pay on time. The company has been looking at home prices in your area, the type of mortgage lender you’re using and whether small-business card customers work in an industry under siege. It has also been looking at how you spend your money, searching for patterns or similarities to other customers who have trouble paying their bills.

In some instances, if it didn’t like what it was seeing, the company has cut customer credit lines. It laid out this logic in letters that infuriated many of the cardholders who received them. “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped,” one of those letters said, “have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

Your Money - American Express Watched Where You Shopped - NYTimes.com

More details surface on Google's alleged GDrive | Webware - CNET

See the full article for more context-setting… and if want to seamlessly sync stuff across devices and in the cloud, and you’re tired of waiting for reporters reading tea leaves (or comments in Google source code fragments) to tell you if the “mythical” Google GDrive actually exists, you might want to explore the award-winning Microsoft Live Mesh 

So far, Google has yet to confirm the existence of the GDrive or Google Web Drive. But as more indicators crop up, it's only a matter of time before the company needs to say something about the rumored storage service. Until then, look for more details to emerge, whether Google wants them to or not.

More details surface on Google's alleged GDrive | Webware - CNET

Microsoft Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Latest Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure

A timely enterprise IT reality check from Gartner

The latest round of research is out from Gartner, and they have positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant of all three Application Infrastructure Magic Quadrants. The Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects , Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Systematic SOA Application Projects, and the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects.

Development Unfiltered: From code, to cloud to comedy. - Steven Martin, CSD Product Management : Microsoft Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Latest Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure

Well-Connected Parents Take On School Boards - washingtonpost.com

See the full article for more details on this important trend

For a new generation of well-wired activists in the Washington region, it's not enough to speak at Parent-Teacher Association or late-night school board meetings. They are going head-to-head with superintendents through e-mail blitzes, social networking Web sites, online petitions, partnerships with business and student groups, and research that mines a mountain of electronic data on school performance.

Well-Connected Parents Take On School Boards - washingtonpost.com

Top Twitter Celebrities - Forbes.com

Check the full article for more evidence that Twitter has jumped the shark…

Guy Kawasaki has plenty of titles to choose from: author, venture capitalist and the chief executive of his own Web start-up, to name a few. But he has no illusions about what his real job has become: "I'm a professional Twitterer," Kawasaki says.

Throughout the day, the 54-year-old serial entrepreneur and former Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) marketing guru scours the Web for interesting links and siphons them into his Twitter feed in 140 characters or less, a stream of around 30 posts a day that flows into the accounts of more than 50,000 users. He peppers that collection of news, rumors and facts with references to his own site, Alltop.com, an aggregator of links to articles and blog posts on hundreds of subjects.

Top Twitter Celebrities - Forbes.com

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Why Google Employees Quit

A timely Google reality check from Dave Kellogg; see the full post for details

I believe in strong culture and I know that Google has one. The trick, in my opinion, is looking out for the downside of a strong culture, because there always is one. The mails below help paint a picture of that downside.
My take on Google has always been

• One-trick pony
• Which has spent literally billions in experimental R&D -- in an organic model that I like
• But has nothing to show for it

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Why Google Employees Quit

Amazon's Sales Surge, Bucking Retail Slump - WSJ.com

An intriguing factoid from WSJ coverage of Amazon.com’s impressive quarterly numbers:

Amazon has also broadened its offerings with its own products, such as the Kindle ebook reader. But the company has struggled to meet demand for the device, which sold out quickly each of the past two holiday seasons.

Mr. Bezos said the Kindle was driving incremental book sales. "When people buy a Kindle, they continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. Incrementally, they buy 1.6 to 1.7 Kindle books for every physical book that they buy."

Amazon's Sales Surge, Bucking Retail Slump - WSJ.com

Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete - NYTimes.com

More on the Burger King chapter of Facebook evolution

Facebook, which now has more than 150 million members, has clearly been built on the back of the culture of oversharing. Many members broadcast the mundane details of their lives through a “status update” feature, which lets people — nay, encourages them — to describe the contents of their lunch or the virulence of their bronchitis.

Even in this environment, however, deleting friends does not generate a notification of any sort, leaving members to discover they’ve been unfriended only when they find they no longer have access to someone’s profile. It can be a jarring experience, especially considering that the person who dumped you at some point either requested you as a friend or accepted your request (on Facebook, that is how friends are made). But members understand that such selective discretion is critical to the social-networking ecosystem.

Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete - NYTimes.com

State of the Art - From Netflix, a Step Toward Any Movie, Anytime - NYTimes.com

See the full article for an overview of the Netflix online strategy

Actually, there’s one more point worth noting — not a technical one, but a psychological one. There’s a side effect of “any movie, any time” that not many people consider. Once you stop having to pay for movies individually, once you’re able to freely movie surf, you lose the risk of making the wrong decision — and some of the joy at having made a good one. In short, movies become a little less special.

Nonetheless, the industry has been trying to sell us on Internet movie downloads for years, and yet it’s remained a techie niche until now. It took Netflix to figure out how to crack the technology code, bringing us tantalizingly close to the “any movie, any time” future that’s surely just around the corner.

State of the Art - From Netflix, a Step Toward Any Movie, Anytime - NYTimes.com

Kyrgyzstan Knocked Offline - WSJ.com

Strange days indeed

A Russian "cyber-militia" has effectively knocked the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan offline in recent days, according to an Internet security expert, in the latest apparent example of geopolitical tensions playing out on the Web.

Since Jan. 18, the country of 5.3 million has come under a massive cyber-attack, according to Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at Atlanta Internet security firm SecureWorks Inc.

The denial-of-service attack -- which swamps Web sites with so many hits that they are forced to shut down -- has targeted the two main Internet service providers in the country, which account for more than 80% of Kyrgyzstan's bandwidth, according to Mr. Jackson. The episode has shut down Web sites and made emailing impossible, he said.

Kyrgyzstan Knocked Offline - WSJ.com

WSJ.com: Influential Tech Blogger Takes Leave; Cites Abuse

Yikes

Michael Arrington, founder of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, announced Wednesday he is taking a leave of absence after suffering from several instances of physical and verbal abuse, including a death threat last summer.

Arrington, well-known in Silicon Valley for his reporting on tech news as well as reviewing start-up companies, said he is leaving the blog at least through February because the abuse has intensified. The final straw came Tuesday at a conference in Germany when "someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face," he said.

"I draw the line at being spat on," Arrington wrote in a blog post. "It's one step away from something far more violent."

Article - WSJ.com

Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9 - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

See the full post for more details, and the “leaked photos” link below for some alleged snapshots.  I’d still prefer a small form-factor netbook Tablet PC with 8+ hour battery life, and hope to be able to buy a cost-effective one when Windows 7 is released.  If Amazon.com makes its ebook service available for other device types at that time, great.  In general, I don’t believe hardware and services should be tightly coupled.

Amazon would not comment in any more detail about the coming announcement, but the Kindle’s detail page on Amazon.com tells the story. It now says the electronic book reader will ship in four to six weeks. It previously suggested a wait of 11 to 13 weeks.

The device has been out of stock since November, after Oprah Winfrey touted it on her show. The announcement seems to confirm our suspicions that the original Kindle has been obsolete since that time and that everyone who purchased the device over the holidays from Amazon.com — or put their name on a waiting list — will receive the newer version.

There has already been much speculation about the upcoming Kindle. If the leaked photos on the gadget site Boy Genius Report are to be believed, the new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9 - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Hewlett-Packard’s War of Words With Cisco Begins - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

The gloves are off, despite the occasional diplomatic “co-opetition” spin

The message expressed by those present at H.P.’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters was clear: Cisco has dominated the networking market for too long, and there are plenty of companies that want to piggyback on H.P.’s new products, hoping that H.P.’s lower prices and mere presence will open up sales opportunities normally gobbled up by Cisco.

H.P. is also rumored to be working on router products, which would have it compete against Cisco and Juniper Networks. Marius Haas, H.P.’s chief of the networking business, declined to comment on such speculation.

Hewlett-Packard’s War of Words With Cisco Begins - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Google Makes Gmail Available Offline - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Lots of press coverage on this, most with the same basic themes…

Google is not the first of the major Web e-mail providers to provide offline access to its service. Yahoo did it last year, though its approach requires users to download a desktop e-mail software program called Zimbra, which Yahoo acquired in 2007. (Zimbra can also be used for offline access to Gmail and AOL Mail.) Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail offers limited offline access. And Zoho, a smaller provider of Web e-mail, has provided offline access since October.

Most Web e-mail services have long allowed users to download their messages to desktop clients like Microsoft Outlook via POP or IMAP technology.

But Gmail’s new offline feature will allow users to handle their e-mail within the familiar Gmail interface, with automatic synchronization of changes when an Internet connection is available.

But some reality check dimensions:

1.  It’s “experimental” – apparently doesn’t even rate the usual Google semi-permanent “beta” suffix yet

2.  People who want to use Gmail off-line already can, as noted in most of the articles on the “experimental” offline model, by using email clients such as Outlook

3.  The Gmail design team appears to go out of its way to make the user experience unfamiliar to people who have used other email systems in the past, e.g., with

• Labels rather than folders
• No option to hit the delete key and move to the next message (instead, Gmail users working with the Gmail browser client interface rather than an alternative such as Outlook hit delete, return to the inbox index, and then select another message)
• The default of saving all messages, for index fodder – this is probably part of the reason for not supporting the otherwise-universal delete => delete and go to next message, i.e., Google wants to encourage people to collect messages rather than deleting them, so it can index the message collection for advertising purposes

Google Makes Gmail Available Offline - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Microsoft Brings Business Intelligence to the Masses With SharePoint: Q&A: Kurt DelBene, senior vice president of the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft

A significant shift in Microsoft’s BI strategy – see the full interview for more details

PressPass: Why did Microsoft make this decision?

DelBene: We frequently sum up our mission as bringing “BI to the masses.” Incorporating Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 features into Office SharePoint Server helps us fulfill that mission and sets us apart from many of the BI vendors that require the purchase of specialized applications.

Analyst firms have told us that BI solutions offered by these other vendors are typically only adopted by about 20 percent of employees at any given company. Part of the reason for such low adoption rates is the expense of licensing additional seats and the learning curve required to become a proficient user.

Microsoft’s BI solution, on the other hand, relies on familiar, widely used tools such as SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office Excel, which is arguably one of the most widely used analysis and planning tools around the world. The ease of use and broad accessibility of our BI offering is part of the reason behind our success. The way we look at it, the more employees who have access to business data, the greater a company’s ability to anticipate changes and make adjustments.

Microsoft Brings Business Intelligence to the Masses With SharePoint: Q&A: Kurt DelBene, senior vice president of the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft, discusses changes to Microsoft’s business intelligence strategy, including how customers and their businesses will benefit through pervasive BI.

H-P and Cisco Looking Less Like Partners - Digits - WSJ.com

Stimulus-response?…

His company has had a networking business for about 25 years. But H-P is also a major reseller of Cisco hardware, too. The latest announcements come as the computer maker seems to be de-emphasizing that strategy–and not long after word leaked out that Cisco may be entering the computer business with a device known as a blade server ((http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/12/12/cisco-pushing-further-into-the-data-center/)), encroaching on turf occupied by companies that include H-P, IBM and Dell.

H-P began building up its ProCurve division last year, after it completed its acquisition of EDS, the big services company. Mr. Haas, who had been in a corporate strategy role, became the ProCurve chief with the aim of boosting its sales. In recent months, he said, H-P has decided to invest in developing and marketing its ProCurve equipment, and encouraging its salesforce to hawk ProCurve products, rather than Cisco’s. For example, he said, salespeople in H-P’s business hardware group now have a quota of ProCurve sales they’re supposed to meet.

H-P and Cisco Looking Less Like Partners - Digits - WSJ.com

Hackers Lurking in Obama's Web Site (PC World) by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Sign of the times

U.S. President Barack Obama ran a successful Web 2.0 campaign last year. Now, as president, he's got to deal with a very Web 2.0 problem: hackers abusing the social-networking features of his Web site.

Hackers have registered bogus accounts on Obama's online community, my.barackobama.com, where they are posting images designed to set off a chain of events that lead to malicious Trojan horse programs. These programs are stepping stones used by hackers to download more and more malware onto a victim's computer.

Hackers Lurking in Obama's Web Site (PC World) by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Apple awarded key iPhone multitouch patent | Apple - CNET News

It’ll be interesting to see when and by whom this gets challenged; see the full post for more details and a link to the patent

Apple has been awarded a patent that appears to cover much of the iPhone's multitouch user interface.

World of Apple (via MacRumors) spotted the patent, which was awarded last Tuesday to several Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, and Wayne Westerman, one of the founders of a company called Fingerworks that Apple acquired in 2005.

Apple awarded key iPhone multitouch patent | Apple - CNET News

McNealy has Obama's ear on open source, countering Microsoft spin - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

See the full post for more context

Ars Technica calls McNealy "an odd choice" to advise Obama on the subject.
"Although Obama's interest in open source looks like a promising sign that the incoming government is serious about reforming federal IT procurement policies, the decision to call on Sun's eccentric cofounder is an incomprehensible twist," write Ars Technica's Ryan Paul. "McNealy's long history of bizarre and contradictory positions on open source software make him a less than ideal candidate for helping to shape national policy on the subject. Asking Scott McNealy to write a paper about open source software is a bit like asking Dick Cheney to write a paper about government transparency."

McNealy has Obama's ear on open source, countering Microsoft spin - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

IBM out of the online services gate with mixed reviews - Network World

A timely reality check from John Fontana – see the full article 

Seeking to break out from behind the firewall, IBM/Lotus is cloning its collaboration family for the cloud and embarking on a direction that could define the future of its applications.

The company last week changed the name of its year-old Bluehouse cloud services project to LotusLive and signaled that it is officially in the software-as-a-service race.

The company, however, could only sketch out a rough outline that was full of technological gaps, vague on delivery dates and empty on pricing.

One clarification on the first sentence of the article: IBM is not actually cloning its collaboration family, with the exception of a couple facets of Connections and hosted Notes email (which is not the same as the SaaS email offering IBM acquired from OutBlaze just before announcing LotusLive at Lotusphere 2009, and will apparently use in LotusLive Engage). 

What IBM Lotus is mostly doing instead, with LotusLive Engage, Meetings, and Events, is acquiring, rebranding, and integrating software services.  While perhaps expedient for IBM, that strategy has obviously troubling implications for developers and administrators who will need to master two largely distinct platforms, if they want to use a mix of IBM’s on-premises and online communication and collaboration offerings (or three different architectures, if they’re going to use a mix of LotusLive, Notes/Domino, and the WebSphere-based IBM Lotus products) .  The end user/information worker user experience also varies considerably, across the IBM Lotus offering set.

That’s a significant departure from the Microsoft Online approach, in which the same underlying (Exchange and SharePoint) infrastructure is used for both software and services at enterprise-scale, with consistent administrator, developer, and information worker experiences across the software + services continuum. 

IBM out of the online services gate with mixed reviews - Network World

Melding Obama’s Web to a YouTube Presidency - NYTimes.com

Interesting times…

The most prominent example of the new strategy is his weekly address to the nation — what under previous presidents was a speech recorded for and released to radio stations on Saturday mornings. Mr. Obama instead records a video, which on Saturday he posted on the White House Web site and on YouTube; in it, he explained what he wanted to accomplish with the $825 billion economic stimulus plan working its way through Congress. By late Sunday afternoon, it had been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube.

The White House also faces legal limitations in terms of what it can do. Perhaps most notably, it cannot use a 13-million-person e-mail list that Mr. Obama’s team developed because it was compiled for political purposes. That is an important reason Mr. Obama has decided to build a new organization within the Democratic Party, which does not have similar restrictions.

Melding Obama’s Web to a YouTube Presidency - NYTimes.com

Report: VC infusion values Twitter at $250 million | Digital Media - CNET News

See the full post for more details

"Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one 'no,'" TechCrunch wrote Saturday. "But someone's bit, perhaps encouraged by Twitter's breakneck growth and the interest from Facebook. That means Twitter gets a new cash injection and time to figure out its business model at an even more leisurely pace."

That certainly would be a boon for Twitter, which until now has not shown signs of a viable business model. Though it is growing rapidly and has millions of users, no one knows how the company could support itself. Some have worried that while it is increasingly useful to the many people who rely on it, it might not be financially viable over time.

Report: VC infusion values Twitter at $250 million | Digital Media - CNET News

Ed Brill: Two different analyst views of Lotus Symphony from Lotusphere

A Symphony snapshot from Ed Brill – excerpt:

In the long term, though, Burton's Guy Creese understands our body language correctly.  What we're ultimately looking to accomplish is to open this market to the idea that desktop productivity is ripe for innovation.  Today, that innovation is blocked by the Microsoft hold on the space.  Once we get past that, IBM and many, many other vendors can start to deliver true innovation in helping users be more productive with documents.  Our labs and research teams have tons of great ideas, and we highlighted many of these at Lotusphere last week.  Even more will start to come to the fore in the future, and we can all expect to benefit from that evolution.

I have to wonder if Ed and others at IBM have invested much time exploring Office 2007, or saw the Office Web Applications demo at Microsoft PDC late last year.  There’s definitely lots of innovation going on in the productivity application market, but it’s not coming from IBM.  Microsoft, in contrast, is creating lots of new opportunities by sincerely supporting open standards such as Open XML and ODF, and by embracing the software + services model in a consistent manner.

Ed Brill

Video: Steve Jobs Giving His First Big Demo

Happy 25th birthday to the Mac – see the full post for a YouTube video of the Steve Jobs intro ( the post title should be “… his first big Mac demo”, however; e.g., there were many big Apple II demos earlier)

Twenty five years ago today, on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs gave the first on-stage demonstration of the Macintosh computer to a packed auditorium. The technology was much different then, but it was the same Steve Jobs: a masterful showman able to make the latest jumble of electronics seem like it was capable of magic. Enjoy.

Video: Steve Jobs Giving His First Big Demo

Google needs to be more transparent about users of and usage of Google Apps in enterprises

A timely Tom Austin reality check; see the full post for more details

Google Docs have been around for more than two years now. Just how many enterprises with hundreds or thousands of users have standardized on gmail and Google Docs?

Google isn’t saying. They’re not being transparent . All of which either hurts them – because people want to know before investing; or it hides a weakness – if too few enterprise users are really using the product. The average enterprise IT shop is not naive. Trotting out Genentech over and over again isn’t enough.

If Google can’t provide a lot more data to establish their credibility in the enterprise space, enterprises won’t take them seriously.

Google needs to be more transparent about users of and usage of Google Apps in enterprises

BBC NEWS | Technology | Britannica reaches out to the web

Better late than never?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has unveiled a plan to let readers help keep the reference work up to date.

Under the plan, readers and contributing experts will help expand and maintain entries online.

Experts will also be enrolled in a reward scheme and given help to promote their command of a subject.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Britannica reaches out to the web

Revolution, Facebook-Style - Can Social Networking Turn Young Eygptians Into a Force for Democratic Change? - NYTimes.com

A stark sign of the times; see the full article 

As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members.

Revolution, Facebook-Style - Can Social Networking Turn Young Eygptians Into a Force for Democratic Change? - NYTimes.com

Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books

A very detailed and interesting reality check – read the full article.  An excerpt:

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books

Selling Apples in the Recession - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Hmm…

The recession in some ways has helped Apple. Lower prices for memory chips and LCD display panels helped boost its profit margins. Tim Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, said he believed that many manufacturers were selling components at cost, so the recession bonus wouldn’t last. In fact, the company predicts its margins will shrink by the second half of the year.

As for product mix, the company sold 3 percent more iPods in the last quarter of 2008 than the year before; analysts were expecting sales in that mature market to shrink. Meanwhile, sales of the iPhone fell short of expectations. Apple sold 4.4 million phones in the quarter, compared to estimates of 5 million. Nobody asked Apple executives to explain this.

Selling Apples in the Recession - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide - NYTimes.com

Go figure, re the unpatched PCs

“I don’t know why people aren’t more afraid of these programs,” said Merrick L. Furst, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. “This is like having a mole in your organization that can do things like send out any information it finds on machines it infects.”

Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.

Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October. The firm’s estimate is based on a survey of nine million Internet addresses.

Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide - NYTimes.com

Google Income Drops 68% on One-Time Charges - NYTimes.com

An emerging pattern…

Mr. Schmidt said that he was pleased with the company’s results and remained optimistic about Google’s long-term prospects.

“The business is quite healthy, especially given the tough economic climate,” Mr. Schmidt said. But saying that the fourth quarter may have been the “easy part,” he noted that Google would not be immune to what appeared to be worsening economic conditions.

“We don’t know how long this period will last,” he said.

Google Income Drops 68% on One-Time Charges - NYTimes.com

Decline in PC Orders Leads to Microsoft Layoffs - NYTimes.com

Strange days indeed

Mr. Ballmer also said Microsoft would take a wait-and-see approach about acquisitions because company executives thought the price of potential targets would fall further. That gloomy assessment offers little hope to investors trying to figure out when tech stocks, which have plunged with the overall market, will hit bottom.

Both Microsoft and Intel, which are generally conservative in their public outlooks, declined to provide forecasts for future sales, saying they were uncomfortable with the proposition in an erratic economy.

“That’s especially unusual for Microsoft,” said Brendan Barnicle, a software analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “Historically, they have had some of the most accurate gauges of PCs, and they didn’t even try to offer guidance.”

Decline in PC Orders Leads to Microsoft Layoffs - NYTimes.com

Pattern Finder: ECM Process Framework Example: Autonomy Buys Interwoven

Looks like the pure-play Web content management dance floor is emptying – see Guy Creese’s full post for more perspectives

This morning Autonomy, a search company, announced it was buying Interwoven, a web content management company. Historically, the market has viewed these two sectors as separate and distinct; they certainly leverage different technologies. However, in my view this is more of a case of, "Why has it taken you so long?"

The deal is valued at ~$775M; see this Autonomy press release for more details.

Pattern Finder: ECM Process Framework Example: Autonomy Buys Interwoven

Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology - washingtonpost.com

Hey, maybe they’ll find the millions of email messages accidentally “lost” by team W…

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology - washingtonpost.com

Zimbra founder to leave Yahoo in March | Digital Media - CNET News

Hmm…

Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj will leave Yahoo in March, about a year and a half after the company acquired the open-source and online e-mail service provider.

Jim Morrisroe, a long-time Zimbra executive, will replace Satish as vice president of Zimbra, Yahoo said. He'll report to Scott Dietzen, Zimbra's former president who was promoted to senior vice president of communications products for Yahoo last year.

Zimbra founder to leave Yahoo in March | Digital Media - CNET News

Apple Reports Strong Quarter Despite Economy - NYTimes.com

See the full post for more details

Amid a deepening recession and an intensifying controversy over the health of its chief executive, Apple reported strong first-quarter profits on Wednesday that surprised analysts and handily beat Wall Street’s expectations.

Apple said robust sales of iPods and laptops buoyed the company amid a terrible holiday shopping season that hurt nearly all other technology and consumer electronics firms.

Apple Reports Strong Quarter Despite Economy - NYTimes.com

Windows 7 Leaves Vista in the Dust - WSJ.com

Walt Mossberg on Windows 7 – see the full article 

I won't be doing a full, detailed review of Windows 7 until it is released in final form, but here's a preview of some of the main features of this new operating system and some of my initial impressions.

In general, I have found Windows 7 a pleasure to use. There are a few drawbacks, but my preliminary verdict on Windows 7 is positive.

On a related note, a Windows 7 review in today’s Boston Globe: Microsoft tries to win back fans with Vista alternative

Windows 7 Leaves Vista in the Dust - WSJ.com

Platformonomics - Regulating the Land that Moore's Law Forgot

A classic and timely Charles Fitzgerald post; read the full post 

And so we come full circle: "IBM accused of abusing position in European mainframe market".

Out of the limelight, IBM has spent significant time and money lobbying various governments to hobble competitors in the last fifteen years, all the while maintaining the biggest monopoly in technology with the mainframe.  Now the antitrust spotlight returns to them, amid accusations that IBM is doing exactly what got them into trouble decades ago (refusing to unbundle their software from their hardware).

IBM is very good at milking the mainframe installed base and defend it aggressively.  And for good reason: I have seen numbers that suggest the mainframe is still close to half of IBM's profits when you include hardware, software and surrounding (people) services.  Forced forklift upgrades every couple of years are a favored strategy.

(Now go read the rest of the post…)

Platformonomics - Regulating the Land that Moore's Law Forgot

IBM to buy Chinese e-mail company | Business Tech - CNET News

Interesting times

Security experts warned that companies considering moving to hosted e-mail services in developing countries should think about where their data will reside, and choose their provider carefully. A report last week warned that emerging markets such as China are at greater risk of cybercrime, while the U.S. government warned in November that the Chinese government was using advanced cyberespionage techniques.

"With any hosted service, you have to do due diligence, look at the system and how it's being managed," said Andy Buss, a senior analyst at Canalys.

IBM to buy Chinese e-mail company | Business Tech - CNET News

IBM 3Q08 Quarterly Earnings Report [software product summary]

See the full IBM press release for more details

Revenues from the Software segment were $5.2 billion, an increase of 12 percent (8 percent, adjusting for currency) compared with the third quarter of 2007. Revenues from IBM's total middleware products, which primarily include WebSphere, Information Management, Tivoli, Lotus and Rational products, were $4.1 billion, up 12 percent versus the third quarter of 2007. Operating systems revenues of $594 million increased 5 percent compared with the prior-year quarter.

For the WebSphere family of software products, which facilitate customers' ability to manage a wide variety of business processes using open standards to interconnect applications, data and operating systems, revenues increased 4 percent. Revenues for Information Management software, which enables clients to leverage information on demand, increased 26 percent. Revenues from Tivoli software, infrastructure software that enables clients to centrally manage networks including security and storage capability, increased 2 percent, and revenues for Lotus software, which allows collaborating and messaging by clients in real-time communication and knowledge management, increased 10 percent year over year. Revenues from Rational software, integrated tools to improve the processes of software development, increased 23 percent compared with the year-ago quarter.

IBM 3Q08 Quarterly Earnings Report

I.B.M. Tops Forecasts and Expects a Good 2009 - NYTimes.com

More on IBM’s earnings announcement:

I.B.M.’s solid profit performance came largely from higher profit margins in the services and software businesses that now account for more than 80 percent of the company’s earnings.

In a difficult economic environment, I.B.M. has apparently been successful in convincing corporations and government agencies that its technology would deliver gains in efficiency. “Cost-saving offerings continue to sell,” Mark Loughridge, I.B.M.’s chief financial officer, said during a conference call with analysts.

[…]

I.B.M. has held up better than many of its peers in the technology sector because of its global reach and its mix of businesses. About 40 percent of its revenue and 60 percent of its profit come from products and services sold on a subscription basis as licenses or contracts that are renewed every year or so.

Such annuity businesses include services that support essential client operations like billing. Most companies do not regard these as discretionary purchases.

I.B.M. Tops Forecasts and Expects a Good 2009 - NYTimes.com

IBM Bucks Tech Slump, Issues Rosy 2009 Outlook - WSJ.com

It will be interesting to read the fine print in this context, but one thing that is clear is that IBM has mastered the art of catering to Wall Street

IBM said it was able to increase earnings in the face of a revenue slowdown because it is getting a larger share of its business from high-profit software and services. Even in its hardware business, solid sales of high-margin mainframe computers helped offset disappointing sales of commodity-type servers and a 34% sales drop in its semiconductor division.

IBM, which has improved profit margins in its services business in the past year, said outsourcing contracts signed in the quarter grew 20%. Despite restructuring actions, IBM's world-wide employment is now more than 400,000 people, up from 386,000 at the end of last year, Mr. Palmisano said in an internal memo.

IBM Bucks Tech Slump, Issues Rosy 2009 Outlook - WSJ.com

Google to shut newspaper ad business - The Boston Globe

See the full article for a recap of other Google initiatives shut down recently.

Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular Internet search engine, will close a business that sells advertising space in newspapers, saying the effort failed to deliver the impact it wanted.

The program, which had attracted more than 800 US newspapers since it began in 2006, will stop selling ads on Feb. 28, Google said yesterday on its blog. The ad sales will continue until March 31 for customers that already had campaigns booked.

Google to shut newspaper ad business - The Boston Globe

Europe: Microsoft Must Remove IE from Windows

Another classic Paul Thurrott snapshop – excerpt from the full post:

Microsoft's latest woes come courtesy of Opera, a Norwegian company that complained to the EU about the software giant's bundling practices and alleged undermining of Web standards. However, Opera is unique among non-Microsoft browser makers in that it did not make market share gains in 2008. Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome all gained on IE during this time period. Perhaps the problem is Opera, not Microsoft's business practices. After all, consumers do have choice; they're just not choosing Opera. And Google's browser was actually launched in late 2008: Apparently that company wasn't aware of the shackles Opera claims that Microsoft has around the industry.

Europe: Microsoft Must Remove IE from Windows

Pattern Finder: Lotusphere 2009: What Might Have Been

An intriguing Guy Creese post from Orlando --

Following are two blog posts I had mentally (and optimistically) written before attending Lotusphere 2009. Unfortunately, IBM Lotus didn't make the corresponding announcements. Oh, well. But since it seems a shame to waste them, here's a glimpse of blog posts I would have loved to have made

The two scenarios Guy had in mind (see his full post for his descriptions):

IBM Lotus Combines Quickr and Connections to Create a SharePoint Killer

IBM Lotus Announces "Social for SharePoint"

A couple observations, based on what I’ve been able to track from Lotusphere 2009 (the keynotes haven’t been webcast, so I’m relying mostly on the few IBM press releases and the blogosphere snapshots):

1. Since IBM plans to add wiki capabilities to Connections 2.5 (see this post for a Connections 2.5 summary), I think IBM went in the opposite direction – creating more functional overlap and confusion about the roles for Quickr and Connections. Until now, Connections has been focused primarily on connections (go figure…), but in 2.5 it will also become a content manager (e.g., with wikis and file sharing), creating more uncertainty about which IBM offering should be used for different customer needs. Then again, since the role for the Domino-based version of Quickr is likely to be significantly reduced, if the XPages features in Domino 8.5 work as claimed by IBM, maybe there simply isn’t much of a need for the Domino-based version of Quickr anymore.

2. As for “Social for SharePoint,” since SharePoint is ultimately a standards- and Web app server-based offering, Connections should be able to integrate with SharePoint with no further work required on IBM’s part.

Pattern Finder: Lotusphere 2009: What Might Have Been

Unified Communications Group Team Blog : IBM’s Email Strategy Takes Another Sharp Turn

A Microsoft perspective on LotusLive – see the Microsoft UC Group Team Blog for more

When I talk to customers, they tell me they do not want a technology ultimatum – a hard choice between a roadmap in the cloud or on-premises.  Customers require the flexibility to use both and move between both modes of delivery, and that’s why our approach with Exchange Server and Exchange Online is catching on.  Will IBM’s new email strategy give customers that flexibility?  Only time will tell.

Unified Communications Group Team Blog : IBM’s Email Strategy Takes Another Sharp Turn

John D. Head aka "Starfish": I wish Lotus would …

An interesting snapshot from Lotusphere; see the full post for more details

I asked how IBM Lotus was going compete with Sharepoint in 2009. Quickr and Connections are good products that will become great products in 2009. The problem is that they are not the platform or message that is Sharepoint. Sharepoint is something you can install in 30 minutes. It is a platform you can build your website on, use as a document store, make your content management system, run all of your workflow, and integrate with every server product on the Microsoft platform. There are thousands of web parts from partners available and web parts and lists are becoming defacto tools that END USERS can use. This is the beast Lotus has to go up against and win.

John D. Head aka "Starfish"

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Regulators set to renew a mainframe battle with IBM

Looks like the EU plans to explore IBM as well as Microsoft, this time around

That is now set to come under renewed scrutiny, with European regulators preparing to blow the dust off a case history that dates back almost as far as the computing industry itself. Armed with its big 2007 legal victory over Microsoft, the European Commission now believes it has the precedent to dig further into some of the tech world’s most entrenched markets.

Ironically, the renewed attention to IBM’s historic mainframe monopoly comes at a time of rampant innovation in the type of high-powered computing that powers corporate and government data centres.

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Regulators set to renew a mainframe battle with IBM

The Inauguration Will Be Televised — and Tweeted and Flickr’d - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Check the full article for an impressive list of options

Barack Obama’s inauguration will be televised. It will also be tweeted, live-streamed and simulated in virtual worlds.

This bodes well for those eager to participate in Tuesday’s festivities without risking frostbite or braving the troubling ratio of porta-potties available for the millions of political partygoers expected to descend on the nation’s capital.

Here at Bits, we’ve compiled a list of some of the inaugural happenings around the Web. Let us know which events we missed in the comments below.

The Inauguration Will Be Televised — and Tweeted and Flickr’d - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market - NYTimes.com

Perhaps Cisco should acquire EMC, if it seriously wants to play this game

The product — a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software — is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.

[…]

Industry experts say that Cisco’s push into the server market will disrupt that comfortable symbiosis and could cause an all-out war among the tech titans for one another’s customers.

Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market - NYTimes.com

Collaborative Thinking: Why Lotusphere 2009 Is Important

A timely Mike Gotta Lotusphere reality check – see the full post for details

This year's Lotusphere could very well be a make-or-break moment for the Lotus brand and solution portfolio. I know that's pretty dramatic - but if you look at this through the lens of history and into the crystal ball of the future, I think it's a pretty accurate statement. I don't want this post to be a timeline and reflection on what's gone wrong over the past several years with Lotus but I do want to point out the two major themes that have negatively defined IBM's "thought leadership" and competitive positioning vs. Microsoft:

Collaborative Thinking: Why Lotusphere 2009 Is Important

Internet Shrinks: Web Loses 1.2M Sites « Data Center Knowledge

Hmm…

The Internet shrunk by 1.2 million web sites last month to 185.5 million sites, the largest monthly loss since the dot-com bust in 2003, according to new data from Netcraft. The results are a sharp departure from a long-running growth trend that has seen the Netcraft survey add between 1 million and 4 million sites per month. 

The decline was driven by large losses at blogging platforms operated by Microsoft and Google. Microsoft saw a loss of more than 2 million blogs hosted on IIS (the majority likely at Microsoft Spaces) while Google saw a drop of more than 800,000 sites using its GFE server, which supports Blogger.

Internet Shrinks: Web Loses 1.2M Sites « Data Center Knowledge

Pope to have own Google channel with video - Boston.com

Sign of the times…

The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI is getting his own channel on Google.

It says the Vatican TV Center and Vatican Radio are collaborating with Google on the project.

The Vatican's press office said Saturday that texts and video of the pope's speeches as well as news about the pontiff would be posted directly onto the channel.

Pope to have own Google channel with video - Boston.com

Rotten reporting: Is it just Apple coverage that ‘bites’? | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Mary-Jo Foley’s timely reality check on the FFSJ Apple press bias/gullibility controversy – read the full post 

I am not as willing as Lyons to throw an entire blogging/press corps under the bus with blanket statements. There’s been some great Apple reporting over the years — so great that Apple sued some of those who conducted it to shut them up. (And was successful, in part, in doing so.)

There are definitely Microsoft fanboys (and girls) who report and blog about the company. But reporters clapping at a Microsoft press conference? Maybe. Somewhere. But I hear/see a lot more jeers than cheers in the Microsoft press rooms and events where I’ve been present than I noticed the couple of times I’ve been at an Apple event….

Rotten reporting: Is it just Apple coverage that ‘bites’? | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Windows Live Calendar is Out of Beta | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

I’m using Windows Live Calendar and the Outlook Connector with the Outlook 2007 multi-calendar overlay mode view, to have a single view into my work and personal calendars – very useful.

The Windows Live team is reporting on their blog the Windows Live Calendar service is now out of beta, ready for action, and being rolled out in 45 languages. After being in beta for several months, the team has been tweaking, bug fixing, and responding to user feedback...and it shows! If you haven't yet tried it, you should - the Windows Live Calendar is a great online calendar service...and it syncs with both Windows Live Mail and Outlook with Microsoft Office Outlook via the Outlook Connector.

Windows Live Calendar is Out of Beta | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

PIFEM: A New Getting Things Done System for Outlook | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

A resource for “GTD” fans who want to work in Outlook; see the full post for more details

Do you get a lot of email? I’ll bet almost everyone out there said “yes.” If you’re drowning in information overload, you have to check out a new email management system that Angus Logan, Ian Palangio, and Johann Kruse have been developing. It’s called PIFEM, or Pay it Forward Email Management, and it’s loosely based on David Allen’s methodology called “Getting Things Done.”

The PIFEM system takes the best practices from GTD – that is, the 4 D’s of Email Management – and combined those with time management skills. Then, the system is integrated with the workflow options present in Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server. The end result is what they’re calling PIFEM.

PIFEM: A New Getting Things Done System for Outlook | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Ping - At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool. - NYTimes.com

Apparently human information processing is still multimedia

With inexpensive cameras flooding the market and a proliferation of Web sites hosting seemingly unlimited numbers of clips, it’s never been easier to create and upload video. You can now find an online video on virtually any topic. Web videos teach how to grout a tub, offer reviews of the latest touch-screen phones and give you a feel for walking across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

The consumption of video has followed a similar trajectory. In November, 146 million Americans watched videos online, streaming a total of 12.6 billion video clips, or nearly double the number they streamed just 20 months ago, according to comScore.

YouTube itself has grown even faster. Its share of videos streamed soared to 40 percent in November from 17 percent in March 2007.

And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.

Ping - At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool. - NYTimes.com

Cover Pages: Oracle Beehive Object Model Proposed for Standardization in OASIS ICOM TC.

An Oracle Beehive update – the product seems to have fallen off the market radar since Oracle OpenWorld last year, but Oracle is evidently pursuing related standards initiatives.

OASIS has announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

See the full post for a (typically excellent) Robin Cover info resource round-up on the topic.

Cover Pages: Oracle Beehive Object Model Proposed for Standardization in OASIS ICOM TC.

Business & Technology | BlackBerry flattered, but it'd be easier if Obama let gadget go | Seattle Times Newspaper

Sign of the times

Obama has lobbied to keep the device over the concerns of the Secret Service. While a presidential BlackBerry would enhance the maker's image, its encryption would be a target for spies, putting its "sterling" reputation for confidentiality at risk, analyst Roger Entner said.

"The moment it becomes known that Barack Obama uses his BlackBerry, you know that a significant share of Russia's signal intelligence and China's signal intelligence and cyberintelligence budgets will be targeted to break it," said Entner, an analyst with market researcher Nielsen in Boston.

Business & Technology | BlackBerry flattered, but it'd be easier if Obama let gadget go | Seattle Times Newspaper

Circuit City, Lacking a Buyer, Will Shut Down - NYTimes.com

Yikes

The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November but had hoped to emerge in a slimmed-down form, said instead that it would liquidate all its stores and assets.

Most of the chain’s 34,000 store employees will be laid off. Closing sales will begin as early as Saturday and will last until the merchandise is gone or about the end of March.

Circuit City, Lacking a Buyer, Will Shut Down - NYTimes.com

Making Sense of the Messaging and Collaboration Market: Q&A: David Scult, a general manager in Microsoft’s Information Worker Division, discusses market shares and trends in the messaging and collaboration arena.

A timely pre-Lotusphere reality check; see the full release for more details

PressPass: This week, IBM claimed that Lotus Notes is taking market share from Microsoft. Is that happening?

Scult: IBM’s claims are not consistent with the market trends we – and a number of independent third-parties – are seeing. Just yesterday, Gartner refuted IBM’s claims in a Computerworld article titled “Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner.”

And according to a Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide, Exchange has a 65 percent share of the messaging market, while Notes/Domino has a 10 percent share.

Ferris’s findings are consistent with Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst, Matt Cain, who publicly stated last year, “We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial e-mail market by 2010.”

PressPass: Is it true that 50 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use Lotus Notes?

Scult: Lotus Notes was once in at least 67 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, so in that context, 50 percent now isn’t terribly impressive. But, yes, the figure is likely true. Because of the proprietary code in some Lotus Notes databases, some customers keep Lotus Notes around for these legacy applications, but they don’t use it as their primary messaging or collaboration applications. So, technically, these customers may be using both IBM and Microsoft platforms, but in reality 80 percent of most of the Fortune 100 have moved or are moving to Microsoft Exchange as their primary messaging application and SharePoint for their primary collaboration needs.

Making Sense of the Messaging and Collaboration Market: Q&A: David Scult, a general manager in Microsoft’s Information Worker Division, discusses market shares and trends in the messaging and collaboration arena.

Microsoft Silverlight Selected by Presidential Inaugural Committee to Enable Online Video Streaming of Inauguration Events

Interesting times

Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) has selected the company’s Silverlight technology to enable live and on-demand video streaming of the official inauguration swearing-in ceremony on the PIC Web site at http://www.pic2009.org. As part of its efforts to hold the most open and accessible inauguration in history, on Saturday, Jan. 17, the PIC will also stream video of a Baltimore event on the Whistle Stop Tour that will take President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.

Microsoft Silverlight Selected by Presidential Inaugural Committee to Enable Online Video Streaming of Inauguration Events: Official swearing in, President-elect Obama’s Whistle Stop Tour event to be streamed online.

Ed Brill: Remember last Lotusphere how a Friday Nitix acquisition became a Monday Lotus Foundations?

Maybe the IBM Lotus subsidiary, in terms of naming, should have evolved from “Lotus Development Corp.” to “Lotus Acquisition Corp.”, since many of its new offerings over the last few years came from acquisitions, e.g., “Bluehouse” messaging in 2009, IBM Lotus Foundations in 2008, Sametime Unyte in 2007, IBM Lotus Forms in 2005…

An excerpt from Ed’s post:

If you remember that, a sense of deja vu prevails for now -- and watch for more on Monday...

IBM has announced its intent to acquire the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, Ltd., a privately held provider of online messaging and collaboration services, based in Hong Kong. Building on IBM Lotus' market leadership in messaging software, the asset acquisition will accelerate the delivery of affordable, Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. ...

Addressing one of the topics in the comment thread (on Ed's post), BTW, Microsoft Exchange Online is 100% Exchange – Microsoft’s software + services strategy is not based on acquisitions and renaming exercises.

Ed Brill

ITunes shift hits right note with industry - The Boston Globe

Interesting times for music publishers

Although Apple Inc. has said some songs sold on iTunes would be available for 69 cents instead of the 99-cent tag Apple had insisted on for years, the change won't necessarily put more money into the pockets of music lovers.

In fact, record companies are the ones that plan to come out ahead. While some songs will be 30 cents cheaper, popular songs likely will be marked up to $1.29. That price breaks a psychological $1 barrier and prepares consumers for a new strategy by labels to bundle songs, videos, and other exclusive content together - all in the hopes of reversing years of falling music sales.

See the full article for more details. 

On a related note, from a BBC article this morning, titled Pirates win music download battle:

Ninety-five per cent of music downloaded online is illegal, a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has said.

ITunes shift hits right note with industry - The Boston Globe

Farting for Dollars | Big Think | BNET

Another innovative productivity application for the iPhone

Stupid sells, even in a downturn. Check out this datapoint:

“iFart is our top application — it’s been pulling in $25,000 a day, for weeks.”

That from Brian Barletta, director of marketing at AppVee, which hosts applications and vidoes specifically for the iPhone. He was speaking at a MobileMonday event in Boston about compelling business models. I wrote this down, and told a friend, who asked why I didn’t blog about it. My answer was I thought it was stupid. But so were pet rocks.

See the full post for more Michael Fitzgerald commentary

Farting for Dollars | Big Think | BNET

Video-game sales hit new peak - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

See the full post for more details

OK, here's that positive news we've been looking for: The video-game industry finished 2008 in record style, topping $5 billion in total sales of hardware, software and accessories in the U.S. in December. It's the first time the industry has exceeded that number in a single month, according to NPD Group data released today.

On a related note, also see Wii, Xbox games dominate 2008.

2008 was not a great year for Sony, although, as noted in the first article linked above, the PS2 continues to sell well – if you add PS2 + PS3 sales for December, 2008, Sony gets closer to Xbox 360 sales for the month (1.236M total Sony versus 1.44M Xbox 360).

Video-game sales hit new peak - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

vowe dot net :: Numbers

An interesting and timely pre-Lotusphere Notes market momentum reality check from Volker Weber; see the full post and comment thread

Ed posted about a "momentum" press release (linked below as last in the list). It's about the fact that Lotus has sold 145 million notes licenses to date, not to be confused with the number of active Notes users.* If those numbers in the press releases can be trusted, it pays to look at older releases and chart out the numbers

vowe dot net :: Numbers

‘Whopper Sacrifice’ De-Friended on Facebook - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Strange days indeed

“While Facebook was a great sport, they did ask for changes that would have resulted in a different approach to our application, counter to what we developed,” Burger King said in a statement. “Ultimately, based on philosophical differences, we decided to conclude the campaign and chose to ‘sacrifice’ the application.”

Before Burger King pulled the campaign, there had been no shortage of Facebookers willing to slim down their friend lists while fattening their bellies. Nearly 234,000 Facebookers were de-friended for the sake of a hamburger. That amounted to more than 23,000 coupons for free Whoppers. Participants who deleted 10 friends before the application was closed down will still receive their coupons via snail mail.

‘Whopper Sacrifice’ De-Friended on Facebook - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Yahoo’s New Chief Makes a Decisive First Appearance - NYTimes.com

Interesting times at Yahoo

In sharp contrast to Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s soft- spoken co-founder who preceded her as chief executive, Ms. Bartz delivered a short, sharp and at times combative speech. She took only three questions, one of which she partly dismissed as “a lot of nonsense.” She used a mild expletive to demand that Yahoo be given some “breathing room.”

And Ms. Bartz made it clear she would have no patience for the crowd of analysts, pundits and armchair chief executives who have been counseling Yahoo on what to do. “That’s going to stop,” Ms. Bartz said.

Yahoo’s New Chief Makes a Decisive First Appearance - NYTimes.com

Jeff Papows in at SOA governance house WebLayers — SOA Talk

A blast from the past

Industry veteran Jeff Papows will take the helm at WebLayers, the Cambridge, Mass.-based maker of SOA governance policy enforcement and automation software.The move comes at the same time the comapny [sic] announces it has secured a new $3-million-round of equity funding from Ascent Venture Partners, Cedar Fund and Veritas Venture Partners.

This Maptuit page indicates Jeff is still chairman at Maptuit, where fellow Lotus alum Bill Quirk is now President and CEO

Jeff Papows in at SOA governance house WebLayers — SOA Talk

Platformonomics - Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Check the Dan Lyons interview video on this post, along with some Charles Fitzgerald commentary.

Don't miss the discussion on CNBC between Dan "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons and CNBC's own Jim Goldman on the topic of Apple's mendacity about Steve Jobs' health and whether Goldman's coverage of this topic was misleading, incompetent or merely lazy.  You can't really hear a lot of what they are saying, but it is pretty entertaining nonetheless (it heats up about 3:30).

FFSJ (former Fake Steve Jobs) rocks…

Platformonomics - Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Official Google Notebook Blog: Stopping development on Google Notebook

Looks like there is one less OneNote competitor in the market, as of yesterday afternoon.

At Google, we're constantly working to innovate and improve our products so people can easily find and manage information. At times though, we have to decide where to focus our efforts and which technologies we expect will yield the most benefit to users in the long run.
Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

Official Google Notebook Blog: Stopping development on Google Notebook

The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Another, and very different (compared with Guy Creese’s perspective), take on the GAPE reseller program news; check the full Forrester post for more details on the Google program.

What this means for information and knowledge management professionals:

• WIM #1: Google is serious about making money with Google Apps Premier Edition. It still has a mountain to climb to earn enterprise credibility, but customers like Genentech, Avago Technologies, and a slew of universites can't all be wrong.
• WIM #2: Google can make money at $40/user/year, which bodes well for the future. If Google were just scraping by at that price, they wouldn't be scrambling a battalion of resellers to meet demand. They can clearly make money at $40/user/year. Take note, email adminstrators, CIOs, information and knowledge management professionals, and the competition.
• WIM #3: The Google Apps portfolio will just get stronger. How? Because these are value-added resellers. They have to be cuz nobody can live off of $10/user/year. To survive, they will have to extend the application and integrate Sites, Docs, Video, Talk,Gmail, and whatever else Google Gmail Labs dreams up into their own cloud-delivered products. Ipso facto: the ecosystem will invest; the product portfolio will improve.

Forrester benefit of the doubt: apparently approaching infinity.

Burton Group benefit of the doubt: not so much…

The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Fork in the road

A timely Steve Gillmor perspective post plus a great new Neil Young song (click the second video image in the post)

Today I get an email from a friend with a pointer to a new Neil Young song, embedded below. It’s the harbinger of spring, the groundhog not seeing his shadow or whatever, the fork in the road where we say what we want and who we want it to over the realtime network. It’s got that Crazy Horse feel mixed with a gnarly hip state of the union vibe. As Neil spits out the lyrics amid chunks of an Apple he’s eating (a visual pun?) the bank is busy repossessing a flat screen TV in the background.

Fork in the road

Official Google Blog: Changes to recruiting

Google is apparently not economy-proof after all…

As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.
Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

Official Google Blog: Changes to recruiting

vowe dot net :: How do you like DDE [Domino Designer on Eclipse]?

Check the comments on the full post for perspectives on Domino Designer’s move to the Eclipse.org IDE. My impression from a quick skim of the reader comments: a necessary strategic move, but not entirely ready for prime-time yet.

DDE you ask? Domino Designer on Eclipse. The new Domino Designer 8.5, part Eclipse, part classic. How are you liking it? I hear very conflicting comments.

vowe dot net :: How do you like DDE?

Transforming Education to Give Every Child Access to Quality 21st-Century Instruction: Q&A: L. Michael Golden, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Education Products Group

See the full press release for more details

PressPass: How does Microsoft envision education in the 21st century?

Golden: Access to a quality education is a fundamental human right. Yet, despite the best efforts of governments and development organizations, school remains out of reach for 375 million children worldwide. That’s simply unacceptable.

With technology, we can extend powerful new opportunities to the millions of kids currently outside the system. We’re developing software and services that collapse the barriers of time, distance and resources that impede access to schooling and throw an educational lifeline to students in remote or underserved communities.

We can also develop educational offerings that meet the needs of individual learners as classrooms around the world grow more diverse. Educational success depends on motivated students. Technology opens up exciting new ways to engage students and immerse them in an instructional environment that ignites their imagination and expands their horizons. At Microsoft, we’re fueling the creation of multimedia content that brings material to life in fresh ways and developing communication and collaboration tools that make lessons more interactive.

In addition, technology allows schools to analyze vast quantities of data to track student progress and inform instruction.

Transforming Education to Give Every Child Access to Quality 21st-Century Instruction: Q&A: L. Michael Golden, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Education Products Group, describes Microsoft’s vision for education and how technology can help create universal access to high-quality schooling.

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Google Expands GAPE Sales Footprint with Resellers

A Google reality check from Burton Group’s Guy Creese; see the full post for what’s missing in GAPE, in terms of meeting enterprise requirements.

This is a good move on Google's part, in that it increases the sales feet on the street and blunts the issue of arrogant Google salespeople (a complaint I hear time and time again from enterprises who have purchased the Google Search Appliance or are talking with Google about buying Google Apps).

However, in my opinion this does not mean that Google's sales to enterprises will turn around any time soon. (Google is doing very well selling to SMB's, but not to large enterprises). This move is like a car manufacturer announcing they have an expanded network of dealers. Umm, OK, but does anyone want to buy the cars? And at the moment the answer is no.

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Google Expands GAPE Sales Footprint with Resellers

Nota Bene : Do yellow sticky notes make you want to scream?

I’m using OneNote for a lot of information management scenarios these days – this post includes a brief video about one of the many handy OneNote features

So... is there a better way to manage all that unavoidably random information that we're forced to scribble down during the day?

You bet! Meet “Side Notes” — an often overlooked feature in OneNote that lets you take your traditional paper sticky notes to a whole new level. Side Notes are the electronic equivalent of those yellow sticky notes that you love, except that they offer all of the benefits of regular OneNote pages. You can edit, format, sort, organize, tag, consolidate, search, and annotate Side Notes, and you can turn anything that you randomly jot down on them into formatted lists or even real Outlook Tasks. By adding reminders to Outlook Tasks on your Side Notes, you'll never forget anything important.

Nota Bene : Do yellow sticky notes make you want to scream?

CIO's cost-cutting measures include move to Gmail

A timely Google Apps reality check (via Ed Brill)

February marks the second anniversary of Google Apps Premier Edition, the beefed-up version of the free Google Apps hosted service launched in 2002 that revolutionized consumer email. For $50 per user per year, the premier edition offers "businesses of all sizes" a communication and collaboration suite of applications that includes Gmail webmail, shared calendaring, Google docs, instant messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol service. But two years in, very few enterprises have made a big commitment to use Google docs as a replacement for Microsoft Office or similar tools, said analyst Tom Austin.

"In fact, I can't think of one, to be honest," said Austin, who follows cloud computing at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.

CIO's cost-cutting measures include move to Gmail

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gaza crisis spills onto the web

Sign of the times – see the full article for more details

A propaganda war is being waged on the internet between supporters of the Israeli and Palestinian sides in the current conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Activists have turned to defacing websites, taking over computers, and shutting down Facebook groups.

US Military sites, Nato, and an Israeli Bank have all been targeted.

Experts have warned users to be on the lookout for phishing emails and webmasters to ensure their servers are secure.

The hacking of security barriers for political or ideological reasons has been branded by some as hacktivism. And it is thought that as use of the internet grows, so too will the number of attacks.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gaza crisis spills onto the web

Well - National Safety Council Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers - NYTimes.com

A timely reality check

“It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel,” said David Strayer, director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah and a leading researcher on cellphone safety. “It’s that your mind is not on the road.”

Now Dr. Strayer’s research has gained a potent ally. On Monday, the National Safety Council, the nonprofit advocacy group that has pushed for seat belt laws and drunken driving awareness, called for an all-out ban on using cellphones while driving.

Well - National Safety Council Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers - NYTimes.com

A Text Arrives. Oh, It’s Just an ‘Idol’ Ad. - NYTimes.com

I hope this is not a leading indicator

AT&T, a sponsor of the show, said it sent text messages to a “significant number” of its 75 million customers, urging them to tune in to the season premiere on Tuesday night.

But some recipients thought the message was a breach of cellphone etiquette, and gave it the kind of reaction that the “Idol” judge Simon Cowell might give an off-key crooner.

A Text Arrives. Oh, It’s Just an ‘Idol’ Ad. - NYTimes.com

Yahoo Picks Former Autodesk Chief to Succeed Yang - NYTimes.com

Small world…

“She’s the best player in the draft,” said John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco Systems, where Ms. Bartz has served as a board member since 1996. Mr. Chambers said Ms. Bartz often challenged him on strategic decisions, like mergers and acquisitions, to make sure they had been thought through well. And Ms. Bartz is not afraid to speak her mind, he said.

“You always know where she stands,” Mr. Chambers said. “You may not always like it.” Mr. Yang, who is returning to his position of “Chief Yahoo” and remaining on the company’s board, also serves on the Cisco board, and Mr. Chambers predicted the two would work well together. Ms. Bartz also sits on the boards of Intel, along with Ms. Decker, and NetApp, a maker of network storage technology.

Even her new top rival, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who worked with Ms. Bartz when both of them were senior executives at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, had words of praise for her. “I have worked with Carol for more than 25 years and she is a superb operating executive,” Mr. Schmidt said in an e-mail. “Yahoo will certainly benefit from her great experience.”

Yahoo Picks Former Autodesk Chief to Succeed Yang - NYTimes.com

Obama's new BlackBerry: The NSA's secure PDA? | Politics and Law - CNET News

Interesting times…

One reason to curb presidential BlackBerrying is the possibility of eavesdropping by hackers and other digital snoops. While Research In Motion offers encryption, the U.S. government has stricter requirements for communications security.

[…]

Fortunately for an enthusiastic e-mailer-in-chief, some handheld devices have been officially blessed as secure enough to handle even classified documents, e-mail, and Web browsing.

[…]

The Sectera runs a mobile version of Microsoft Windows, including versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Windows Media Player. The NSA claims that the installed versions of Internet Explorer, WordPad, and Windows Messenger are good enough for data that's classified at a level of Secret.

See the full article for more details

Obama's new BlackBerry: The NSA's secure PDA? | Politics and Law - CNET News

Searching for the Next Steve Jobs - washingtonpost.com

A timely snapshot; read the full article for more context

Compare Jobs's recent recklessness to the way Microsoft managed the delicate hand-over of the company from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer. Gates, you'll recall, was every bit as synonymous with Microsoft as Jobs is with Apple.

Yet Gates managed to slide out of his company with virtually no disruption. He accomplished this by setting up the transition years in advance, giving Ballmer the CEO post and letting him get more exposure even while Gates stayed on as the figurehead and official outside representative of the company. By the time Gates did step down officially, in June 2008, his departure was practically a non-event.

Jobs, in contrast, seems determined to hang on at Apple no matter what. See, in the world of Steve, it's all about Steve. When he does go, he will be remembered as a tremendous genius -- but also as a petulant narcissist with a grandiose sense of his importance and a sadly limited view of the world around him.

Searching for the Next Steve Jobs - washingtonpost.com

Traction Software, Inc. | Blog936: Reinventing the Web

Traction Software President Greg Lloyd posted a perspective on the NYT Ted Nelson article; an excerpt:

So when people ask what will deliver two-way links, fine grain comments and tagging, traceable transclusion and the promise of the Semantic Web, I suggest an approach which layers these hypertext capabilities over the basic Web in way that exposes readable content which is absolutely compatible with the basic Web for all readers and existing engines.

Offer seamless collaborative editing, traceability, semantic search and other capabilities by extending the hypertext editing engines to support new layered protocols and transparently downsample richer models to deliver basic Web content to clients who use basic Web protocols. Offer extended formats and services to client or other servers with extended capabilities.

I'm sure that won't satisfy Ted, but before a sea change in the basic structure of the Web - which is what Nelson and other's global visions require - I believe you'll have to be satisfied with stable islands in the Web's storm tossed sea and protocols that support robust connections among islands.

I believe it's even possible to implement Ted's micropayment transclusion model as a layered protocol. People's DRM aversion, rights contracting and enforcement seem to be bigger issues than the technical barriers.

I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 secure collaboration and social networking provide the motivation to make this new way to think of reinvention of the Web a reality.

imho Traction is a market leader in beyond-the-basics hypertext, and Greg Lloyd has been working on hypertext systems for decades; read his full post for more details and historical context-setting

Traction Software, Inc. | Blog936: Reinventing the Web

Scientist slams newspaper for Google CO2 report | Green Tech - CNET News

An interesting case study in information quality and information literacy; see the full article for more details

A report in The Times of London on Sunday generated a firestorm of controversy when a Harvard physicist was identified as saying a typical Google Web search on a desktop computer generates about 7 grams of carbon dioxide, making two searches comparable to bringing a tea kettle to boil.

"A Google search has a definite environmental impact," Alex Wissner-Gross was quoted as telling the newspaper.

Problem is, Wissner-Gross tells TechNewsWorld, his study never singles out or even mentions Google.

Scientist slams newspaper for Google CO2 report | Green Tech - CNET News

Tech giants team on education push | Microsoft - CNET News

Glad to see this

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.

The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.

Tech giants team on education push | Microsoft - CNET News

A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator | Edmonds | Journal of Digital Information

The abstract of a 2004 Web-as-hypertext perspective added as a comment reference to my Ted Nelson post:

The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s. The ways in which Weblogging has evolved beyond the previous limitations of the Web as hypertext, and the ways Weblogging is evolving towards common-use hypertext destined to play a critical role in everyday life, will be explored. We have a vision of a universal information management system built on extending the traditional hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today's blogs to structure, search and share personal information, as well as to participate in shared discussion. We begin by expressing a vision of common-use hypertext for information management and interpersonal communication. This vision is grounded in the rapid evolution of Weblogs and known issues in information systems and hypertext. The practical implications of who will use these systems, and how, is expanded as usage scenarios for Weblogs now and in the future. After recapping the current issues facing the Weblogging community, we look to the long-range implementation issues with optimism. Our system is forward-looking yet realistic. The activities the system will support are extrapolated from recent developments in the online community, and most of the sketches of implementation are based on current approaches. It is of more than passing interest that the features we extrapolate were all described by Nelson as early hypertext ideals. Of particular interest is that the features are now being implemented because of perceived immediate need by communities of interest.

If you’re a Burton Group Collaboration and Content Strategies subscriber, you may also find a report I wrote in 2006 useful: Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models: Collaboration and Content Management Implications.  An excerpt from the synopsis of the Burton Group report:

A funny thing happened on the way to the web. Hypertext, a model for fostering collaboration and content management by flexibly working with information items, essentially took one step forward and two steps back. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), introduced with the World Wide Web, has become the global standard for hypertext content. But, ironically, it’s actually rather basic and limited. As a result, the web has failed to achieve many facets of the vision web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind in the first place.

The print-centricity dominating most personal computing platforms and tools has also hampered hypertext during recent decades. Although Vannevar Bush eloquently articulated his vision for a much more effective way of working with and collaborating through content more than 60 years ago, today’s most widely deployed platforms and tools are still dominated by conceptual models based on a foundation of digitized file cabinets and traditional documents.

This is all about to change, as the rapid growth of blogs, wikis, and other market dynamics are helping information workers to more fully exploit the advantages of beyond-the-basics hypertext along with compound and interactive document models. Although the trends are also accompanied with the usual assortment of market hype and new buzzwords, they may well, collectively, usher in a renaissance in collaboration and content management.

Hypertext is simply a better form-follows-function fit (than print-centric approaches) for the way people actually think and work. Compound documents facilitate focusing more on information work than on disparate technologies and tools, and foster more effective content management. Interactive document models are used to automatically and unobtrusively offer supplemental resources and actions in context, providing opportunities to more effectively leverage tools and metadata without disruptive context shifts.

A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator | Edmonds | Journal of Digital Information

The economics of Phishing – working fast food could earn you more - Security

A timely reality check -- see the full article

Microsoft Research has published a new report that takes an interesting look inside the criminal business of Phishing. Written by Cormac Herley and Dinei Florêncio, the report explains the economics behind the criminal enterprise, and paints a picture that is in stark contrast to what many analysts have reported in the past.

“Conventional wisdom is that Phishing represents easy money,” is how the report starts. The headlines have grabbed the attention of the masses time and time again. The headlines report that criminals -- who are often falsely labelled as hackers by the media -- are making money hand-over-fist thinks to a form of scam called Phishing.

The economics of Phishing – working fast food could earn you more - Security

Demo: 'Eee PC' Tablet - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

I want one – with Windows 7…

Could the Tablet PC concept break out of its "niche" if combined with one of the hottest trends in computing? That's the question raised by the upcoming Asus Eee PC T91, which takes the company's tiny netbook computer and turns it into a convertible Tablet PC. William Lai of Asus gave me this quick tour of the device on the CES show floor today.

Demo: 'Eee PC' Tablet - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

A Universal Remote that Makes Sense - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com

An interesting leading indicator – see the full post for more details

But a new iPhone app I saw on Friday just might change my mind about universal remotes. Two developers, one of whom is a former Hewlett-Packard executive, showed me a demo of their prototype application that allows users to create virtual remotes on their iPhone. Rather than using a single remote to control everything, you can choose pictures of typical remote control shapes, and then populate each one with the buttons you want.

You can place the command buttons anywhere on the virtual remote’s face, and change their size. And if you’re a masochist, you can create one giant remote with every command for every home theater product you own.

The iPhone connects to a small box via Bluetooth. The box sends the commands via infrared to each device.

A Universal Remote that Makes Sense - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: iPod Touch Becoming a Bigger Story Than iPhone

A timely Burton Group snapshot – see the full post for more details

The iPod Touch is an intriguing device. Imagine an iPhone minus the camera and cell phone (and also minus the expensive monthly cell phone service fees). But it has all the other goodness found in the iPhone:

• It’s an iPod (of course)
• WiFi networking
• Cool applications ranging from fun games to educational tools to the unusual. This is just the beginning, the SDK has been out less than a year.

The iPod Touch also ships with the Safari web browser and enterprise capabilities like support for virtual private networks (L2TP/IPSEC, Cisco IPSec, and PPTP) and connectivity to Exchange e-mail servers via ActiveSync (which can enforce corporate policies and remotely wipe data, details in the Enterprise Deployment Guide).

I’d rather imagine a future iPod touch-class device with a camera and Skype -- and without the monthly AT&T or other service provider iPhone fee :)

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: iPod Touch Becoming a Bigger Story Than iPhone

If You Want to Text Obama, Do It Before Jan. 20 - NYTimes.com

See the full article for more details

Why can’t the most powerful person in the world keep his BlackBerry?

President-elect Barack Obama, who will take the oath of office next week, has repeatedly acknowledged a strong attachment to his Verizon BlackBerry 8830 World Edition smartphone, a k a the BarackBerry. But in an interview last week, Mr. Obama lamented that the Secret Service and his lawyers appeared to be winning the battle to deny him this electronic link to friends, family and news of the larger world.

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ll win.”

If You Want to Text Obama, Do It Before Jan. 20 - NYTimes.com

Police increasingly use social networking websites in detective work - The Boston Globe

Sign of the times

When a Wilmington man in his early 20s overdosed on heroin the day after Christmas, local police Detective Pat Nally turned to his computer. He wanted to look at the deceased's Facebook and MySpace pages for possible clues about the source of the drug and who might have been using it with the man.

"People arrange to buy and sell drugs on Facebook; there's talk of what they may do and where they may go," said Nally. "We'd be foolish not to use it as an investigative tool."

Police increasingly use social networking websites in detective work - The Boston Globe

More Nelson + hypertext

I ordered Ted Nelson’s new book from lulu.com and received the following in an email (from “Ted Nelson noreply@lulu.com”):

Thank you for buying *Geeks Bearing Gifts*. I've tried to share with you the excitement, tension and vividness of the computer past that got us here. There's material in the book to confirm every point of view, pro or anti- (Unicode, Unix, Macintosh, Windows, the Web - you name it).

How about your friends, family and colleagues? Would they like it? Would they benefit? Would they go apoplectic? Consider the pros and cons. Your boss? Careful now. But who knows? He or she might learn something that would help your project over the next hurdle.

FOR THE NEXT EDITION: If you have interesting anecdotes, special knowledge or suggestions, please send them to me at geekback@xanadu.net. I won't be checking this address every day, you understand, but perhaps you can help me open even further the treasures of the past - and build a better future.

Umpward!

Ted Nelson

I suspect it will be an intriguing read, just as Nelson’s pioneering “Computer Lib” was many years ago.  Kind of ironic, of course, that the book is apparently only available in dead-tree format.

Digital Domain - You’ve Been Talking (or Pressing ‘Send’) in Your Sleep - NYTimes.com

I suspect a lot of information workers can relate to this (read the full article for more context-setting)…

E-mailing while sleeping, however, upturns the previous understanding of the mind as essentially quiescent, absolved of a participating role. The Sleep Medicine article — prepared by Dr. Fouzia Siddiqui, a neurologist at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and two colleagues — describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.

Digital Domain - You’ve Been Talking (or Pressing ‘Send’) in Your Sleep - NYTimes.com

Slipstream - In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - NYTimes.com

A John Markoff profile of Ted Nelson – very timely and appropriate, following the Doug Engelbart tribute event a few weeks ago.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way” (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

Nelson got a lot right, and much of his vision is finally coming to fruition, e.g., bidirectional and typed (e.g., annotation, association, and composition) links (information item relationships) and transclusion, although Nelson wasn’t personally involved in much beyond the initial vision phase, in terms of today’s widely-used tools.  Read the full Markoff article (and also seriously consider reading his book about Engelbart et al) for insights into just how far ahead of their times Engelbart and Nelson were, four decades ago.

In some respects, hypertext and collaboration have much in common – both have been around for a long time, yet in many ways, in terms of mainstream impact, both are only now hitting their strides.  Indeed, it’s the combination of collaboration and hypertext, in information models such as wikis, that is making Web-centric content and collaboration relevant to a global audience.

Slipstream - In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - NYTimes.com

Ubuntu and Its Leader Set Sights on the Mainstream - NYTimes.com

A timely Linux client snapshot – excerpt:

Created just over four years ago, Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) has emerged as the fastest-growing and most celebrated version of the Linux operating system, which competes with Windows primarily through its low, low price: $0.

More than 10 million people are estimated to run Ubuntu today, and they represent a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony in developed countries and perhaps even more so in those regions catching up to the technology revolution.

“If we’re successful, we would fundamentally change the operating system market,” Mr. Shuttleworth said during a break at the gathering, the Ubuntu Developer Summit. “Microsoft would need to adapt, and I don’t think that would be unhealthy.”

Another interesting factoid later in the article:

Close to half of Google’s 20,000 employees use a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, playfully called Goobuntu.

See the full article for more background info on Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.

I’m using a Windows 7 beta laptop for my news scan and blogging this morning, and I’m not getting the sense Ubuntu could add a lot to my computing routine.  It’s still a fascinating phenomenon, however, and one that probably makes product planners at companies such as Novell and Red Hat very nervous.

Ubuntu and Its Leader Set Sights on the Mainstream - NYTimes.com

My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com

A timely reality check – read the full article 

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. It could usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which drug regimens are customized for a patient’s biochemistry rather than juggled through trial and error, and screening and prevention measures are aimed at those who are most at risk. It opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance.

My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com

The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Strange days indeed

You may not be able to get a coupon for a digital TV converter box, but if you’re experiencing a bit of bloat on your Facebook friend list, you can snag a free burger by dropping 10 of your Facebook friends, courtesy of Burger King.

That’s the gist of Whopper Sacrifice, an advertising campaign from Burger King to promote a new version of the company’s flagship sandwich called the Angry Whopper. To earn their free burger, users download the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and dump 10 unlucky friends deemed to be unworthy of their weight in beef. After completing the purge, users are prompted to enter their addresses and the coupons are sent out via snail mail.

The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

FT.com | Tech Blog | Palm: Not dead yet

Another Pre perspective – see the full article for more on what needs to follow the device intro

That was Wall Street’s verdict on Thursday when the struggling company showed off its long-awaited new operating system and the new Pre smartphone (the stock bounced by 35 per cent, though it’s still 50 per cent off its 12-month high).

If you really had to bet your company on a single gadget, this is not a bad one to pick.

FT.com | Tech Blog | Palm: Not dead yet

Microsoft Office Is Right at Home: Q&A: Microsoft Office Live Director of Marketing Michael Schultz explains how consumers can use Office to accomplish more every day.

A timely snapshot; see the full press release, and check out Office Live Workspace for an example of software + services in action  

PressPass: CES is traditionally more about devices than software. What is your team demonstrating this week?

Schultz: We want to show our customers that there are countless ways Office 2007 and Office Live Workspace can help them get more done. People are busy. In a 24-hour period, parents are helping kids with school projects; homeowners are balancing household budgets; consumers are managing credit card bills. Some people work full-time, and run a home-based business, and are active in their kids’ PTA — and they still make enough time to exercise. Sandra Hofferth, professor with the Department of Family Science, University of Maryland, says that even children have less free time than they did 20 years ago — down from 40 percent to 30 percent of their week.*

In that context, Office provides a lot of ways to accomplish a variety of everyday tasks more quickly. So really what we’re doing at CES this week is showing people how Microsoft Office is more than Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. It can help people collaborate, share, design, write, draw, calculate, present and organize. When you add up all those little things that Office does really well, the end result is simple — more time.

Microsoft Office Is Right at Home: Q&A: Microsoft Office Live Director of Marketing Michael Schultz explains how consumers can use Office to accomplish more every day.

For BlackBerry, Obama’s Devotion Is Priceless - NYTimes.com

Interesting times…

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

What could the “BlackBerry president” charge for his plugs of the device if he were not a public servant? More than $25 million, marketing experts say, and maybe as much as $50 million.

For BlackBerry, Obama’s Devotion Is Priceless - NYTimes.com

Dream of changing the developing world with free laptops for poor children suffers a blow - The Boston Globe

A stark OLPC reality check

"The economic downturn hit us like everybody else," said Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The foundation laid off 32 of its 64 workers and cut pay for the rest.

A wave of cheap laptops has come to the market since Negroponte's foundation introduced a no-frills machine in 2007. Similar "netbooks," modest laptops from companies like Dell Inc. and the Hewlett-Packard Co. that sell for as little as $300, became commonplace last year.

"We're not the newest story in town," said Negroponte. "The novelty has worn off."

I guess we won’t be seeing the cool OLPC 2.0 vision coming to fruition anytime soon – or, as with netbooks, perhaps we will, just not with an OLPC label.

Dream of changing the developing world with free laptops for poor children suffers a blow - The Boston Globe

Tech: The Palm Pre Takes on Apple's iPhone | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com

Excerpt from the third page of the article:

So: is it an iPhone killer? McNamee wishes people wouldn't ask that question. "Everyone in the cell-phone business has missed the point. They're all trying to make an iPhone killer. I don't want to compete with Apple. Why the hell would you want to get in the way of that machine? I look at the guys who are trying to compete with Apple and I think, Are you guys crazy? I just want to learn from Apple's experience." Nonetheless, the "Will this kill the iPhone?" question is the first one everyone asks about any new high-end mobile phone today. And the answer is, well, probably not. Not because the Pre isn't terrific—it is—but because Apple's brand is so powerful, and because Apple has sold 13 million iPhones, and because there are 10,000 applications already written for the iPhone. Nonetheless the Pre has moved the ball forward in some very significant ways. The experience it delivers is much closer to what we get on a laptop or desktop computer, which is essential if mobile devices are to become the hub of our Internet lives rather than mere peripherals that attach to a personal computer.

The ad I saw on all 3 pages:

Tech: The Palm Pre Takes on Apple's iPhone | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com

Platformonomics - SOA: "Never Mind"

See the full post for another timely and insightful reality check from Charles Fitzgerald

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group writes an obituary for SOA and says:

“SOA” has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary. 

Coming from one of the bigger SOA enthusiasts, this is a milestone.  She attributes its death to the recession, underscoring it with the spiffy accompanying illustration.

An excerpt from later in the post:

Revisionist history requires at least a modicum of truth and this fails to meet the bar.  Beyond a common use of the word "service", these "offspring" are all orthogonal or alternatives to SOA, not descendents.  It would be more accurate to say SOA was killed by a combination of its own failures and by the availability of lightweight, bottoms-up service approaches that addresses on real customer problems, as opposed to SOA's heavyweight, top-down, consultants by the busload approach.

Platformonomics - SOA: "Never Mind"

Better Management through Drug Abuse | Big Think | BNET

A timely reality check (and great post title) from Michael Fitzgerald; see the full post for more details

In the future, corporate drug testing will be to see if you’re taking the drugs the company wants you to take.

An argument found and posted by Nick Carr, in Managing productivity through pharmacology, holds that people should be allowed to take drugs that dull their minds to everything but the task at hand. Carr takes this as the next logical step, as a follow-on to an editorial in Nature calling for governments to allow mentally healthy people access to prescription-only drugs like Ritalin. The scientists, several of whom hold chairs funded by drug companies, think that such drugs should not be used only as correctives, but for all those who want to stimulate their minds.

Better Management through Drug Abuse | Big Think | BNET

BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter hit by security breaches

Social insecurity?   See the full article for more details

Micro-blogging site Twitter has admitted that some of its most high profile bloggers have been targeted by hackers.

It announced that 33 accounts had been hacked, including those belonging to president elect Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter hit by security breaches

VMware hires away Borland CEO | Coop's Corner - CNET News

Also another sad milestone for Borland; see the full article for more on its recent financial performance etc.

Tod Nielsen just can't hold a job.

Actually, peripatetic is the better description. VMware on Tuesday named Nielsen to be its chief operating officer, his sixth different company since the millennium.

Nielsen had been Borland's chief executive since November 2005. Before that, the garrulous 43-year-old held executive roles at Oracle, BEA Systems, and Microsoft. He also served a stint as CEO of Crossgain, before a noncompete snit with Microsoft forced him to step aside. BEA later acquired Crossgain.

VMware hires away Borland CEO | Coop's Corner - CNET News

Cisco adds social networking to its forte | Digital Media - CNET News

Cisco’s social solution-centric diversification continues

Two years after it first started courting big media companies, Cisco Systems will finally launch a new product to help these companies harness the power of social networking and connect their brands to fans.

On Wednesday, Cisco will kick off the Consumer Electronics Show here by announcing Eos, a hosted software platform that allows media and entertainment companies to create, manage and grow online communities. Through Eos Cisco has compiled technology tools and slapped on an easy to use interface to make building and customizing Web sites easy. But most importantly, it's bundled into the software, technology that will allow media companies to build interactive Web sites so that fans can connect with musicians, TV shows, movies, or whatever brand a media company wants to promote.

Cisco adds social networking to its forte | Digital Media - CNET News

Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post | Politics and Law - CNET News

Ironic timing, given the Apple DRM news yesterday

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party.

That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the same law that Lessig and his allies unsuccessfully sued to overturn.

Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post | Politics and Law - CNET News

Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes - NYTimes.com

Interesting times…  And for a mere $.30/song, you can upgrade your current iTunes library to DRM-free content.

Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so.

In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes - NYTimes.com

BBC - Newsbeat - Technology - Facebook 'sets Christmas record'

Sign of the times

The social networking site accounted for one in every 22 online visits on Christmas Day, according to internet research company Hitwise.

That was up 69% from the same time in 2007 and meant it took an overall market share of 4.65%.

It makes Facebook the second most popular site after internet search engine Google.

BBC - Newsbeat - Technology - Facebook 'sets Christmas record'

Microsoft | Microsoft sees extra-good sales for Xbox 360 in 2008 | Seattle Times Newspaper

See the full article and this Microsoft press release for more details

Microsoft is calling 2008 the best year yet for its video-game business.

The company has sold 28 million Xbox 360s globally since launching in November 2005. Console sales increased 58 percent over 2007.

At year's end, Microsoft tallied 17 million members of the Xbox Live online entertainment service, which has become a highlight of the business, up 70 percent for the year.

Microsoft | Microsoft sees extra-good sales for Xbox 360 in 2008 | Seattle Times Newspaper

Cisco Funds Xobni, the Outlook Search Tool - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Hmm…

Cisco Systems, which has been expanding its workplace collaboration tools, has taken an interest in Xobni, the Microsoft Outlook plug-in for people who are drowning in e-mail.

Xobni announced Monday that it closed a $7 million round of funding, its second, with Cisco as a new investor. The company’s previous investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Atomico also participated.

Cisco Funds Xobni, the Outlook Search Tool - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Personal update: I am now a Microsoft employee

I’m psyched to announce that I have joined a new Microsoft team focused on enterprise collaboration optimization (i.e., communication, collaboration, and information architecture, for large organizations). It’s a great opportunity for many reasons, including:

1. Microsoft now has what I consider to be the best enterprise offering (software + services) set for communication, collaboration, and information architecture (e.g., content and data management). I’ve greatly enjoyed interacting with the related Microsoft product teams as an industry analyst/consultant over the last few years, and look forward to getting more involved with the product teams in my new role.

2. The role is consistent with what I’ve been focused on for most of the last couple decades, as a product manager/strategist and as an industry analyst. In many ways, I think we’re just getting started with collaboration, and I’m very pleased to be part of a product company again, helping to advance the enterprise collaboration industry agenda.

3. I’m reunited with many former colleagues with whom I’m very excited to work again – I’ll share more details on the team members and mission in future posts.

4. On a personal level, I will continue working from a home office, the routine I’ve been enjoying full-time for several years (i.e., I’m not moving to Redmond; I think the Seattle area is great, but the timing is not right for my family to relocate).

I will miss some facets of the industry analyst/consultant routine, such as the extensive press interaction, but I will continue with enterprise-focused collaboration consulting; I’ll simply be focused on Microsoft products and services, from now on.

This blog isn’t going to change – it will remain a technology-focused news filter blog.

Lenovo Brings Wii Functionality to PCs (PC World) by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Lawsuits to follow, no doubt…

Taking a page from Nintendo's Wii gaming console, Lenovo on Monday announced an all-in-one PC with a remote control that doubles as a motion-based gaming controller.

Like the iMac, the all-in-one IdeaCentre A600 combines a monitor and CPU in a thin system. It will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show from January 8 to 11 in Las Vegas.

Its wireless remote control is similar to Nintendo Wii's Wii Remote, which allows users to interact with a video game by waving or pointing the game controller. Using motion-sensing technology, the Wii Remote becomes a racket when swinging during a tennis game, or a weapon when playing a fighting game.

Lenovo's gadget mimics the Wii's approach.

Lenovo Brings Wii Functionality to PCs (PC World) by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Managing productivity through pharmacology

Yikes – see the full post and related links for more details

I recently commented on the Nature editorial that made a case for "the responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy." The writers of the editorial, a distinguished group of academics, had noted that artificial "cognition enhancement" could boost the performance and productivity of many workers: "From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it."

In a posting today, the law professor Frank Pasquale takes the next logical step, offering a modest proposal for also allowing the use of "cognition-dulling drugs" by the healthy. Pasquale notes that for many types of contemporary jobs, particularly those involving repetitive computer work, "a relentless focus on well-defined tasks can offer a real competitive edge in today’s economy."

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Managing productivity through pharmacology

Israel brings Gaza airstrikes to the Web | Digital Media - CNET News

A scary sign of the times

The Israel Defense Forces this week extended its airstrikes on Gaza to the Web, posting video footage of its air assault against Hamas militants on YouTube and using Twitter to spread its message.

According to various news reports, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) created its own YouTube channel carrying videos that include black-and-white aerial footage of attacks on Hamas weapon sites, and clips of Hamas terrorists loading rockets into trucks.

An IDF spokesperson said it is using the platform to "help us bring our message to the world," by offering "exclusive footage showing the IDF's operation success" in Gaza.

Israel brings Gaza airstrikes to the Web | Digital Media - CNET News

Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books - NYTimes.com

Check the full article for more details

Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.

According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers.

Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books - NYTimes.com

More and More, Schools Got Game - washingtonpost.com

A timely and encouraging reality check

Teachers have long yearned for the rapt attention students lavish on mutants and aliens, but stereotypes of video games as violent or brain-numbing have slowed their entry into schools. While the military and even medical schools are turning to "serious games" or simulations for training, the Software and Information Industry Association estimates that instructional games make up only a tiny portion of the $2 billion-a-year educational software industry.

But lately, researchers and educators say sentiment toward gaming is changing. Advocates argue that games teach vital skills overlooked in the age of high-stakes tests, such as teamwork, decision-making and digital literacy. And they admire the way good games challenge players just enough to keep them engaged and pushing to reach the next level.

More and More, Schools Got Game - washingtonpost.com

Check it out - The Boston Globe

Interesting times for libraries; see the full article for more details

In the fast-paced, instant message, Internet era, public libraries have often struggled for attention from patrons. But with the economy sputtering, unemployment rising, and no relief in sight, Massachusetts libraries, long the victim of budget cuts, are busier than ever before, said Robert Maier, director of the state Board of Library Commissioners.

Attendance is surging. Check-out rates are soaring. At some libraries, circulation - the number of items checked out in a given month - is up as much as 33 percent since last summer. And for the unemployed, libraries have become something like an office, with computers, Internet access, and even classes that teach how to write a resume and peddle it online. In a tough time, it seems, people are returning to a place where whispering trumps shouting and no credit card is necessary. At the library, just about everything is free.

Check it out - The Boston Globe