internet

Forums are often full of total newbies trying to find out, and only slightly-less-newbies answering their questions. I know blogs like The IT SKeptic are nearly as dangerous for their self-appointed-expert status, but at least you have Google page-rank as some indicator of how others view the site. On a forum it is hard to evaluate what a poster knows unless you already know the answer to the question. Look at this example

Wired magazine seems to think the internet heralds a new socialism. This silliness stems from the same hypocricy and self-delusion that has middle class kids sitting in a house someone else built wearing clothes someone else cast off and lusting after DVDs and cell phones, while pretending to plot the downfall of Western capitalism. The internet is perhaps the greatest creation of capitalism. It is only through the surpluses generated by its money engine and the freedom generated by its armies that twaddle such as this even gets written and read.

Apparently the IT job market is a great generator of traffic. So much so that any story will do. Up one day, down the next.

Google AdWords/AdSense is a fascinating thing. Internet advertising may be the most revolutionary thing ever to happen to small business marketing (or big business for that matter). The sensitivity and feedback are extraordinary for testing and refining marketing messages. (So why do vendors still do so badly?).

The point of this ramble is that right now someone is paying over five bucks a click for the "itSMF" keyword.

I found a fascinating article from the ever-interesting Nicholas Carr (remember "IT Doesn't Matter"?) on how Google is making us stupid.

This may not come as a surprise to you, but it does to me. I - along with The ITIL Imp - was under the misapprehension that the ITIL Live Portal was going to be free. Nope.

It occured to me today that defending your digital IP is like having a puppy [warning: yet another puppy analogy].

People demand online privacy as if it were some god-given right. Privacy is an abberation of recent history, a transitory phenomenon that is evaporating quickly in the hot light of technology. Privacy is dead - get over it.

These are ugly times for telcos, a topic I look forward to exploring a little more on this blog. Today's topic is VOIP and the anti-competitive behaviours that would logically induce in a telco. Let me share with you a recent email from my broadband ISP. First some background. My ISP is a telco, the big dominant telco. They also provide me phone lines. Actually they try to pretend they don’t, by branding the ISP arm as an excitingly named subsidiary, but it is a pointless sham really when it all comes on one convenient monthly bill.