How a marketing firm implemented an enterprise wiki - NetworkWorld.com

Neil Callahan, President of Digital, had a simple thought for at his New York-based selling firm. He would begin with a little group, allow them dwell it with helpful information such
as meeting short letters and presentations, and then throw it up as an illustration to other departments. Those groups, in turn, would create
their ain wikis.

But moving towards a new tool like a wiki for collaboration, especially when people are so used to exchanging information
over e-mail, tin be just as large a cultural challenge as it is a technical one. E-mail have been the basic of communication
for many houses for well more than than a decade. As a result, Callahan says, it's critical to have got a concern leader ain the project
and promote wiki adoption. It also helps, of course, to pick a wiki with an easy user interface so users won't diffident away
from contributing to it. Don't Miss!

Picking a Sociable Software Platform

Large sellers such as as as have got added societal software system to their offerings, but Callahan states such merchandises (SharePoint in particular) required too much
clip and attempt to implement, especially for a company with lone 300 full-time employees. "There is just too much policy and
administration direction with SharePoint," he says. "We weren't going to child ourselves into thought we needed that. We aren't
going to set people in the punishment box if they don't accede to some administration or policy." Related Content

Instead, Callahan picked , a company which do wiki software system designed for businesses. The user interface lets people to redact and pull strings information with no hypertext markup language or coding experience. Power users - people who
redact frequently - can use a assortment of cutoffs to upload links, written documents and other information with greater efficiency.

While Socialtext offers clients the pick to host the information on premise, Callahan opted for a software system as a service (SaaS)
theoretical account where the seller hosts the data, citing less care costs. He also states he experiences comfy with the security
the seller provides.

"It's encrypted and protected, and we could set a VPN [virtual private network] around it if we needed to," Callahan says. "But we're not putting fiscal statements and employee wages on there or anything." 1

Yahoo shakes up its management

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Hoping to change by reversal its fiscal slack and reassure investors, Yokel Inc. unveiled a direction inspection and repair Thursday that purposes to better its Internet merchandises and advertisement business.

The changes, expected for more than than a week, make three new groupings under Yokel President Sue Decker, who modestly increases her authorization under the new structure.

But the inquiry remained whether the reshuffle is too small too late, as the Sunnyvale Web portal seeks to struggle for control of its board and resuscitate its concern followers an aborted coup d'etat command by Microsoft Corp.

Under the plan, Ash Patel, a Yokel veteran soldier who supervises a large ball of implicit in software, will take a grouping that pulls off and makes the company's wide portfolio of merchandises such as as search, e-mail and instantaneous messaging.

Hilary Schneider, an executive director in complaint of the company's advertisement who is close to Decker, will now supervise most of the U.S. business.

A 3rd squad that ours the huge amounts of information Yokel accumulates about it users' wonts will be led by an executive director to be named later.

Kraut Yang, Yahoo's head executive, said the displacement is "designed to set us in an even better place to leverage our prima planetary audience and capture the chance we see in the convergence of hunt and show advertising."

Over the past twelvemonth and a half, Yokel have undergone respective restructurings that included occupation cuts, the riddance of merchandises deemed no longer cardinal to its business, and the going of top executive directors including former chief executive officer Dame Ellen Terry Semel. Those overhauls' failure to resuscitate the company signalings that this up-to-the-minute effort is no certain thing.

Kevin Landis, main investing military officer for Firsthand Funds, a common monetary fund company in San Jose that owned 136,000 Yokel shares as of the end of March, said Yahoo's direction had to agitate things up, given the company's predicament. But he added that rarely makes a successful corporate turnaround time hinge on a direction reorganization.

"They needed to make something," Landis said.

The restructuring come ups a small over a calendar month before a high-profile showdown with billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who have launched a conflict to replace the company's board with his ain slate of directors. Anything Yokel can indicate to as an counterpoison to its unease may assist support its lawsuit that its current board should be re-elected.

Many investors are angry that Yahoo's board failed to accept Microsoft's $47.5 billion coup d'etat bid, which would have got paid $33 per share for the company. But since the two engineering giants called off negotiation June 12, Yahoo's shares have got sunk sharply, leaving Yang's hereafter in doubt.

On Thursday, Yahoo's stock drop 64 cents, or 3 percent, to $21.37, indicating investor incredulity about the new organisation chart.

Since the Microsoft negotiation collapsed, and the planned reorganisation took shape, respective top Yokel executive director director directors have got resigned or program to make so soon, including Jeff Weiner, executive frailty president who oversaw most consumer-facing products; Vish Makhijani, who led the hunt team; Qi Lu, executive frailty president of hunt and advertisement technology; Brad Garlinghouse, a senior frailty president in complaint of communication theory products; and the laminitises of the Flickr photograph sharing service, Caterina Fake and Jimmy Stewart Butterfield. A smattering of other executive directors in Yahoo's engineering group, whose direction also was overhauled Thursday, lost their jobs, according to a individual familiar with the matter.

E-mail Jules Verne Kopytoff at .

The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 10:00 Prime Minister PDT

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The same inquiry people used to inquire about PCs can be asked of societal networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or more than complex, before they came around? The reply is yes. For some folks, societal networking land sites such as as Facebook and MySpace look nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these practical circles of friends turns out to be quite a spot of work, often necessarily so. Here are the 10 things that bug me most about today's societal networking services. 10. MySpace Kitsch

Ning, which allows you put up your ain usage societal network, have attracted attending for its ability to make communities that are more than functional than those created through competing services from Google and Yahoo. Nonprofits, support groups, and hobbyists have got establish their places on Ning. But, as with many new vicinities on the Web, the seedier side of the civilization is often the first to travel in. As on Second Life, pornography reportedly consists a important per centum of the communities Ning hosts. Flickr confronts a similar issue, but it shields unsuspicious visitants from seeing grownup content through default filters (that is, you must actively choose out of the filter). Ning offers no such as setting, which do the land site tough to urge to schools and families.

Tibetan writer alleges harassment by Chinese police and nationalist Internet hackers

: A Beijing-based Tibetan author said Wednesday that Chinese police force have got been harassing her and that patriots hacked into her blog, where they posted a Chinese flag and baleful messages.

Woeser, who wrote about news from Tibetan countries of People'S Republic Of China during public violences and protestations in March, said her e-mail and online telephone set business relationships had also been hacked and her place telephone and cell telephone no longer worked.

She said it was the 4th clip 1 of her blogs had been attacked and that she thought the up-to-the-minute blog would be safe because it was hosted by an abroad server.

"Even though I can't recover it, I can begin another blog," she said in an e-mailed message to The Associated Press. "They can interrupt one, but I will just begin another one. I can't halt unless they collar me."

The hackers left a image of the Chinese national flag on her blog along with the message: "Long unrecorded the People's Democracy of China. Overthrow all Tibetan separatists." Today in Asia - Pacific

Above a photograph of the author, whose books are banned in China, the hackers wrote: "Please retrieve this Tibetan breakaway Woeser's ugly face. Whoever sees this ugly face, delight round her hard like one beat generation a dog."

The grouping phone calls itself the Honker Union of China, which is an informal web of Chinese patriot hackers. The grouping claimed duty for hacking into U.S. Web land sites after an American undercover agent airplane and a Chinese military jet plane collided in 2001.

Woeser, who travels by one name, said that since the protestations in Thibet she had received 100s of messages abusive Tibet's exiled Negro spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

"I believe the events in Thibet caused certain people to go angry because they don't desire me to state the whole human race what is really happening in Tibet," she said.

Woeser's aggregation of traveling stories, "Notes on Tibet," was banned in 2003, reportedly because it deviated from the functionary authorities take on Tibetan history and culture. Woeser was subsequently fired from her redaction occupation at a government-backed journal and forced to go forth her place in Tibet's capital, Lhasa.

Woeser was set under house apprehension from March 15 to March 22 this twelvemonth as violent protestations took topographic point in Lhasa. She said four police force military officers from the Dongcheng territory in eastern Peking interrogated her astatine a friend's house Monday, just as the first U.S.-China human rights negotiation in six old age were in progress. They asked for her Idaho card and took photographs of points in her bag, she said.

A adult female who answered the telephone at the Dongcheng police force said she was unaware of the incident. She refused to give her name.

Demonstrations in Lassa that started peacefully but turned violent on March 14 caused an all-out attack by Chinese state mass media on the Dalai Lama, who they said wanted to divide Thibet from China.

A moving ridge of patriotism among many Chinese also broke out on the Internet after the international leg of the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by pro-Tibet demonstrators in April.

___

On the Net:

Woeser:

The Honker Union of China: (Chinese language)

Five ways of defining cloud computing

As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we're all talking about
cloud computer science doesn't intend we're talking about the same thing.

I recently joined a LinkedIn/Google grouping on cloud computing, a member of which posted what should have got been an guiltless question:
Is there a difference between cloud computer science and what we cognize as power system computing? I was ready with my ain answer, but overnight
about a twelve responses had already flooded in, creating an e-mail concatenation that offered some interesting niceties on the terminology.

[ Learn more than about the cloud computer science tendency in "" and "." ]

I trust this doesn't acquire me kicked out of this group, but Iodine idea it might be interesting to reproduce some of these as food
for thought. In the involvements of privacy, I'm not publishing anyone's names, and I've edited some of the definitions for the
interest of lucidity and length. Here are the top five:

1. "Vendors, as always, film over the existent definitions of new terms. In my sentiment (and the sentiment of others), cloud computing
isn't the same as public utility computing, which isn't the same as power system computing:

"Grid computer science generally mentions to resource pooled environments for running play calculate occupations (like mental image processing) rather than
long running procedures (such as a Web land site or e-mail server).

"Utility computer science generally mentions to resource-pooled environments for hosting long running play processes, and be givens to be focused
on meeting service degrees with the optimal amount of resources necessary to make so.

"Cloud computer science mentions (for many) to a assortment of services available over the Internet that present calculate functionality
on the service provider's substructure (e.g. Google Apps or Amazon EC2 or Salesforce.com). A cloud computer science environment
may actually be hosted on either a power system or public utility computer science environment, but that doesn't substance to a service user."

2. "Cloud computer science = Power System computing. The workload is sent to the IT substructure that dwells of dispatching Masters and
working slave nodes. The Masters control resource statistical distributions to the workload (how many slaves run the parallelized workload). This is crystalline to the client, who only sees that workload have been dispatched to the cloud/grid and consequences are returned
to it. The slaves may or may not be practical hosts.

"Cloud computer science = Software-as-Service. This is the Google apps model, where apps are located 'in the cloud,' i.e. somewhere
in the Web.

"Cloud computer science = Platform-as-Service. This is the Amazon EC2 et aluminum theoretical account where an external physical thing keeps the IT infrastructure
(masters/slaves) and the client purchases time/resources on this infrastructure. This is 'in the cloud' in so much that it is across
the Web, outside of the organisation that is leasing clip off it. Continued1 | | »

Web 2.0: Whatever Google Knows About Spam, It Isn't Saying - InformationWeek

At the on Friday, Google applied scientist Flatness Cutts, who heads Google's Web Spam team, gave a keynote computer address titled

Cutts and many others at Google cognize a batch about Spam because Google acquires a batch of spam, in e-mail and on Web pages. The job is, he couldn't state very much about it.

Cutts anticipated this in a on Tuesday in which he mentioned his approaching speech."I'm struggling with what exactly to say," said Cutts. "On one hand, Google cognizes a batch about spam... On the other hand, I don't desire to let on things that would profit people that attempt to spam."

While keeping Google's security card game stopping point to the waistcoat is apprehensible -- few companies are unfastened about security issues -- Cutts's reluctance to let on what Google cognizes about Spam made his presentation more tantalising than rewarding.

For instance, Websense Security Labs on Thursday echoed former studies that spammers were having a just grade of success in defeating Google's CAPTCHA system, which forestalls spammers from registering free business relationships that they can mistreat services like Gmail and Blogger.

"Spammers have got managed to make automated bots that are capable of not only signing up and creating Blogger business relationships (using spammer business relationship credentials), but also utilize these business relationships as redirectors and room access pages for advertisement their merchandises and services," said Websense security research worker Sumeet Prasad in a .

Cutts made no reference of this and Google have maintained that business relationship maltreatment at its free services goes on to be driven by people rather than bots. Nor did Cutts computer address what looks to be an in progress inundation of malware-infected porn on Google Groups pages.

Instead, Cutts focused on Web Spam and how land sites can avoid it.

"Web Spam is when person seeks to beat or take cutoffs so that their Web land site shows up higher [in hunt consequences rankings] than it rates to demo up," he explained.

The root cause of Spam is money, Cutts said, so land site proprietors should look for ways to deny money to spammers. (Putting an end to all free online services would effectively deny money, in the word form of free Spam infrastructure, to spammers. But that would interfere with Google's concern model, so the burden is on land site proprietors to make something.)

Trust and repute systems are a great manner to cut down spam, Cutts said, citing eBay's and Amazon's work in this area. True though that may be, Cutts made it sound as if eBay and Amazon had more than or less quit their systems of abuse. There's no uncertainty that eBay and Amazon have got top-notch security, but retention those two companies up as the reply rubrics over existent jobs that remain.

Guillaume Lovet, a security research worker at , recently explained that swindlers cognize that to beat out eBay's repute system, they either have got to steal business relationships -- which is why, he said, eBay is phished about 20 modern times more than Banks -- or make fake trust with bogus transactions. That's why, he says, there are so many points sold on eBay for a penny: to game the repute system.

Given his observation that "Spam will acquire more than than malicious and more unsafe in the approaching calendar months and years," Cutts is clearly aware of the trends. Yet his recommendations -- acquire some trust chemical mechanism into your system, avoid being a target, and endeavor to thwart spammers by not giving them what they desire -- look incomplete.

Google clearly cognizes a batch about spam, perhaps as much as spammers themselves know. If lone it were more than than willing to share that knowledge, we might be able to have got a more informed treatment about possible solutions.

Microsoft To Acquire Mobile Software Maker Danger - InformationWeek

Microsoft on Monday said it have agreed to get Danger, a shaper of mobile software system and services, as well as the youth-oriented Sidekick smartphone sold by radio bearer T-Mobile. Financial footing were not disclosed.

In purchasing Danger, Microsoft would acquire an operating system that powerfulnesses some of the most consumer-friendly phones for accessing the Internet. Danger OS-driven information services include Web browsing, e-mail, instantaneous messaging, games, multimedia system applications, and easy entree to online societal networks, such as as MySpace. Sharp and Motorola are manufacturing spouses for Danger-powered devices.

Microsoft bes after to add Danger's trading operations to its amusement and devices division headed by Robbie Bach. Products under the division include the Xbox, the Zune, Windows Live, and the Windows Mobile River platform for handsets.

"The improver of Danger functions as a perfect complement to our existent software system and services, and also beef ups our dedication to improving mobile experiences centered around people and what they like," Johann Sebastian Bach .

Microsoft claims Windows Mobile River is available in more than than than than 160 telephones made by more than 50 hardware manufacturers, which sell the devices to more than 160 mobile operators worldwide. Nevertheless, Microsoft-powered telephones dawdle in the emerging smartphone market, which grew by 60% last twelvemonth over 2006, according to marketplace research worker Canalys. The devices were one of the fastest growth sections in the engineering industry.

The concerted marketplace share of all the sellers making smartphones powered by Windows Mobile River in the 4th one-fourth of 2007, less than Apple's 28% share from the iPhone, which launched in late June. The leader was blackberry shaper Research In Motion, which had a 41% share. Apple was 2nd in the U.S. market.

Danger, based in Palo Alto, Calif., was co-founded in 1999 by Andy Rubin, who is now in complaint of Google's mobile platforms. The company in December filed for an initial populace offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A day of the month and terms scope for the offering was not released, but the company planned to raise as much as $100 million on the Nasdaq, The New House Of York Times reported.

As of Sept. 30, Danger had 923,000 endorsers to its information services. The company's investors include Redpoint Ventures, August F. Mobius Technology Ventures, Motorola, and T-Mobile.