Category: Uncategorized

Internet Evolution – First Post!

I’ve been asked to blog at Internet Evolution, a TechWeb property. My first post just went up this morning. Going forward I intend to evaluate software for IT professionals. It doesn’t seem, to me, like their are a lot of software evaluators in the blogosphere who address the needs of IT. I expect to cover new/social, open source, or free technologies for IT and trends affecting the IT professional and manager. I think this should prove especially salient for IT during our current economic downturn.

Internet Evolution – Aaron Roe Fulkerson – How, and Why, End Users Circumvent ITtechweb T

Enterprise IT has been changing, or evolving if you like. The challenges of IT have grown more complex, spending habits are in flux, and technology adoption patterns are shifting. There are some key forces driving the changes in enterprise IT, but let’s take a quick look at the increasing complexity of enterprise IT.

A long time ago (meaning, a few years back), the IT department had only to combat rogue deployments of desktop software in business departments, such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the latter of which could often have more business logic than most of today’s Web 2.0 applications. Now, however, companies have a plethora of insurgent server-based applications that are proliferating both inside the firewall and outside in the “cloud.”

Who’s deploying and feeding these guerrilla applications (often of dubious engineering quality and even more questionable security)? It’s the users in the business departments [gasps of horror] who are installing and driving adoption independent of IT sanction and governance. The business users are taking matters into their own hands in an effort to improve their productivity and remain competitive. They’re turning to easy-to-use and flexible tools like wikis, blogs, lightweight CMSes, social bookmarking tools, and others that are often grouped under the category of Enterprise 2.0.

AppRising video interview, can you do this with Skype?

AppRising I was recently interviewed by Geoff Daily of AppRising. Geoff describes his blog as:

App-Rising.com covers the development and adoption of broadband applications, the deployment of and need for broadband networks, and the demands placed on policy to adapt to the revolutionary opportunities made possible by the Internet.

App-Rising.com is written by Geoff Daily, a DC-based technology journalist, broadband activist, marketing consultant, and Internet entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video here, but you can watch the video interview at Geoff’s blog. I start off a little slow, but I think the interview gets pretty interesting once I get comfortable with the format.

On the topic of the format. I think it’s fantastic. I’d like to do interviews, picture in picture, like this, but I would prefer to use Skype and then I would upload the finished product to Viddler. Viddler rules. Geoff is using SightSpeed, but to get all the features Geoff uses costs money and no one I know uses the application; so, I would have to ask them to install. Skype video would be so much better. Anyone know an easy way to do this? Tools?

One Day Poem Pavilion

Jiyeon Song

The results of an extensive exploration with shadows, the One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow. Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice.

Oil BJs?

Brita1

Brita’s new ad campaign is…well…genius, if you ask me. It reads:

Last year 16 million gallons of oil were consumed to make plastic water bottles.

www.filterforgood.com

Also from Treehugger via the Aesthetic Poet:

“If just one in 10 Americans used public transportation daily, U.S. reliance on foreign oil would decrease 40 percent.”

One would think a stat like that would inspire government and citizens to do whatever they could to enhance and/or develop public transportation within their centers, yet the status-quo persists. In fact, it’s worsening here in Southern California where there is much talk about the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes (carpool lanes) that are being considered for sale to private companies to turn into toll roads. Hrmm…taking publicly funded infrastructure and making it private so a monopoly can be created that will guarantee an inferior product. That makes no sense. Or as his been the case for many years, the state government in California has been trying to pave over state parks to createpuroplastic unnecessary highways in a poorly veiled attempt to open up choice parks to wealthy developers.

Finally, while I’m on a green kick, this comes by way of The Tyee.ca:

North America uses 60 per cent of the world’s paper cups, 130 billion of them per year. Those cups require about 50 million trees and 33 billion gallons of water, which could sequester 9.3 million tonnes of CO2 and quench 550,000 drought-stricken citizens of the state of Georgia, without even asking them to lower their ridiculous consumption rate of 166 gallons per day.

I feel so dirty. I need a nice reusable mug that I can carry in my backpack so when I bike by the coffee shop on the way to work I’m not contributing to this madness.