Finally, welcome to the 20th century, [tag]LinkedIn[/tag]: > “It’s taken four years for LinkedIn to add photos, when every other [tag]social network[/tag] has done it forever. The site for business professionals has always kept a conservative, business-like tone. But although it says the decision has been driven by members, LinkedIn could not have escaped noticing that business people are using sites like Facebook to network both personally and for business. Adding photos ticks a box marked ‘we can be as friendly-looking as Facebook too guys’.”
My friend Shelby has been living and blogging from Africa over the last year or so. From reading it you can tell what a unique experience she has had, and that she comes back a changed person. Welcome back, Shelby! Check out this post from Plantains and Palm Trees: > “[snip…] Going from Liberia to the US, my overwhelming thought is always this: It’s not that they’re poor and we’re rich. It’s that they’re incredibly poor and we’re incredibly rich. [snip…]” Read her blog, there are lots of other interesting and revealing stories.
I don’t follow the Identify world that closely and like everyone I’ve now come across services who suggest that you log into them with an [tag]OpenId[/tag] account. So I have one now too. It’s free. It’s decentralized. What’s not to love? Well apparently it isn’t 100% love. Rea...
Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy: > “…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting….” This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: “At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate”, from the New York Times.
I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂
Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)
Check out this post from Joel on Software: ** IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to w...
Scott Adams of course is the evil genius behind Dilbert, which as you know I am a big fan of. Scott also has a really funny blog. As proof, this is from the latest post from The Dilbert Blog: > Lawyer: “Where were you on the night of the tornado?” God: “Um, everywhere. Same as always. Go to Hell. Seriously.” (from: Suing God)
Reading this article about The Casualties Of the NFL, in Men’s Journal the other week really colors my view of the NFL and football. Here’s a bit of it to give you a taste: > “…But the men on the field who generate those billion...
I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?
You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language ...
It’s hard to get good data on this, and I keep get wildly varying opinions. I haven’t fully formed my own yet, but here’s another data point: > “In contrast, 50 percent of respondents said that their company did not block access to [tag]Facebook[/tag], with eight percent specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.” (from Sophos) What do you think?
Check out this post about the distribution of Facebook applications on Christopher Herot’s Weblog: > [
I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?
Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been actually able to carve out some quality time to get my head around Ruby and Ruby on Rails. My play project is something called myscum.org, which is a lightweight scrum tracking tool. Basically it’s modeled after what I’ve been using for BlogBridge, working with Aleksey. So a pretty simple case, makes a decent play project. But of course, that’s how BlogBridge started. A decent play project…