Articles in “February 2006” from Datamation Blog

There was a time when small businesses didn't need to collaborate in the same way that large businesses do. The last people I know to get e-mail on the job all worked for small businesses. When EMC rolled out its Insignia line of storage products for small business yesterday, it included an SMB version of the company's eRoom collaboration solution. EMC follows on the heels of WebEx, which expanded its enterprise collaboration offerings when it purchased Intranets.com, re-branded it as WebOffice, and launched WebExOne. Small businesses have always been a huge part of the American economy, so what changed in the past couple of years to bring enterprise software vendors into the small business collaboration market? (I used just two examples, there's many more, including Citrix and SiteScape.) There's bandwidth for one. It's now available to small companies. Small companies themselves aren't what they used to be. They are increasingly spread out geographically, and taking advantage of home offices to keep costs down. Online collaboration also helps SMBs keep costs in check by reducing travel and making it easier to involve partners and customers. Small collaboration vendors are getting in on the game too. David Coleman recently wrote a piece on how companies sell collaboration software to SMBs, and found extensive use of marketing tools like Google AdWords.

Even before the recent controversy over Google's refusal to comply with a Justice Department subpoena to turn over search databases, I wondered how many technology companies were working secretly with the U.S. government. Which companies, in the name of fighting terrorism (or perhaps even for other reasons), were providing data on users to the FBI or NSA, or allowing the government to monitor digital communications? Given the controversy and smokescreen surrounding the NSA's current surveillance program, this hardly is a paranoid question. CNET tries to get some answers in an interesting, though ultimately frustrating, article here. CNET's Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache decided to go right to the source, asking 27 telecom and Internet companies if they had "turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?" Fifteen of the companies queried -- including BellSouth, ComCast and Earthlink -- indicated they have had no role in the NSA snoop program. Another dozen either didn't reply or issued vague responses that defy interpretation. Some companies apparently cited "national security" in declining to comment. The article has lot of good legal and historical information regarding electronic eavesdropping, so is well worth a read. But to get concrete answers about the extent of corporate cooperation with the NSA, it appears we have to wait for a lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to play out. The EFF sued the telecom in response to reports that it had allowed the NSA to view its customer records.

News comes today that AOL and Yahoo! will charge e-mail marketers to ensure that their messages get to people who want to receive them. You can read the story from EarthWebNews and then ask yourself: Why would anyone work to clean up spam if they could leverage it to make money?

At its core, what we're doing is all about safety and security of our members and doing everything that we can to help maintain the trust in and the integrity of the e-mail system of the Web, which has been constantly under attack from Internet miscreants like scammers, phishers and spammers," Graham told internetnews.com.

All about safety and security? Sure about that? This reminded me of something. A few years back there was an e-mail that started in Canada and then showed up in the United States about the post office putting a surcharge on e-mail. The thought was that the adoption of e-mail was hurting business at the post office, and they wanted to cash in. The message was so widespread that the U.S. Postal Service actually issued a press release denying the rumor.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington used a Web crawler to sample 20 million Internet addresses and search for spyware. There's still a lot of spyware out there, according to the findings, but there's some evidence the problem is getting better. A sample of what they found:

• On average, one in 62 Internet domains performed drive-by download attacks
• Game and celebrity Web sites appeared to pose the greatest risk for piggybacked spyware, while sites that offer pirated software topped the list for drive-by attacks.
• More than one in 20 executable files contained piggybacked spyware

From May to October, the researchers found a 93 percent reduction in drive-by downloads, which sounds like good news, but the problem remains so widespread that unprotected computers can easily fall prey. The biggest conclusion of the study seems to be that computer users are taking steps to avoid spyware infections by using software and common sense. Now if they would just stop opening those e-mail attachments.

I have a soft spot in my heart for teams that aren't given a chance to win championships in the days leading up to the final game. But to say the Super Bowl was handed to the Steelers last night is just plain crazy. Seattle-based Slate, though now owned by the Washington Post, got the ball rolling early this morning, casting Pittsburgh as the "Stealers." If you watched any NFL games this season — and I have a sneaking suspicion many Seattle fans who jumped on the bandwagon as the season rolled on did not — you know questionable calls in an NFL game are like the scantily clad in NFL commercials — everywhere.

When Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger lunged for the goal line near the end of the first half, replays indicated a close play but a clear stop by the Seahawks. Nopetouchdown, Steelers.

A clear stop? I was convinced the ball crossed the plane of the goal line while Roethlisberger was in mid-air, before the defender hit him. There certainly wasn't the indisputable evidence needed to overturn the call. And I believe it was third down, which means Pittsburgh had another shot from the one-inch line if they wanted it. How many times do you stop that? I didn't like the offensive pass interference call. And I didn't like the low block call on Hasselback. But bad calls are as a synonymous with the NFL as beer commercials, you still have to go out and win the game. By the way, my colleague's prediction (Steelers by 12) was pretty close. I hope it's not a sign his powers of prognostication are fading.

It was a hard-fought game, but in the end the team that software built (OK, bought) couldn't keep up with the Pittsburgh Steelers, who got a good bit of help from the refs on several questionable calls. Final Super Bowl XL score: Pittsburgh Steelers 21, Seattle Seahawks 10 Interestingly, that 11-point margin almost exactly matches a prediction made recently right here. I'd leave this for my blogging partner to note, but he's somewhat stingy with the props.

Do you know what a "personal brand" is? Hint: It doesn't involve a "Golden Palace" tattoo on any visible parts of your body. Rather, your "personal brand" is a combination of professional, communications and self-marketing skills that enable you to stand out in an IT crowd. Over at CIO Update, there's a good piece on the importance of your personal brand and how to develop it. It's by Rajesh Setty, chairman of CIGNEX Technologies. Setty says personal branding:

...requires more than communication skills. You need to be working on something that is remarkable or be remarkable yourself. A large majority of IT professionals ... are typically victims of commoditization. While you have a lot of company in the commodity crowd, your value erodes. People don't pay top dollars for skills that are available in plenty.

There's a lot more to personal branding, which is no overnight project. Indeed, Setty's guest column is but the first part of his exploration of this valuable career skill and strategy. It's a must-read for any IT pro who wants to break out of the commodity box.

Good articles on the art of management don't come along every day, but that doesn't mean those of us here at your friendly IT Management blog ever stop looking. And sometimes, it even pays off. Gary Hamel has an article on management innovation on the Harvard Business Review site (available as an 18-page PDF for $6). The biggest challenge to innovation, he says, is generating truly unique ideas. But he identifies four components that can help:

• a big problem that demands fresh thinking
• creative principles, or paradigms that can reveal new approaches
• an evaluation of the conventions that constrain novel thinking
• examples and analogies that help redefine what can be done.

If you don't want to shell out the $6, Christian Sarkar has a pretty good rundown of what you're missing, including a list of a dozen of the most noteworthy management innovations from 1900 to 2000. Sorry to be such a tease.

A few days ago the New York Times ran an article about the growing problem of counterfeit items -- jewelry, sports memorabilia and other kinds of collectibles -- being sold on eBay. The paper published a helpful sidebar providing tips on how to spot cheap knockoffs. Unfortunately there was no information to help bidders determine if the soul of a whale that died two weeks ago after swimming up the River Thames in London is the real deal. An anonymous eBay seller from Minneapolis claims:

I was accompanying the poor whale in his last journey, and he handed his soul to me. He asked me to sell it, so I could invest the money raised in other bottlenosed whales.

At the risk of sounding like a skeptic, I would point out that not only did the seller get the whale's gender wrong (as the Reuters story notes), but I don't believe whales are in the habit of "handing" things to anyone. Flipping it to him, I might buy. Seriously, if anyone at eBay has a conscience, never mind a soul, that ridiculous auction will be pulled before this blog post is published.

I'm going to leave the politics of this topic to my co-contributor, but it's an interesting topic given current events and the convergence of technologies like telephony and the Internet. We all know (at least, anyone who was paying attention during Good Will Hunting knows) that the National Security Agency (NSA) is the largest intelligence gathering operation in the United States and probably the world. Clearly upset by the revelations of domestic eavesdropping, the ACLU put a short white paper online that explains how the NSA does it job, and how, with advances in technology and networking, the line between international espionage and domestic surveillance can become blurred.

An important result of this technology is that on the Internet, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between "domestic" and "international" routes of a communication. It was once relatively easy for the NSA, which by law is limited to "foreign intelligence," to aim its interception technologies at purely "foreign" communications. But now, an e-mail sent from London to Paris, for example, might well be routed through the west coast of the United States (when, for example, it is a busy mid-morning in Europe but the middle of the night in California) along the same path traveled by mail between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

And, naturally, the NSA needs to get to these networks.

One major new element of the NSA's spying machinery is its ability to tap directly into the major communications switches, routing stations, or access points of the telecommunications system. For example, according to the New York Times, the NSA has worked with "the leading companies" in the telecommunications industry to collect communications patterns, and has gained access "to switches that act as gateways" at "some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States."

There's even a nice map illustrating how it all works. Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link.

E-mail marketing is a tough business to be in. Even if you're legitimately marketing to customers you have a relationship with, such as e-mails from Amazon or Ticketmaster that those of us who buy from them receive, most people write the messages off as spam. But let's assume someone starts to get a handle on the spam — e-mail spam, that is. My personal opinion is it's moving to blog spam and other new tricks. Over at our JupiterResearch division, they think spam is on the decline, and that e-mail marketing will benefit.

E-mail marketing spending will grow from $885 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion by 2010, and the volume of spam messages per consumer will decrease by 13% a year during this same period.

In 2005, the report found, average active e-mail consumer was on the receiving end of 3,253 pieces of spam. By 2010, it will be a mere 1,640 pieces of spam. Better filtering by ISPs will be the reason for the decrease, not the usually futile anti-spam laws. The report also claims that by 2010, the cost of incorrectly blocked e-mail will drop to $92 million from a high of $107 million in 2006. So that means the filters are going to be removing more spam messages, with fewer legitimate messages as collateral damage. I can't wait.

I don't own a BlackBerry, the addictive mobile device whose future is imperiled by a lengthy intellectual property battle. But even here on the sidelines, the tension -- indeed, panic -- is palpable among devoted owners of the portable communications devices. Unfortunately, there's not much BlackBerry owners can do now except wait for final arguments in the court fight between BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion and patent holder NTP. That's expected to happen sometime this month in a Virginia courtroom. Should NTP prevail, Research in Motion will be prohibited from selling BlackBerrys or providing service for them in the U.S. There's a good FAQ over at CNET explaining details of the legal proceedings as well as possible outcomes. And for those of you who can't bear the thought of going cold turkey, here's another FAQ, this one on U.S. Passport applications. I hear Spain is very nice this time of year.

There's a good speculative piece over at Business 2.0 that lays out four distinct visions regarding the future of Google and how each may affect not only the technology business, but society as a whole. But first, a bitter complaint. The author of the piece consults a slew of top "experts" -- "scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries" -- on Google's future, yet overlooks my quickie blog knockoff in-depth brainstorming about the search giant's larger impact on our economy from nearly three months ago. Further, my credentials as a futurist are impeccable, having correctly predicted the winner of the last four (OK, three of the last four) Super Bowls. And that's counting the point spreads. Esther Dyson, can you say the same? On to the article. Here are the four basic scenarios:

Scenario 1 (Circa 2025): Google Is The Media Google TV, Google Mobile and the rise of e-paper create the perfect storm. Scenario 2 (Circa 2015): Google is the Internet Free wi-fi, a faster version of the Web, the Gbrowser, and the cube transform the technology landscape and our language. Scenario 3 (Circa 2020): Google is Dead The once-mighty search engine falls prey to privacy intrusion, optimizers and Microsoft. Scenario 4 (Circa 2105): Google is God Human consciousness gets stored, upgraded and networked.

Finally, not that anyone asked, here's my prediction: Steelers by 12.

I'm reading Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat, and I'm flying through it because it deals with a lot of issues I cover, relating to the tech industry, outsourcing, and globalization. Just the other night I was reading in the book how India's days as the capital of offshore outsourcing, which is a huge part of the book, may be limited. You can add the CEO of SAP to those who think India's salaries aren't the deal they used to be.

"India is slowly getting expensive," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said in an interview published Monday in the German edition of the Financial Times. "We have decided to hire a certain number there, and then start looking at other locations."

Back in August, Gartner saw this coming and predicted offshore outsourcing would follow the cheap labor to places like Vietnam. The demand for skilled labor in India is driving the turnover rates up. In addition to Indian companies, international firms have to compete against each other, and supply and demand means higher wages and more turnover.

We're really going to see what RSS can do as a delivery platform once it's integrated into Windows. I know that makes a lot of people in the tech world shudder, but if you're interested in reaching the masses using RSS, its integration with Windows is necessary. Those that are using the latest beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 are seeing the RSS feed integration there, but the Microsoft Team RSS blog is publishing information on how RSS will eventually work in IE and Windows.

The Windows RSS Platform is available to any application. The idea is that applications can utilize the Windows RSS Platform to become RSS enabled without having to re-implement basic RSS building blocks. This can significantly reduce the time and effort application developers have to invest in order to integrate RSS into their programs.

This will make the importing and exporting of OPML files largely a thing of the past because a feed added to your list in IE will become available to any other applications you have using RSS. That should make it easier for both developers and users to use RSS.

I don't usually post items criticizing media coverage elsewhere, but the headline of this story on SiliconValley.com strikes me as, well, somewhat assumptive:

"Bush grants valley's wishes"

Really? Seems to me like the president made another State of the Union speech filled with the kind of hopeful plans that almost all presidents trot out during their annual address to Congress and the nation. Or maybe the headline is on target, and the high-tech industry is ridiculously easy to please. Or just naive. Does anyone remember the Mars initiative from his 2004 SOTU? We seem no closer to the Red Planet two years later. The article itself was a little more down-to-earth in describing Bush's $136 billion "American Competitiveness Initiative" to further scientific research and promote math and science education. Sure, tech execs are quoted gushing about the initiative, but the reporter also quotes more grounded observers, including U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto:

[T]he real commitment will come when Bush funds his proposals in upcoming budgets, she said. "The president has a history of coming up here and giving great speeches and not acting on what he says," Eshoo said, noting shortfalls from funding promises for his "No Child Left Behind" education plan.

The problem, of course, is we have this thing called a massive federal deficit that makes it hard to back up promises of multibillion-dollar government programs. Until they see the actual money in a budget, tech execs should take a page from Larry David and curb their enthusiasm.

This sounds like a clear-cut case of business jealousy, or dare I call it stock price envy? I think we can safely identify some people who were excited to see the stock market hammer Google. Maybe they were lucky enough to short the stock. AT&T's CEO is still making noise about having companies like Google and VoIP providers pay up to play on telecom networks. Google has already said they won't have any part of this. He has an analyst meeting coming up, then Congressional hearings on network neutrality. We'll hear more from him I'm sure. Meanwhile, newspapers, an industry even more under fire, are taking aim at their own feet.

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners."

If newspapers were smart, they'd forget about copyright lawsuits against search engines that are sending them traffic, and instead invest in search engine optimization so more people can find their content using search engines. Oh, and Mr. Newspaper Man, once your Google traffic dries up, you're still going to lose your classified revenue to Craig's List.

I'll be the first to admit that learning enough HTML to create a Web page isn't hard, but learning enough HTML to build a Web page properly and according to the HTML specification takes a lot more work than many people are willing to do. The people at Google have the technology to take a sample of a good billion or so pages on the Web, and they did just that to see how developers are using HTML.

As part of our work with the WHAT working group, who are writing proposals for a new version of HTML, we have done some research into what aspects of HTML authors are using today. We took a sample of slightly over a billion documents, and looked at what elements were used on the most pages, what class names were used on the most pages, and so forth.

The results are interesting and lead to a few head-scratching moments, as well as questions about how HTML should be further developed. For example, the 34th most popular class attribute was "breadcrumb." This begs the question: should HTML be extended to include support for breadcrumb-type navigation? The same goes for the class "price." Meta tags seem like a mess. And then there's this finding from the body element:

One conclusion one can draw from the spread of attributes used on the body element is that authors don't care about what the specifications say. Of these top twenty attributes, nine are completely invalid, and five have been deprecated for nearly eight years, half the lifetime of the Web so far.

Thanks to Tony Byrne at CMS Watch for the link.

I'd love to write today about my experiences testing the latest beta of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0, and how the phishing filter and enhanced security I wrote about when they were announced months ago work. But I don't have Windows XP here in the office. So no beta for me. Instead, I rely on Joe Wilcox at the JupiterResearch Microsoft Monitor to give his first impressions.

Search surprisingly improves. Microsoft had already done well by adding a search box to the browser in IE 7 Beta 1 and offering a list of different search providers (yes, including Google). The Beta 2 Preview goes further, with support of OpenSearch, which use could make just about any Website searchable from the IE 7 search box. To my surprise, Microsoft is really kicking the tires on supporting Web, whether emerging or established, standards. OpenSearch is good example, as is improved CSS support.

There are a number of new features that protect users from themselves, which is absolutely necessary these days. It uses a stoplight-type system to rate Web sites from good to phishy (pun intended) to dangerous. Users are warned if security settings are changed upon launching the browser. More ActiveX controls are turned off by default. Joe also likes the "modern conveniences" like RSS support and tabbed browsing. I'll keep an eye out for some other first impressions and report anything interesting.