IBM experiments with flexibility

On the eve of a long Labor Day week-end that signals the official end of the summer and back-to-school, it feels nice to reflect on vacations, just a little bit more.

The NYT reports today on IBM's experiments with flexibility. Employees at IBM are usually allowed to take from 3 to 5 weeks of vacation / year (readers from France, interpret it in one way; readers from the US, interpret it in another one), but they do not officially have to report their vacation time to HR managers and can take vacation time at any time on very short notice, as long as their immediate manager is informed.

The article reports that some employees feel pressured to check their e-mail and answer phone calls during their vacation time as a result of this new flexibility, but such behavior seems pretty routine to any professional white collar today.

Apparently, IBM's move is part of its transitioning from a manufacturing to a service company.

Back by popular demand

This is not a fake entry

Reader, don't you worry, this entry is a real one. One with no strings attached, no dangerous urls that could maleciously infect your computer.

The BBC just reported that blogger (i.e. the company that graciously hosts this blog) is used by hackers who create posts (and perhaps blogs as well) with links towards undesirable downloads onto PCs (as usual, Macs are OK).

Weird. I guess we should have expected this to happen, in the cats-and-mice game of internet threats, but still, so far I considered blogging as quite a safe and, appart from the occasional (well, alright, quite frequent for some) spats, rather inoffensive. How naive of me.

Podcast no more?

I came across this interesting piece on Read/WriteWeb entitled "Will Podcasting survive?"

The piece interested me, not just because podcasts have made my subway rides pass faster, but also because it compares the current fast development of blogs and online videos to the stagnation of new podcasts.

Alex Iskold, the author, dissects the relative disadvantages of the podcasts (not as cool as videos, not as easy to skim through as blogs), as well as the current dead-end of their business models: advertising money does not come easy because no magical formula for efficient advertising for podcasts has been found.

The conclusion of the author, which really reminds of the previous discussion on the "end of blogging" is that the little, independent, podcast will probably suffer a long death while the big companies, the NPR, CNN, FranceInter, etc., of the world, recycle their contents at low cost.

The search stops here

Pan et al. just published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication an article "In google we trust: users' decisions on rank, positions, and relevance" that has even PC World puzzled.

The authors found that university students do not question Google's rankings in search results: they are therefore likely to limit their information search to Google's first results ("the top of the list") even when these results are not relevant to them.

These findings are not surprising per se. Anyone looking for information on the internet is likeky to browse through Google's initial results rather than through the 36,548th result provided by a benign search.

Nonetheless, the apparent ease of access to just about any information should make us more, rather than less, critical of results. Instead of trusting blindly the search engine, we should consider it as a tool, a powerful tool, at that, that can make our search easier, but should not mute our analytical abilities.

New condo woes

For those who have shared the misadventures of owning new condos in the NYC area, today's NYT as a dead-on article in its real estate section "Condos, brand-new yet not so perfect". Not that it is comforting or anything, but one does not feel isolated anymore.

Year-round Halloween

Ah, the happy mystification of the net! It helps people adopt various personalities and present themselves as others (see my previous posts here, and here, on the topic).

We thought that the Fake Steve Jobs (who turned out to be editor of Forbes Magazine, see here and here for details) was an anomaly.

Not so anymore. TechCrunch reveals quite a few of these fakes: from the secret diary of Bill Gates to that of Jonathan Schwartz (the real Schwartz is famous for being one of the first CEOs to become an actual blogger).

The most intriguing of these fakes, to me, is the Fake Scoble, since Robert Scoble has become a personality from merely being a blogger and not because of his business achievements.

The future of journalism

Following my previous post on the professionalization or business-making turn of blogging, there has also been much tension about the relationships between bloggers and traditional journalists. Questions about the legitimacy of the new media guard versus the old-keepers (and deliverers) of news and opinions have abounded.

These days, though, these relationships are expressed less in oppositional terms and more in terms of complementary and transition. Some bloggers are becoming full-blown journalists and journalists become bloggers. Blogging becomes an essential part of many journalists' activities.

Such evolution can also be traced in media job trends. This report, for instance, shows how job cuts in traditional journalism (especially in big cities) are countered by increased job openings for digital journalists.

The business of blogging

There has been recently an outcry over the move of Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics blog to the New York Times website. The two authors were criticized for being "sold" to a big media company.
In particular, the RSS feed of their blog is now partial instead of full, which means that, in order to continue reading an entry that seems interesting, you need to go to the NYT website (and generate more ad revenue for both the authors and the company).
Dubner discussed this decision here.

At the same time, others worry that the success of social networking website, that make it possible to publish on the web freely and that require less upkeep than a blog, actually means the "end of blogging". Some of the early bloggers are already nostalgic of the good old days when they were among the happy few and could express their enlightened views to an arguably much smaller audience.

But one cannot help but notice that blogging has become quite mainstram, that media companies (and the NYT is just but one such example of adoption of the medium) are starting to see the strategic opportunities of partnerships with bloggers and that many companies are starting to hire bloggers.

This is not the end of blogging, but it is the end of its beginning. Blogging is becoming a profession. It is business, as usual.

Be a techie, the easy way

Many people dream of being computer wizards, but much fewer would feel honored of being called geeks. Not to mention that actually being a computer wizard is, well, difficult. Basic computer literacy does not always make the cut (oh, I so wish I was a programming genius!).

Fortunately, many free web-based applications are really easy to use and can make any blog, facebook, website, etc., looking sleek and stylish.

Follow this advice by PC World, for instance, and you shall put maps, create RSS feeds, add online calendars, etc., onto your site, my friend.

A brief history of spam, spam, spam

As I was going through my backlog of New Yorker issues, I came upon this interesting article on spam or junk mail.

This is how I discovered (I was probably the last person in the world not to know that), that the first junk mail was sent as an advertisement for DEC in 1978 and that the word "spam" is a contraction of "spiced ham" (not being a fan of ham may partly explain my ignorance, but still, mea culpa).

So, from "spiced ham", the product, to spam, what litters our mail boxes, what is the missing link?

This Monty Pythons' skit, but of course. Not sure how many times "spam" is said in the 3-minute sketch, but enough to persuade us of the relevance of the term to indicate something that comes again and again, at one's annoyance.

In addition to the New Yorker article, you can also see here for a more detailed history of spam.

Information or deformation?

Following up from yesterday's post, here is the latest news on the debate around online sources (in general) and wikipedia (in particular) as reliable sources of information.

The New York Times reported today about wikipedia's "impolite side": some wikipedia entries contain not only errors (we knew this already), but also pranks if not downright insults.

Again, this should not surprise us, and comes from the very openness of wikipedia. The NYT article interestingly makes a generational hypothesis, considering that in 25 years (an eternity in the internet time), everybody will have become used (or been born with) a much more fluid vision of information than the one we inherited.

Let's talk about this in a quarter of century, then.

Elusive information ownership

According to the reliable web aggregator techmeme, the latest talk in the tech blogosphere has to do with Wiki Scanner, a tool that allows to trace the origins of entries edits and corrections to wikipedia entries. The tool does not make it possible to trace the individual authors, but the owners of the networks from which the edit originated.

And, (surprise!) many companies "correct" entries that are not to their liking. Pepsi, for instance (see the NYT article here) removed mentions to negative health effects of its soda. Corporations are not the only ones, however, to write about themselves. Among others, the CIA changed entries related to its activities, as well as the Vatican.

What surprises me is that everyone seems surprised by this. The openness of wikipedia makes it vulnerable to conflicts of interest. We may regret it, but at the very source of the dynamics of collective action on wikipedia is the fact that the most likely to write about a topic are the ones who are the most involved in it...

Funny, by the way, how this piece of news comes right after the whole debate about Google's initiative to have people involved in the news comment on it.

Introducing Matisse

Campaign crafts

Pardon my narrow-mindedness. After all, I am not so versed in American political campaigning.
Here is what my tidy world looked like. On one hand, knitting was for mum, scrap-booking was for auntie, and barbecuing was for the males. On the other end of spectrum was the ruthless and highly efficient world of campaigning, with its fund-raising, debating, and vaguely imagining programs.

Well, according to the ever-so-entertaining (to the geeky audience at least) Slate, the two worlds have merged, kindof. Now, you can play an active political role while indulging in your favorite crafty hobby! Don't miss the article here, and especially its slide show.

Who would have thought that a mere blanket could carry such a powerful message? Well, it does, if it is an "homeland security blanket". Who knew that Mayor Bloomberg's leadership really stood out, even when rendered through macaronis?

Bottom line: Tree lover

It is heartening to see that bloggers take on worthy causes, even though sometimes hidden behind mundane complaints.

See Muhammad Salem, for instance, in a recent post, he calculated that at&t will destroy 74,535 trees in order to provide extensive and lengthy bills to Iphone owners.

The very same day, someone working for an at&t call center provided some information onto at&t's plans to transition toward "summary billing" (i.e. smaller bills) to improve the company's bottomline. His / her answers were then posted onto Salem's blog.

Two things seem really interesting with this story:

- The call center representative relayed information from at&t, but did not seem uncritically "sold" to the company. His / her voice was that of someone at the periphery of the company rather than a middle- or high-level manager.

- Salem's second post shows him feeling gratified with the answer he received. It is not that at&t altered its tree-destroying billing policy because of him. However, Salem's post raised awareness toward the issue, and the immediacy of the answer showed that his blog mattered, at least to a certain audience.

My other self has yet to wear Prada

It was bound to happen.

With all these talks about online selves, mystification, and disinhibited behaviors in virtual worlds, it was time for fashion to make its entry. Social norms and influence arise just as well online as they do offline, as any user of social networking applications knows well.

Fashion is now very present in the world of the likes of second life and Sims 2. The ubiquitous H&M has discovered the promising land of Sims 2 and in Second life a magazine, Second Style, is telling us ladies what is in and what is out on the dancefloors of three-d renderings of Ibiza, according to the International Herald Tribune.

Missing so far: the upscale fashion labels; could it be that their marketing execs do not (yet) consider the users of these applications as target clientele?

Patient health and competitive hygiene

The International Herald Tribune just reported that both Google and Microsoft plan to develop web-based applications that allow individuals to manage their health-information.

These initiatives for sure will raise many questions related to security and privacy and will probably have people wonder about what the two companies can do in a legal context framed by the much debated and questioned HIPAA regulations.

However, what is striking, and has been noted by the New York Times as well, is the parallel between the current frenzy of American Presidential candidates in introducing health plans and the concurrent initiatives of two companies, Google and Microsoft, that both try to dominate the competitive world of web applications.

Could such a risky move toward the health information market create sustainable competitive advantage? Is it the latest expression of companies opportunistic moves toward social responsibility?

Reading more, connecting less

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) recently released the results of a four-year study of internet use. These two websites, webpronews and webware, have summarized its main results.

What are the changing trends in internet users' habits? In short, they spend more time reading content and less time communicating with others. In 2007, they spend about 46% of their time reading and 33% communicating. In 2004, these proportions were inversed.

Anyone interested in interpreting / extrapolating these results that, at first glance, seem at odds with the web 2.0 shebang? An explanation is probably related to the extreme heterogeneity among internet uses. More and more people have adopted the net as a frequent medium, but have appropriated it in widely diverse ways. Average percentages do not reflect this diversity.

Big brother returns

It has become commonplace to note the panoptical effect of new technologies. We also know that advances in IT play a solid role in intelligence efforts.

So this news, relayed by the NYT and Boing Boing, is not surprising per se, but its extent is: More than 20,000 surveillance cameras are being installed in Southern China. An American company will analyze the videos in order to track suspects' faces and identify unwanted activities.
With this endeavor, big brother has just gotten bigger.

Branding through naming

Just came across this interesting post from the website Facereviews that claims that Facebook (sought after by many silicon valley investors and the favorite pastime of teenagers, students and many a person who manage their online image through the user-friendly and ubiquitous application).

The point that Facereviews makes attests to the power of a name. Basically, it consists in saying that if Facebook was not called Facebook but, say, "classmates.com" or "schoolyearbook.com", it would not attract the people who do not fall into the "school" / "higher education" category.

I.e., the name conditions the brand. A name whose initial meaning is relatively unknown appeals broadly and creates the possibility for the application to become identified with the name.
Facebook is such an example.

Google is another one. To "google" someone or something is something that we all do, and the verb itself is a recent addition to ourvocabulary. We incidentally forgot that google got its name from the mispelling of "googol", which is the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros, indicating the search power of the engine.

And since we are there, the name recognition of yahoo is quite high, too. Who cares if it is actually the acronym for the long but always fun "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", although the official history of the company insists that its two founders, Filo and Yang, also appreciated the meaning of yahoo as "rough, unsophisticated, uncough".

Semiology rules, again!

Neutral networks, with a rock'n roll attitude

Pearl Jam has been venting its disappointment (to put it midly) that the ATT webcast blue room of its recent concert was censored.



ATT had silenced a few sentences in which the Pearl Jam expressed a negative opinion (to remain polite) on the current US President. See here for more information about what happened.
Since then, the concert has been entirely removed from the blue room.


Now, mind you, what is really interesting is that Pearl Jam made a theoretical point while criticizing AT&T's decision: they said that such involvement was against the principle of network neutrality that supposes the clear separation between content and medium on the internet. Highly debated principle as everything on the internet.

ATT originally defended its action by saying that they feared the band's speech would offend listeners, which is a line of defense used very effectively (and routinely) by TV networks.

Here is when it gets surprising: today, AT&T issued an apology on its blueroom website, apology to the fans and the band. I do not know how long the statement will be available here, so here is the statement. Enjoy!

Semiologists of the world, rejoice!

In a world of words, images, sounds and fury, symbols still mean something. Take the venerable red cross symbol, for instance.

The New York Times reports today that the Johnson & Johnson, the company, is suing the American Red Cross over what it considers to be unwelcome use of the symbol the non-for-profit organization and the corporation have shared since the end of the 19th century.


For a bit of legalese: According to the Times, Johnson & Johnson started using the red cross symbol in 1887, with a trademark.
In 1895, an agreement posited each organization's right to use the symbol: Johnson & Johnson got what its current lawyers consider to be the exclusive trademark rights for any pharmaceutical goods, while the American Red Cross could use the symbol for its disaster relief efforts.


Fast-forward to 2007: Johnson & Johnson sues the American Red Cross for using the symbol on licensed products it sells, such as first aid kits. Mr Everson, the American Red Cross' lawyer hopes that "the courts and Congress will not allow Johnson & Johnson to bully the American Red Cross.”

Scoop or smoke?

For those who remember, I talked here about the Fake Steve Jobs, when mentioning identity manipulation, sock puppets, and other funny stuff that happens with self-presentation online.

Now it is official, apparently the New York Times had the scoop: the Fake Steve Jobs is actually Daniel Lyons, Senior Editor at Forbes magazine.

Reading the article, it is ironic to see that Brad Stone, the NYT writer, takes pain to explain the clever process the NYT used to unmask FSJ. Doesn't it sound like a "wink-wink" to the investigative skills of the innumerable bloggers who had tried, unsuccessful, to uncover his identity?

In any case, bloggers, here and there, have been wondering whether the NYT was tipped off or if the scoop was actually revenge of the journal against recent cruel assertions against it by the said blogger.

How to blog

The blogosphere is exploding.

Most bloggers blog for their immediate social circles, publishing pictures of their babies, discussing at great length of their favorite rock band, or rambling about what they did yesterday.

However, blogging is not a private activity and people get into trouble by blogging about things they ought not to.

Find some advice on "how NOT to get fired because of your blog" here.

Also, take a look here for a good discussion on what should (and should not) be disclosed in a blog.

Google's concerns

Google does not want to push too much behavioral targeting for its online ads, according to CIO Insight, invoking in particular concerns of privacy. As internet users, many would agree, and feel relieved.


Google representatives also consider that task-based information (i.e. the information provided by the user as she / he enters words to be searched by the search engine) provide the most useful information for advertisers than web browsing patterns. These patterns, Google representatives argue, are not necessarily reliable or relevant.


Google's stance is strong - and likely to be welcome by users (nice PR, as usual). However, given the dependence of Google on advertisement, such position is risky. It has probably generated much internal debate, and who knows if this righteous stance be abandoned in time?


Amazon for instance is the quintessential example of early use of behavioral pattern for marketing pursuits. Customers' privacy concerns have always been rampant, but they seem to have had little effects on the company's revenue growth.

Somebody said "Bubble"?

John Dvorak of PCMag foresees the end of the web 2.0 bubble. Some agree with his main argument while wondering when the crisis will really take place, but others dismiss the claim.

I am not sure about this. There clearly ia a lot of talk these days about web 2.0, too much talk (and this blog is guilty as charged). However, social networking applications have not yet pervaded all business, the way e-commerce was doing in the mid- to late 1990's. Also, today's successful start-ups do not go public. They are being acquired by bigger companies. Cases in point: Google's appetite and the so-far unuccessful seduction danse of many Facebook suitors.

Navigating the blogging waters

The download squad just discovered it: Pirates infest the ever expanding blogging ocean.

By pirates, they mean bloggers who merely cut and paste information previously onto another blog and pretent the writing is their own.

In other words, bloggers plagiarize other bloggers.

Information management has become a much more complicated affair in the recent history of the Internet. On the one hand, information is at one's fingertips. I can barely remember the ante-diluvian time where one had to start finding information from the scratches of books: today, books are the last ---- but ever so important --- resort to finding information. On the other hand, it is also much easier and tempting to copy information.





Questions of authorship, copyright, and intellectual honesty pose real dilemmas, but let's all attempt to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.



(Thanks, Mr Uderzo).