Saturday, November 15, 2008



November as been a month filled with hens parties, bucks parties, weddings: first Ana and Rudi of Gymea fame and then Patrick and Chris of Newport fame ... So much dancing and so many blisters. Highlighs this month must be the six whales at Iceberg I watched with the ondon Mafia Robie, Tim, Sofie, etc... Monday before the Melbourne Cup will be remmembered by Mal as the time when dinner was served with the view of the Whales and the Viewed won the following day so the dinner was paid for by other punters ...

He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
-- Paul Keating (overheard at the launch of Hugh Lunn's latest wordsmith gems at French Forest)

Happy birthday Internet: click go the cheers, Agnes King, Jeanne-Vida Douglas & Mark Jones, BRW, 9 October 2008, pp.24-31. Looking back at the 20th anniversary of the transmission of the first data packets across what became the Internet. Articles discuss the beginning, and changing uses, of the Internet, 10 things coming in the next 5 years, and the Internet as the infrastructure of the digital economy. Social networking online is full of pitfalls for the unsuspecting. Don't put anything on FaceBook, MySpace, or similar web 2.0 applications, unless you'd be happy to see it broadcast or on the front page of the newspaper. Two decades or even more since Cold River took place and one still has to be aware of computer based espionage and how organisations can defend against it How to prevent cyber espionage

Hungry Media Dragon Bivings Report: American Newspapers and the Internet: Threat or Opportunity?
We have recently completed the 2007 study of America’s top 100 newspaper websites, entitled American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?

As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper’s reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. This study explores these concepts, as well as the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers...research data is available in Excel format here


• Pdf formatNews of Media Dragons; [Security vendors have long been criticised for making grandiose claims about the efficacy of their wares. Calculating a specific product or solution's potential return on investment 'is mostly bunk in practice' Security can be measured ; Companies of all sizes have begun to embrace Moodle, an open source learning management system that can be downloaded free and operates with virtually every other training related software system on the market. Moodle goes corporate ]
• · Welcome to the age of globalisation, modernity and all sorts of other forms of “progressiveness”. A couple of years ago I did an assignment entitled “Progress is Always Good”. Unfortunately I didn’t know then what I know now. Progress means the Internet, no barriers, there is no time therefore there is no reality. Hello, Internet dating!; That was fast. In eight days, my mate and his girlfriend 'winked' and were seriously dating. So what constitutes an internet date exactly? Internet dating: instant love or instant disappointment?
• · The best connections are the ones that take you to new and strange places. Slate writer, Daniel Gross, certainly ventured off the map when he connected the number of Starbucks locations in a country’s financial capital with how affected the city has been by the recent economic blast. The more Starbucks stores, the worse affected. Starbucks: The world's local coffee house ; This case study focuses on the process involved in a pharmaceutical company's decision to rapidly promote and develop an existing staff member to the position of Chief Information Officer. Some valuable executive development lessons were learnt along the way High speed executive development
• · · Open-source politics is the idea that social networking and participatory technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Forget party bosses in smoky backrooms—netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life...How times changed report from 2003 AD - is a commentary on the inherent impediments to implementing enterprise-wide blogging tools due to issues such as application interoperability, the volume of data involved, and the hierarchy used for information storage. Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World ; MotherJones Examines Role of Web 2.0 in Political Campaigns
• · · · I would like to announce the launch of the Texas Digital Library's (TDL) blog, The Scholar's Space, featuring a team of four contributors (including me), with more to come over the next few months. The Scholar's Space joins scholarly communications blogs sponsored by friends at other colleges and universities, and national and international organizations. We'll be providing commentary on newsworthy items related to TDL participants' local and global interests in academic processes and systems of research -- from providing access to data and information, to online collaboration and new approaches to reporting out results and public archiving of papers and data The Scholar's Space; BlawgWorld 2007 is the best way to explore and discover legal blogs (blawgs). It features 77 remarkable essays from 77 of the most influential blawgs. Each blogger handpicked their best essay of the year for inclusion in the eBook. The 2007 TechnoLawyer Problem/Solution Guide is a revolutionary new way to find Solutions to Problems your law firm is experiencing. Specifically, it contains 185 Problems and corresponding Solutions. Each Problem is written in the form of a question from the point of view of a law firm and organized by topic. Topics include case management, depositions, discovery, document management, legal research, time-billing, and many more — 58 topics in all." (366 pages, PDF) TechnoLawyer BlawgWorld 2007:
• · · · · Longer office hours and extended computer usage is increasing bad vision. Around 48 percent of officer workers suffer from computer eye fatigue, according to the Optometrists Association of Australia ; Office workers risk computer eye fatigue,
• · · · · · Some things keep resurfacing in October 2008 AD – Applies Media Exemption to Political Blogs the Commission determined that Kos Media, L.L.C., which operates the website DailyKos, did not violate the Federal Election Campaign Act. The Commission rejected allegations that the site should be regulated as a political committee because it charges a fee to place advertising on its website and it provides “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” by posting blog entries that support candidates. Kos Media; LibWorm Beta is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries. LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator...Each feed searched by LibWorm has been assigned a category, so when you browse by Feed Category, you're seeing all the content from the feeds that have been assigned to that category. Subjects are pre-built searches, usually of greater complexity than the user interface currently supports, for common subjects of interest to libraryfolk." This site is free. LibWorm Beta