April 2007 Archives

If you're an IT person there's a good chance you're a geek. And if you're a geek, that means you're into electronic toys.

That being the case, I wanted to let you know about a very cool new site launched by Jupitermedia. It's called WebVideoUniverse, and it's all about shooting, editing and distributing video on the Internet.

Whether you upload your drunken webcam ramblings to YouTube or are heavily involved in your web-based corporate video strategy, WebVideoUniverse should have something for you. Here's a sample of the content:

Create Clips for Cell Phones

Media Publisher Delivers for Enterprise

5 Questions to Answer Before Starting a Project

Search Tips for Online Video

I doubt the philosopher Kierkegaard was thinking about IT professionals when he (supposedly) said, "If you define me, you negate me," back in the 19th century.

But the point of the observation has some relevance to IT pros today, especially as they define themselves.

For as columnist Rob England posits over at our newest site, IT Career Planet, "As you get older, you get slower, uglier and more expensive. As your work rate goes down and your cost goes up, you must compensate by expanding your skills and adding more value to the organization."

England briefly lays out a number of career options for geeks, most of which require them to define (or redefine) themselves as more than technologists.

He also cautions those technologists to drop some behaviors that, while serving them well in geekland, likely will cause problems in the real world. They include a penchant for negativity (good, however, for journalism careers!), perfectionism and tinkering (screwing around on the web or incessantly playing with gadgets).

There's a lot of good advice in the piece.

Having just returned from the AIMM and ON DEMAND Conference and Expo in Boston, where sleek, gigantic commercial printers dominated a huge chunk of the show floor, I am gripped with mild curiousity an insatiable lust for news, information and fun facts about inkjets, my new fleeting interest lifelong obsession.

But not even I, a nascent inkjet consultant/pundit, saw this one coming:

Hewlett-Packard has announced that the company is introducing a new line of business multifunction inkjet printers called Edgeline. What makes these printers special is their efficiency: they're so thrifty with ink that HP isn't planning to sell them at all. You could rent one, though!

[T]he printers use a new technology where the print head — which is the entire width of the paper — remains stationary as the paper moves through the printer. The print head applies a hydrophilic bonding agent to the paper before the ink is applied, resulting in near-instant drying. ...

In a departure from its usual sales practices, HP will only be offering these printers under a managed HP print contract: they will not be available for direct sales to either customers or retailers.

From a business standpoint, HP's refusal to sell their magic printers makes perfect sense. Where's the post-sale revenue? But once competitors jump in and begin selling (with service contracts attached) their own versions of the magic printers, I think HP will reconsider. And I say that as a burgeoning inkjet consultant/pundit.

Alas, if you're looking for a magic printer for personal use, don't hold your breath. According to the Ars Technica article, HP "does not expect to bring the printers to the consumer level any time soon, at least not as long as it holds an exclusive to the new technology."

I'd give you my expert take on that, but you've all gotten enough freebies for the day. You want more professional inkjet analysis, we go on the clock. Just protecting the brand.

A House subcommittee hearing Thursday on cybersecurity generated a number of disturbing questions regarding federal agencies' ability to protect sensitive data.

Here's a good story, from which I have compiled the following Bullet Points o' Trouble:

21 of 24 major federal agencies had weak or deficient information security controls in place during the past fiscal year.

That's 87.5 percent of major federal agencies. Just putting a "no-spin" number on it.

"We don't know who's inside our networks," subcommittee chairman Rep. James Langevin (D-R.I.) said. "We don't know what information has been stolen."

Political rhetoric, perhaps, but accurate nonetheless. A new GAO study cited a number of security flaws, including:

"[F]ailing to replace well-known vendor-supplied passwords on systems to not encrypting sensitive information to not creating adequate audit logs to track activity on their systems" (as CNET News reports).

Among the worst of the federal agencies are the State and Commerce departments. For their "efforts" to comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, each received a grade of "F". I think Foggy Bottom can forget all about the prom this year.

The Department of Homeland Security earned a "D" in information security.

Hidden good news in the above Bullet Point o' Trouble ("good" being used loosely here): It's the first time ever that Homeland didn't get an "F"! Thank you, Sylvan Learning Center!

All kidding aside, it boggles the mind that our federal agencies continue to expand the definition of incompetence when it comes to protecting sensitive information on their networks. Let's hope a new Congress can force positive change.

Reading about Google's latest spectacular quarterly earnings -- Q1 net profit soared 69%, while sales climbed 66% -- reminded me of an article we ran on Datamation last November.

As a public service, here's a link to that article. Good luck.

Even non-BlackBerry users felt the sting of Tuesday's network failure that interrupted email service and prevented Internet browsing.

Over at the AIMM conference in Boston (see Tom's post below), laptop users were having great difficulty -- or sometimes no success at all -- connecting to the convention center's free wireless network.

A spokesperson for the event said the BlackBerry crash caused the convention center's wireless network to overload. I'm not sure how that explains the problems at the conference this morning, since the CrackBerry supply was resumed around 4 a.m. Wednesday. Maybe there's a backlog effect.

Frustrating as it is, it's always good to know that it's not your laptop that's the problem.

BOSTON -- You can tell that the straight-laced enterprise content management space is on the upswing by the wackiness of the convention-floor booths at the AIIM Expo here.

Sure, the AIIM booths are light-years from the shenanigans at the Consumer Electronics Show or any (dis)respectable gaming show. But there are still some worthy entries here.

Hyland Software turned its huge booth into a faux, brick-walled bar, the OnBase Sports Bar and Grille, with PCs on the bar, real bartender/PR agents behind the bar, and bottles of booze -- which were actually empty. (We checked.)

A “Today’s Special” board at the bar’s entrance featured:

Documents captured in high-volumes daily.

Content served with your preferred interface.

A la carte functionality suited to your
ECM appetite!

Datacap was offering a free bike, a nice racing bike, which was on display at the front of the booth. All the madcap Datacap employees were dressed in tight, yellow-and-black racing shirts. A male employee was also pedaling furiously at the back of the booth, on a mounted version of the prize bike. I wanted to ask about it but feared being sucked into another vendor tractor beam.

The mini theater on the corner of the booth -– a staple of all self-respecting trade shows -– was again popular at the AIIM Expo. And what mini theater would be complete without the accompanying booth babes trolling the insanely bright red carpet, looking for dazed conventioneers who really needed to know more about the latest in content management (but didn't realize it)?

Microsoft had one of the biggest booths (duh), and they went with a tasteful beachwood look for the high booth walls. The mini theatre (dubbed the Microsoft Solutions Theater) was adorned with little white backless love seats, while the hyper PR woman with the Britney Spears ear-to-cheek microphone prowled the little stage, talking way too vigorously about … I’m not sure what. Something to do with software.

One of the more surreal aspects of the show are these really loud, major-league printing fortresses on display. There are many right by the press room, and several times today I could swear baseball-ball sized hail was hammering the roof of the cavernous Boston Convention Center. But it was really just the latest in high-end, souped-up digital printing.

Ever gotten bad directions from one of the online map services like Google Maps or Mapquest?

Well, Google Maps takes that to the next level with a little goof. The joke is generating all kinds of comments on Digg.com (with 5,930 "diggs") and other sites.

I won't spoil it for you. Go to Google Maps; click on Directions; type New York to London. Check out No. 23 on the list.

It works for other cities, too. It strikes my jaded mind as a little too wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we're Google and we're so clever ... but your mileage may vary.

Maybe I'm still smarting from the time I printed Yahoo directions, looking for a bar in San Francisco, and spent the next hour walking 20 blocks to find the club's real location. I even ran into -- and became fast friends with -- a couple wandering around the wrong neighborhood with their own version of the bogus Yahoo map.

One of my favorite tech columnists, Bambi Francisco, has left financial news Web site MarketWatch, with lingering questions about her ethical chops. She resigned last week, after an eight-year stint with the Web site, following potential conflicts of interest between her prose and a video start-up she's involved with.

Several news outlets reported on the conflict, citing a few examples. For instance, Francisco wrote about Powerset, a new search engine, without a disclaimer that one of its soon-to-be board members, Peter Thiel, was also an investor in her company, Vator.tv, a video Web site where entrepreneurs can pitch their companies to venture capitalists.

In other cases, she wrote about companies that had previously posted videos on Vator.tv.

In her recent column, Francisco wrote:

"My boss, David Callaway, MarketWatch's editor-in-chief, gave me his blessing, with certain ground rules, many months ago. Dave allowed me to stay at MarketWatch while incubating Vator.tv in my spare time. The understanding had always been that if it got to a point at which I could not proceed without conflicts of interest, then I would leave MarketWatch to focus on Vator.tv.

So I have decided to run Vator.tv full-time, and I believe in the company.

With much regret, I'm leaving MarketWatch, my employer for eight years, as a full-time columnist and correspondent, though I hope to maintain ties."

If she deliberately crossed the ethical line, that's too bad, considering she was one of my favorite columnists. I liked her for her insightful coverage of one of my former San Francisco employers, CNET Networks, in addition to her solid reporting on other topics. Plus, how many tech columnists are named Bambi?

Let's be honest: Nothing is quite so fun as dwelling on the failures of others. That is, besides helping others.

This week Computerworld takes us on a stroll past the tech graveyard in this article as it looks at 21 "overpromoted products and technologies that utterly failed to live up to their hype." It serves as a cautionary tale during a time when, more than ever, societies around the globe are placing their trust in emerging technologies that -- who am I kidding? This is about schadenfreude!

I won't reveal the entire list here, but here are a few you might remember:

Apple Newton. It's funny how you can forget, but for awhile in the early '90s you couldn't go anywhere without seeing advertisements for Apple's now-prehistoric PDA. According to Computerworld, one reason the Newton never took off...

...was the ridicule heaped on it by talk show comedians and comic strips (most notably "Doonesbury"), which focused on the supposed inaccuracy of the handwriting recognition.

Now that they mention it, I seem to remember Andrew Dice Clay doing a bit about Jack and Jill going up a hill with an Apple Newton -- and it wouldn't work! Whoa!

The Paperless Office. Yeah, right. Fun fact:

A book published by MIT Press in 2002 called The Myth of the Paperless Office found that e-mail caused a 40% increase in paper use in many organizations.

Push Technology. One of my favorites. Back in the day, many a venture capitalist patiently explained to me, the dunce journalist, how "push technology" would transform the Internet. Unfortunately, it worked better in theory than practice:

Those who did take the technology for a spin found themselves inundated with news, weather, sports and more; it wasn't easy to filter what specific information was received.

That was my experience. I think I disabled my push feed in about a half-day. Of course, as Computerworld points out, push lives on in mobile e-mail, RSS feeds and other forms, but with better filters and controls than a decade ago.

Anyway, it's a good read.

Even before the epic legal struggle between the music recording industry and the Napsters of the world, there was the battle between music publishers and Internet sites that posted song chords for guitarists.

In fact, one of the first articles I ever wrote in tech journalism -- I was at Network World at the time -- was about this dispute over alleged copyright infringement. Here's a link to the article. Go ahead and click on the link, if only just to see what a hack lead I wrote. I shudder myself to read it.

Have you had your little laugh? I'm glad.

The reason I'm even thinking of this is the news reported here of a recent deal that finally may put an end to the hostilities begun more than a decade ago:

Because of an agreement in March between MusicNotes, an online music publisher, and the Harry Fox Agency, which represents 31,000 music publishers, guitar tablature -- a popular system for teaching and learning guitar -- will enter the legitimate business realm for the first time.

Last year popular sites like Olga.net, MxTabs.net and others -- where users post tablature, usually called "guitar tabs," for rock songs -- suspended operations after the music publishing industry threatened them with copyright infringement lawsuits. Under the new initiative, MxTabs, which is owned by MusicNotes, will share an undisclosed portion of advertising revenue with music publishers, who in turn will give a portion to artists.

I'm not terribly surprised that the legal struggle lasted so long, but I'm downright amazed that most of those tablature sites stayed up as long as they did. They were facing litigation back in 1996, yet many -- maybe most -- remained in operation until last year. And even until now, finding tabs online has remained relatively easy.

What's behind the agreement? The music publishers finally sobered up and realized 1) they'd never be able to prevent chords, tablature, etc. from being posted online, and 2) they were staring a revenue opportunity -- sharing advertising dollars with the tab-posting sites they've previously been trying to shut down -- in the face.

According to the Times article, many details must be worked out. But it sounds as if they're heading toward a win-win.