The challenge with a free file sharing program is that exploding server costs can and do drive organizations out of business. BitTorrent plans to avoid this kind of fate by building out its own P2P-powered personal cloud storage system. The idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.

BitTorrent Inc. launched a personal file sharing application called Share Thursday that aims to give users an alternative to paid cloud storage companies and media sharing over social networks. Share makes it possible to transfer files without any size limits to an unlimited number of personal contacts. Files are cached in the cloud, so users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.

On Wednesday, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem told me the company is relying on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to provide this kind of caching infrastructure. Files are taken off the cloud as soon as they are sufficiently shared by peers. The app will initially be Windows-only, but Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same kind of personal file sharing functionality. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will also offer Share functionality.

BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing

This is emergent thinking. The power of the network hive. Free file sharing by using under-utilized resources is brilliant. Further, BitTorrent is leveraging file sharing program code that is proven, efficient and dependable. The challenge for torrent technology is achieving the ease of use that programs like Dropbox demonstrate for their users, although their inherent advantage will be free volume.

Conference on Internet freedom

Ms. Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech on Internet freedom:

But when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us. What we do today to preserve fundamental freedoms online will have a profound effect on the next generation of users. More than two billion people are now connected to the internet, but in the next 20 years, that number will more than double. And we are quickly approaching the day when more than a billion people are using the internet in repressive countries. The pledges we make and the actions we take today can help us determine whether that number grows or shrinks, or whether the meaning of being on the internet is totally distorted.

Delivering on internet freedom requires cooperative actions, and we have to foster a global conversation based on shared principles and with the right partners to navigate the practical challenges of maintaining an internet that is open and free while also interoperable, secure, and reliable. Now, this enterprise isn’t a matter of negotiating a single document and calling the job done. It requires an ongoing effort to reckon with the new reality that we live in, in a digital world, and doing so in a way that maximizes its promise.

…So right now, in various international forums, some countries are working to change how the internet is governed. They want to replace the current multi-stakeholder approach, which includes governments, the private sector, and citizens, and supports the free flow of information, in a single global network. In its place, they aim to impose a system cemented in a global code that expands control over internet resources, institutions, and content, and centralizes that control in the hands of governments.

Conference on Internet Freedom

American practice

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that’s been in the making for over a year, and which we’re exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year — with the only difference being that, rather than “a printing press” and a “magazine,” the story involved “a domain” and a “blog.”

…In fact, as the details came out, it became clear that ICE and the Justice Department were in way over their heads. ICE’s “investigation” was done by a technically inept recent college grad, who didn’t even seem to understand the basics of the technology. But it didn’t stop him from going to a judge and asking for a site to be completely censored with no due process.

The Dajaz1 case became particularly interesting to us, after we saw evidence showing that the songs that ICE used in its affidavit as “evidence” of criminal copyright infringement were songs sent by representatives of the copyright holder with the request that the site publicize the works — in one case, even coming from a VP at a major music label.

Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details… | Techdirt

In fact several domain owners have had their sites confiscated without access to court order extensions which were ‘filed under seal’ and could not be released, even in redacted form. Many of these stories look like imperial seizure, improper and illegal censorship, followed by denial of due process and unnecessary secrecy.

SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act

SOPA seems to be an attempt to prevent online piracy as increasing numbers of sites download entertainment industry and media content without their permission. We suspect the newspaper industry is motivated given the erosion of their business model. Especially since pay walls and increasing hype and snark levels have not worked; if anything, they have hastened their decline. But SOPA has jumped the shark:

What the bill can’t do is block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important because it means this bill can’t do much to stop downloaders of pirated content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and many more. If it’s possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so troubling.

All About SOPA, the Bill That Wants to Cripple Your Internet

Read a more detailed overview at SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The law as written is frightfully broad. It envisions that Internet providers will block access to sites, search engines to remove links, payment intermediaries to cut off financial support, and Internet advertising companies to cease placing advertisements. Internet companies, civil society groups, law professors and others have responded with an avalanche of repudiation. And the sweeping definitions guarantee jurisdictional implications as well.

Now we face a constitutive choice with the Internet—a choice between closed networks where the network operators control the user experience and open networks that are controlled by end users.

– FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, Statement at Stanford’s Hearing on Broadband Network Management Practices

Copyright and patent issues

Technology is quickly altering or destroying business models. Significantly altering the freedom and unregulated Internet is not the answer.

But at the very foundation of these issues must be technology’s growing conflict with our current definitions of copyright and patent law. Sooner or later, we will actually need to address that conflict again. It is one thing if a Youtube video of a girl singing “Stairway to Heaven” is technically illegal. Or a mash-up of same song is also unacceptable. But we have gone far beyond that; patent law now acts as a barrier to entry. We would all benefit from a more open discussion on the topic, free from political and special interest pressure.

We might begin with a more operative definition of ‘copy’ as well as a distinction between amateur and professional use. But that is only the beginning if we want to avoid making most users criminals in the digital age.

And as for a UN or ‘world summit’ solution well, for anyone with a respect for complexity, the answer to that is clear.

The concept of the Internet as a commons is a popular one. What is even more surprising is that the success of open source projects combined with the commons perception has lead to many heated debates in surprising places about whether those structures are spelling the end of free markets.

Definition of Commons

Following is the popular dictionary definition of ‘commons’ which pertains:

“Belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more or all in question: common property; common interests. Examples include pasture land, central park, or water system.”

Harvesting whales on a Japanese trawler

One can see why at first blush the Internet as a commons seems an apt analogy; an almost free Internet coupled with a general disdain for intellectual rights combines to propagate the  general perception that we are all sharing ideas in a veritable garden of socialist Eden.

Even a superficial understanding of open source software environments seems to buttress the concept.  It does not help that the nature of competition has for decades been pilloried and misconstrued.  But the concept is foundationally incorrect. The Internet is not a commons. In fact it is the opposite; a celebration of free markets. Here’s why.

Commons is inherently limited and exhaustible

A Commons by definition is a defined and limited resource that must be shared. To review the famous example of the commons: it is a pasture capable of sustaining only 100 cattle.  If more than 100 cattle graze the commons, the 100 cows never reach their full potential either in size or reproduction capability since none of them receive optimal nutrition.  If four farmers share the commons, each farmer is theoretically allowed 25 cattle.  But that is not what happens. Each farmer cheats. He grazes as many cattle as he can without getting caught.  Yields for all farmers decrease over time because it is over used.

Fishing grounds around the world are now depleted because of the inherent difficulty in policing the commons.  No one abides by their share.  The rewards for cheating outweigh the often petty punishments of playing by the rules, as the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma demonstrates.

We build rather than share the Internet

But as we can see, the commons is not an apt analogy for the Internet.  It is not a limited resource that must be shared. On the contrary, it is a public or private forum where each individual is encouraged to contribute in whatever manner they wish; some collaboratively, some individually.  The more contributions the better; doing so makes us all richer.  In no way do more ‘farmers’ threaten communal health. We do not share the Internet, we build it.

And that each person is free to choose their collaboration partners should not obscure our ideas of how teams and firms and networks depend on sharing ideas in order to create new ones.  Often it is external influences, not formally examined nearly enough in traditional firms, that inspire our innovations and change industries.

Unnecessary confusion caused by open source and copyright

In this regard, the Internet is one of the purest forms of free markets in existence. It is a celebration of individual and team effort and creativity. It has so far resisted virtually all government regulation. No physical geography or industry can boast of such freedom in any sense. Every Internet contributor is much closer to the man with 2 acres and a mule amidst a vast open frontier than a farmer shackled by common law regarding land use.

Note also that some of the most successful web firms have ensured that when new entrepreneurs decide to plant their own personal stake in the Internet, their acreage and mule are free of charge.

That some individuals freely collaborate or develop free resources, is neither surprising nor a threat to free markets.  In fact it is a refreshing celebration of the centuries old tradition of markets bound only by creativity and motive since our cultures began throwing off the vestiges of serfdom centuries ago.  Many theorists suggest we would all be richer if copyrights were not hampering free markets.

Now, as then, some of the most foundational structures of our society and economy were built on the precepts of donation, and free access, often financed by the fruits of market activity.  The Internet is a free market where limited only by imagination.  That idea used to define markets.  Only regulation and taxes can alter that tradition.

Lest readers interpret advice against affecting software source code as naive or trite, consider that Internet Explorer 6 market share still hovers around 13% world wide.  That market share is predominantly due to corporate IT departments still clinging to 10 year old technology that is buggy, slow, and most importantly, an incontrovertible security hole.

The bug in the machine

IE6 has glaring CSS issues and security holes.  There’s only one reason beyond laziness that corporate offices do not upgrade in the face of leaving their businesses open to hackers and covering the open door with costly virus software that exacts fantastic tolls on hardware.  It is hard coded into their infrastructure and they can not stomach the upgrade costs the mistake is going to cost them.

Unfortunately, they are paying in hardware usage and virus overhead anyway.  Security software is notoriously greedy on hardware and memory usage.  And most of it is directed at IE6 viruses.

Digg, Google and others withdraw support of IE6

It was IE6 that allowed hackers to infiltrate Google and at least a dozen other companies in the latest large cyber attack.  Soon after, Google announced it would no longer support IE6, and began phasing out its exposure to the browser in all their products, including their document suite and Gmail.

If you’ve wondered why Microsoft counsels and advertises upgrades to IE8 so close to their introduction of IE9, wonder no longer.  Their support of IE6 is no doubt wearing thin, having long ago lapsed into a money loser.  Besides, it hurts their reputation, especially when the largest web company announces they are fed up.

Legal recourse to preventable virus attacks

We suspect the heaviest culprits other than legacy in-house systems and VB runtimes (most IE6 requirements are undoubtedly due to in-house IT departments) are large vendors like Oracle, tying their customers to old browser shells because their software products have ignored foundational programming precepts.  If the security of your company websites is being held hostage by third party programming, we suggest you have a chat with the vendor.

They might just be interested in shouldering your security or upgrade costs given the exposure of their programming.  There is at least an argument to be made that they have voided their contracts by ignoring prudent and expected behavior.  Legal departments might consider including explicit penalties for hard coding hardware and software technologies.  There really is rarely any excuse for it, and there hasn’t been for decades.

Just as frighteningly, if you’ve ever been on the wrong end of an unjustified bank or other financial institution transaction and suffered for it while they decided the issue was theirs, you may be motivated to ask them if they are still using IE6.  Of course they are liable if their systems are hacked.  But it is your life, your cash and securities, and your identity that will be affected while they determine where the fault lies.  Make no mistake.

Reduce your exposure as a customer

It is long past time that software vendors be asked to shoulder the full cost of their fiduciary duties.  The cost of preventable cyber attacks is beyond all reason, and measured in the billions of dollars per year.  Only one-fifth of the IT execs surveyed in at least one poll believe their systems are currently secure. In that same poll, concern for loss of customer personal information ranks third behind their own cash and reputation losses.  Of course, company losses are just passed on to the consumer anyway in higher prices.  But there is one simple way to rectify your exposure.  After all, you are the customer.

References

Photo courtesy Ines at Stock.xchng

Surgient is a leading driver of cloud and data center solutions, with a customer list that includes IBM, Microsoft, HP and SAP. Their flagship product allows companies to develop their own private cloud space in less than a month.

For more information, see the Surgient video of their presentation given at Cloud Expo East.

Note: This website is not affiliated with Surgient in any way.

Aims for 40% cost reductions in the design, deployment and management of e-service blends

As governments and businesses across Europe increasingly rely on information and e-services from a myriad of industries and sectors — from transportation, energy and water, to housing and health care — there is a growing desire among them to have the ability to combine the core competencies their proprietary systems offer with core competencies of other organizations, to achieve greater results that transfer into enhanced, smarter, more cost-effective customer services.

“Today, companies need to invest a considerable amount of time, expertise, and maintenance to develop ad hoc proprietary systems that coordinate these myriad e-services,” explained Professor Guiseppe De Giacomo, University of Rome La Sapienza. “More often than not, these systems are application specific and do not have the flexibility to support variations that stem from different geographical regions or shifts in the marketplace, and are not able to scale up as the business grows.”

Source: IBM and European Union Join to Develop New Collaborative e-Business Model Extending Open Source and Cloud Technologies

The idea is to provide a cloud hosted hub based on ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) which can combine unique service offerings and more effectively hand-off processes and data.  After all, the government manages upwards of 40% of the economy (and growing) in many European countries.  This development gives small business a better chance to participate.

The application will push cloud computing technology by enabling and operating an open source semantic language entirely within the cloud.  The benefits are rather large for business – pay for usage without up front capital costs along with the natural scalability of cloud technology – and provide integrative services across a broad spectrum of industries and business providers.

In an era where even the vast ocean of government data is difficult to obtain for potentially interested businesses, this is an interesting development to say the least.  Readers of this website will intuit the author’s great respect for IBM. Their ability to restructure and thrive after having so drastically bungled their strategy in personal computing technology, gifting their own future to Microsoft and Intel, is one of the storied turnarounds in the modern age.  It is decades later, and they have long ago successfully moved on.

I’ve talked about Zotero in another post on Bookmarks, and why this one add-on or plug-in alone has forced me to migrate from Internet Explorer to Firefox, since it is not available on Explorer.  It deserves its own post.  I believe Zotero is the most useful plug-in on personal computers, for anyone who is an avid reader and especially for researchers.  Here’s why.

As a simple bookmark plug-in, it has no peers.  Here’s the functionality:

• Remotely backs up and syncs your library.  Other bookmark systems do this is as well, but most hog memory.  The benefits of remote backup are mainly two; safeguarding computer crashes and allowing access to bookmarks from any remote computer.
• Store PDFs, images, and web pages.  Have you ever bookmarked a page that disappears?  Have you ever wished you had a copy of the web page?  Don’t worry about it any longer.  And here’s a nifty little add-on as well; it’s called PDF Download.  It not only helps you manage PDF documents, it will convert web pages into PDF’s for storage and later access.  Which of course Zotero does with aplomb.
• Take rich-text notes in any language.  Did you ever want to add a few notes to your bookmarks, so that you didn’t lose your train of thought?  I did.
• Wide variety of import/export options.  Just to ensure your data is more accessible.  My advice is to stay away from any repository of information, including a blog or a database, that can not be downloaded or converted to other formats.  Who knows what you might want to do with your data someday?  Don’t be trapped.
• Free, open source, and extensible.  Enough said.
• Collaborate with group libraries.  If you’re interested in collaboration, you’ve got it.  You can share your bookmarks with specific people, or everyone.  You can track other people’s bookmarks, if they allow it.
• Organize with collections and tags.  Organize your bookmarks in any manner you wish.  The interface is awesome.
• Access your library from anywhere.  As mentioned before, since it automatically performs remote backups, you can access them anywhere.
• Automatically grab metadata for PDFs.
• Instantly search your PDFs and notes.  The text in your notes, and PDFs is automatically indexed and searchable.   Ultimately this capability becomes a part of a killer application.  Have you ever lost a bookmark and can’t even find the tag?  Thought so.
• Advanced search and data mining tools.  This capability is the umbrella under which all the other capabilities mesh.  Think library, rather than bookmarks.
• Interface available in over 30 languages.

For any serious reader, Zotero is a godsend.  It’s a natural corollary to RSS readers.  Did I mention that it can work in concert with RSS readers?  Just get this Better GReader add-on.  Don’t you love emergence?

For the researcher or writer though, there is more functionality:

• One click capture.  Zotero captures the metadata or bibliography (Title, author, publication, copyright, etc.) on an article or book in one click on thousands of websites.  Or you can manually enter the information yourself.
• Cite from within Word and OpenOffice.  Did you ever wish you had your library on-line so you could cite from it as you write?  I did.  Or you can drag and drop citations into any software, including blogs, that you can type.
• Use thousands of bibliographic styles.  Did you ever wish you could change from one bibliographic style to another, depending on usage?  I did.
• Remote access to online libraries.  If you are a registered member to professional journals or university libraries, most of them allow online viewing to many of their resources.  Zotero will allow you to enter their resolver and your password, so you can access them from home.  And of course it will add the citation for you as well.  Or would you rather go to the library?

Watch this short video:

What do you want for nothing?  Zotero is one of the most beautifully written, useful, non-intrusive, software modules available on the Internet.  I can’t imagine being on the Internet without it.  So as Gandalf said, “Run you fools.”  Run get Zotero.

To Program or not to Program: that is the Question

Stenographer using new dictaphone technology, LOC on flickr

Ahhh, the allure of programming. The sensual attraction of creating unique value and competitive advantage in a hard fought industry. It is an almost universal attraction. But before your IT department sits down to program, all of management must very honestly answer these questions:

1. Do we have the expertise to do this?
2. Are we re-inventing the wheel?
3. How much of our resources are we willing to divert from our core business?

Remember that less than 40% of IT projects meet their ROI and time goals. This is the elephant in the room of all technology discussions. If the organization is not absolutely expert at design, development and execution, success is further threatened.  Leave IT projects to established experts, forgo egos and listen to them. On very large projects, consider employing a separate firm, even if it is only one or two people, whose sole purpose is to guide change and implementation.

Also remember that authoring enterprise software puts you in competition with every software house in the world. Like the Terminator, that is all they do.  It is an unfortunate and overwhelming trend that organizations become subsumed with software development at the expense of managing their business. Given the terrifying failure rate, it is better to build additional management resource costs into the design. The choice is not to save money; it is whether the project will ever succeed.

Also consider that there is more than one way to skin the cat.  And of course one never touches the source code of others.  There are many methods to add unique value to third party software. Changing the source is not one of them. Hardwiring code kills applications and costs exorbitant upgrade sums in the long run.  But it is still an alarmingly common practice.

Conclusions to software series

The rate of change of both macro and micro variables is increasing. That means business strategies are in a constant flux, and IT, as one of its most important enablers, must find new ways to integrate and nimbly adjust.

IT Metrics which begin with strategic alignment of business projects, ideally buttressed with embedded Associates, begins to guarantee an integrated approach to IT from top to bottom.  These systemic and reporting changes reduce the formal collaboration burden and increase integration by placing IT in a more actively involved front line position where they belong.

Integrating IT portfolios with business projects transforms them from a cost center to an added value team member. The question of being involved and utilized or not has been totally subsumed. Now we’re rockin’.

Articles in this Series

Manage IT Costs and Culture

Alternatives to Address Departmental Inefficiency

Metrics to Manage Informational Technology

Should Your Organization Program Enterprise Software

IT projects are essentially components of strategic Business initiatives that have paybacks.  Use the Business portfolio and its ROI to guide IT.  Develop 4 IT scorecards that support and add detail to the portfolio.

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Spending

IT Server banks

IT spend is alluringly tempted by change, new innovations, ad hoc queries, and in general the chirping babies syndrome. It is also common to find IT spend a jumbled unmanaged mass of projects ungovernable by the IT department for the simple reason that upper management has vetoed their objections in favor of a myriad of pet projects.

On the other side of the coin, organizations determined to bring out of control departments under rein can find themselves starving important and valid projects. More than one company has flourished after escaping a corporate umbrella starving them of the investment needed to flourish.

But if ad hoc and total spend and its variations are not recipes for successful IT management, what is?

Force IT Dollar Alignment

The first mistake is viewing IT as another administrative function like Finance or Accounting. It is not. It is an enabler or tool.

Align IT budgets with key strategic objectives, ongoing and new. Scale all initiatives according to the size of the strategy. View all IT initiatives as components of the larger business initiative.

Of course all business initiatives have a payback. If there is no payback, there is no project. Payback demands measurement, either in increased sales, profits, channel development, etc. Mandatory and discretionary IT budgets can then be drawn and exercised and tracked within the prism of the organization’s strategies. The project portfolio is prioritized and trimmed according to ROI.

With these changes in place, we are now managing total IT cost by project rather in total. As long as the IT portfolio is returning ROI without threatening the organism’s cash flow, why worry?

Notice the portfolio, in exacting ROI, is not technically composed of IT projects as traditionally envisaged. It is a business proposition with an IT component. Instituted well, this portfolio can change the IT culture to view all activities within an added value paradigm.

Cardinal rule: Exercise the idea of sunk cost.

Measure Maintenance vs. New

Divide the portfolio above into two sections; maintenance and new. The distinction is more important than total spending.

As with any bureaucracy, maintenance of existent functionality has an almost irresistibly seductive way of consuming 100% of resources. If maintenance gets over 60% in today’s changing world, consider it a red light calling for action. Combining the two points above, you now have the cohesive report that leads you to decision making.

Cardinal rule: IT departments, like any support function, will never come back into line or develop ‘religion’ on their own.

The Whips and Scorns of Measurement

IT departments are often adept at producing any number of metrics. The issue is that they are an ocean apart from business management. Server uptime, delivery response, availability, or problem resolution time delivers nothing in the way of actionable data. The problem is that these are measurements describing service delivery, not business value.

Compounding issues include metrics written in a language or jargon impossible for others to understand, or in isolation of the business initiatives they support.

Customer Scorecard

Assuming the organization already has instituted the business ROI portfolio as described above, minimizing at least some measurement frustrations, what other measurements are needed?

We need measurements about the customer. With all projects, develop measurable service agreements (just like the professionals do) with internal and external customers as part of the development of the project. Then when the project is completed and implemented, insist on using them. Here are some guidelines and signposts:

1. End of period processes that require manual intervention should be viewed with extreme prejudice. Something is fundamentally wrong. It is not only dangerous to have people manually intervening in product and accounting files at the end of periods; it threatens security, viability and in some cases may contravene the law. Better yet, why are there period end processes anymore? If you need an honest answer, ask an external consultant to give their honest opinion.
2. Measure satisfaction.
3. Defer lagging indicators in preference to leading indicators. As an example, it is popular practice for help desks to measure customer satisfaction. It is more informative to link customer satisfaction with the percentage of successful resolutions of segmented problems.
4. Measure customer involvement along the project life cycle encouraging self-management and implementation.

Operational Scorecard

This is the area IT innately understands and often shines. The operational mission is to describe the effective delivery of IT. Here are some guidelines:

1. Software development timeliness and efficiency.
2. Maintenance operational efficiency.
   1. Response times.
   2. Hardware and network availability.
   3. Issue resolution descriptions.

Planning Scorecard

IT especially requires investment in future technologies and the added value they can bring. The mission is to remain abreast of developing technologies in an environment of innovation. Planning scorecards should include education and emerging technology investigation with formal reviews which summarize practical potential uses of new technology and estimated benefits. These papers can be disseminated through the organization for awareness and inspiration.

Insert Goals as a Management Tool

Effective measurement a priori has beneficial effects on groups and cultures. Almost anything that communicates and clarifies common direction is an aid. The golden rule is that if the organization wonders if they are communicating enough, they probably are not.

But measurement is truly effective as a management tool if it includes targets or budgets for improvement. Automated scorecards with improvement goals will inevitably be used daily, often by the entire organization.

Targets or goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely).

Articles in this Series

Manage IT Costs and Culture

Alternatives to Address Departmental Inefficiency

Metrics to Manage Informational Technology

Should Your Organization Program Enterprise Software

What bookmarks are you using?

I do a heck of a lot of research, and I’m also highly inquisitive, and the Favorites button just doesn’t do a good job after the first couple thousand bookmarks.

And what if you use more than one computer? Good lord.

The on-line bookmark choices are never ending. It’s like trying to find a decent mutual fund in most cases; I’d almost rather put a stick in my eye. Social bookmarking? What’s that? I want a private place to keep and comment on my stuff. It’s not a social game to help me find friends. Maybe I’m missing something. I’m not sure I understand Digg at all, especially since there seems to be an active sub-group whose politics are just left of Lenin.

And don’t ask me to download all kinds of widgets and menus and otherwise clutter my computer with more overhead. Windows is mind numbingly memory intensive and unstable as it is. And if Explorer is quite fast, it doesn’t really play well with others. Firefox has the benefit of being more open, with an impressive cadre of entrepreneurs adding useful add-ons, but it has a notorious way of clogging up and slowing down over time. I’m sure if the authors knew how to fix that, they would. The point is that I carefully guard my browser because they both have mysterious weaknesses which threaten my hardware investment and lessen my vast exuberance for reading about golf swings at 2:00am in the morning. My defensive tactic is to ensure any additional programs are non-intrusive and don’t bring a lot of baggage with them, like adding services to my kernel (sometimes I can’t avoid it), and otherwise giving me the feeling that I’m now driving down the Internet super highway in a huge 40 foot tractor trailer rather than the sports car I want to be driving. Incidentally, speed, or more accurately the lack of it, kills usage of any website, even Google.

Social Bookmarks and Back-up

I like Diigo, but wow can it ever get slow. I really like del.icio.us, and the extensive array of choices I have there, especially since it lets me choose whether my entries are private or public, and allows both tagging and comments. There again, the issue is how slow it can be. It often seems like I am waiting more than I am working. Lately I’ve been using Diigo just because of their useful bookmarklet, and telling Diigo to forward them to del.ico.us as well. time to time, I like how both search public data. Xmarks will synch or replace your Firefox bookmarks on a remote server, and so I use that for back-up.

There’s nothing worse than losing your hard drive or having to re-install Windows because of virus problems, and losing all your bookmarks. Hey, it’s going to happen some day. And I realize given human nature that no one is going to start backing up their bookmarks, or at least emailing the file to an on-line email address just because I warn you of the consequences of losing them altogether, but believe me, you never want to go through that more than once. If you use Explorer, you can always download Firefox and import Explorer bookmarks just to get them on a remote server. Xmarks’ biggest issue is that it slows my computer down when I’m surfing the web, so usually I just deactivate the plug-in. About once a week I reactivate it and replace all my bookmarks there.

Zotero and Connotea

I experimented with Connotea. Wow, it’s a great site. Now there’s some folks that are thinking.

But it really was discovering Zotero that moved me away from Explorer and made me a full time Firefox user. That’s how useful it is. As you browse the web it allows you to store articles and interesting subject matter. Then it generates bibliographies or footnotes in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word in any format you choose and automatically synchronizes your database with their remote server. That capability makes your library of citations available for every paper or book you write anywhere there is a computer on-line! It will even store a picture of the website for posterity, in case the referring site goes down.

It’s final awesome capability takes the cake. Members of on-line journal databases (like JSTOR) or university libraries with remote access to on-line articles and books can place the resolver in Zotero and it will search the databases for you and then place the citation in your database! Now that’s what I call living in clover.

Over at You’re It, they’ve compiled a great article and this graphic on the phenomenon of tagging. Great article folks.