Backspin: Owning your own data There's a lot of data out there about you, but you hardly "own" most of it. What would it mean if you did own it and why does no one care yet? More Gearhead and Backspin: Aardvark solves my Gmail problem Mark Gibbs suddenly found that with Firefox on his Mac he couldn't log in to Gmail and there was no obvious reason. After asking his friends he tried asking strangers by using Aardvark, a social search service. Surprise of surprises; he got an answer! Becoming green or just greenish? Becoming an environmentally responsible organization isn't easy particularly in IT. It requires seeing the bigger picture and treating effort of becoming green as a comprehensive, strategic issue. So far, not many organizations are doing anything like that. Keeping IT honest Just over a week ago Forrester Research posted a blog item titled "Sponsored Conversations: When it's OK to pay bloggers to post." Generating regexes and Gmail filters Mark Gibbs is very impressed with a service that generates code for regular expressions and he has found that Gmail now supports importing and exporting filters. His happiness knows no bounds. Search tools: hardware, an add-on and a service Gibbs outlines a product awaiting test that searches and captures television programs, raves about a browser search enhancement plug-in he can’t live without, and is quite impressed by a service to help you identify errors. To Tweet or not to Tweet, that's not an option I'm writing this column for one simple reason: Once I get it written then the next time someone says to me "I don't get Twitter, it seems kinda stoopid to me. What is it all about?" I can direct them to this polemic and save my breath. Computers and five kinds of insanity I wrote last week about New Zealand's insane copyright legislation that would make people accused of content piracy guilty until proven innocent. Over the last few days I've been marveling at how that seems to be consistent with the general level of insanity that surrounds the digital world at present. Wrapping up TiddlyWiki The excitement is coming to an end...Mark Gibbs has covered TiddlyWiki up one side and down the other and is still amazed with the application. New Zealand gets insane copyright law A law has just been passed in New Zealand that allows for alleged online copyright infringers to have their Internet access cut off before being proved guilty. TiddlyWiki macros and plugins Continuing with his exploration of TiddlyWiki wiki technology, Mark Gibbs looks at the system's macros and plugins that modify and extend the how and what the software can do. IT's glass - full, empty or too big? In times of economic chaos and budget cuts you need to check your perspective. You know the old saw: A pessimist sees the glass as half empty; the optimist sees it as half full. These are both wrong ways of looking at the problem. The realist's perspective, the right way, recognizes that when there's space above the contents the glass is simply too big. Exploring TiddlyWiki Mark Gibbs discusses some reader feedback on TiddlyWiki and then starts to break down the TiddlyWiki system. Will the excitement never end? Fixing the privacy joke The whole idea of privacy has become a joke. On one hand we have consumers who will give away their personal details to random Web sites (as well as to Mrs. Sikiratu Seki Adam, "a widow to Late Saheed Baba Adams") at the drop of a virtual hat, and on the other we have businesses losing personally identifiable information and transaction data with wild abandon … yes, I'm talking about you Heartland Payment Systems. (Heartland lost data on more than 100 million transactions although it is hardly alone — check out the data loss database at the Open Security Foundation). April giveaways galore Cisco Subnet and Microsoft Subnet are giving away training courses from Global Knowledge, valued at $2,995 and $3,495, and have copies of three hot books up for grabs: CCVP CIPT2 Quick Reference by Anthony Sequeira, Microsoft Voice Unified Communications by Joe Schurman and Microsoft Office 2007 On Demand by Steve Johnson. Deadline for entries April 30. Network World on Twitter Get our tweets and stay plugged in to networking news. |
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