May 2007 Issue

In the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident—in which a female technology blogger received misogynistic hate comments on her Creating Passionate Users blog, and elsewhere on the internet, that eventually escalated to death threats—publisher Tim O'Reilly has proposed a blogger code of conduct to address issues of incivility, misogyny, and racism in blogs.

YouTube, social networking sites like MySpace, and the internet in general have become significant factors that must be taken into account by any political campaign with designs on electoral success. TechPresident is a blog that was created in early 2007 with the aim of covering the web’s effect on the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development (GAID), borne from the United Nations’ Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Task Force, has some ambitious plans regarding accessibility.

Vasont Systems, supplier of content management systems to Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and General Electric Healthcare, rolled out a new version of its flagship software earlier this month, with a drastically revamped user interface that aims to streamline common publishing tasks. Vasont version 11, released April 2, replaced version 10, which has been in use since November of 2005.

Over time, a rift has grown between those who use the internet to expand their sense of community and those who devalue the internet’s ability to foster a sense of community at all.

Most citizens equate the national emergency alert system with an annoying green screen accompanied by a high-pitched screech that inevitably interrupts a favorite TV program. However, recent natural disasters have left Americans wondering why government officials are still tied to old technologies—land-line phones, TVs, radios, and even wailing sirens—in their efforts to warn citizens about emergencies.

There are clear signs that momentum is building for enterprise implementation of social networks as tools to improve internal communication and to deepen customer relationships. However, companies are cautiously matching up collaborative functionality with measurable ROI before throwing resources into social networking.

Not all that long ago, content flowed one way. These days, however, content is a two-way street. The trick is how to avoid content traffic jams.

Generation C is the "You" in YouTube, the "My" in MySpace, and the "i" in iPod. They're you (and me), and they're shaking up the way people make, think about, and use digital content. Get to know them, and get to know how to connect with their content expectations.

As a teenager in northern New Hampshire, I worked after school and on weekends in a small country store. I calculated retail prices, stamped them onto cans, then stocked the shelves. I also worked the checkout register, carefully entering each item’s price into the register. This was before the use of UPC bar codes—indeed, before the ubiquitous use of microprocessors.

The other day I was trying to track down someone I haven’t seen in about 20 years. I tried Google and, shockingly, received too many results. The two links on the first page of results that I clicked and skimmed through were old and not terribly useful. Next, I tried ZoomInfo. I actually find this service to be a bit spooky.

As an intranet consultant, there are times when I am tempted to say that all my clients have the same problems; only the solutions differ. The best example of this is when I am asked which department should be responsible for intranet management. My task is then to quickly read between the lines of the question to judge whether the managers concerned want me to make the case for them to hand over the intranet to someone else, or to justify why they themselves should be the owners.

After witnessing many econtent companies start up, grow, sometimes die, occasionally go public, and often be acquired over the past (gasp) 24 years, I've finally come to the realization that the best companies follow a defined birth and growth process. Initial sparks of an idea typically come from a founder who identifies a market problem that is solved by technology. The founder-turned-entrepreneur then either self-funds or finds seed funding to build an initial product, which is typically released into the marketplace after months or years of development effort. So far, so good.

Business in the virtual world got very serious, very quickly in 2006. There have been a lot of false starts over the years. The massively multi-player gaming worlds like EverQuest and the eight-million strong World of Warcraft were always fascinating phenomena for their niche audiences, but they only made money for Sony and Blizzard/Vivendi, respectively, not for anyone else. Several things changed last year, however.

“We come up with a method to map the current content to the new application.”

FeedBurner helps SOHH.com gain insights into the uses (and users) of its content and help the site to better monetize its offerings in the process.