General

Posting on the Internet – a User Story

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Just in case you have ever thought about it (or never have), in cyberspace everyone sees what you type, eventually. The other day I quickly subscribed to a newsgroup about Mercedes Benz classic cars (I was doing some car research – even IT people can like cars – but I suspect I’ll never get to own the car). About a week later, casually typing my name into Yahoo (as you do) suddenly brought up my membership of this group. I do this occasionally because the spelling of “Micheal” is unique and therefore actually returns entires relating just to me, rather than, say, if my name was John Smith – it’s good to know who has your details.

In this instance, I had only signed up very quickly to read about the great and wondrous things that can happen with a Mercedes Benz 450SLC (in case you’re wondering, they come in two categories: (a) expensive; and (b) marriage-threatening). It took about thirty seconds to “subscribe to our site” and now that site has my details cached in Yahoo and it will probably be there for ages yet. I’m just glad it wasn’t a support group for strange and debilitating infectious diseases that you can catch from unsanitary telephones.

But – I should have already learned my lesson, as the same search on Google shows an entry that I’m probably not too happy about! I was on a mailing list some time ago (like, 1996!) and responded to an email (foolishly using my real name). That mailing list diligently archives EVERY email ever sent to it, and accordingly Google has now cached it and it will be there forever now – it’s unlikely I can get it taken down.

As an exercise for the reader, see if you can pick up the page I’m not happy about from the link above.

So – a salient lesson in being careful on the internet.

(Postscript: I had forgotten the “findoz” website that is returned by this search – this is NOT the mailing list to which I was subscribed, I have no idea how my professional profile manages to get mixed up with “hard core DVDs” on the findoz website, and I have a feeling there’s another salient lesson there somewhere!).

SME’s and e-Business

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Dr Kate Andrews suggested I take a look at the online business journal “Ivey Business Journal”. This is the online version of a 70-year old journal.

I note that the May/June 2005 edition carries an article “The Strategic Management Process In E-Business“. This article provides several case studies from a scientific study of SME’s that have adopted e-business, and those strategies that SME’s can use to be effective with e-business.

VOIP Is Maturing

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Voice Over IP Solutions seem to be maturing. This article from Technology & Business at ZDNet reviews some handsets providing VOIP capability, and almost gets one thinking about such things. Unless you have a real need, I am not convinced that the technology is mature enough just yet to recommend wholesale adoption by clients, although for clients with specific requirements and expertise it may be a good solution.

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned from Wikipedia

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If ever there is a topic you need to know about, the web’s free encyclopaedia will likely have the answer for you: en.wikipedia.com

If you read up on how Wikipedia works, it seems anarchistic, it seems strange, and it seems somehow machiavellian in the extreme, but there is no doubt that it works. With all those authors contributing and, hopefully, not making stuff up, the peer review process means that it covers Fox Terriers to Robots with equal aplomb. However, when it is confronted with a contentious topic, it can all get a bit out of hand – as the Terri Schiavo entry’s history shows.

SourceForge By The Numbers

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At the presentation on Tuesday night (on the commercial issues of Open Source software) I was asked if it was possible to manipulate the Sourceforge rankings. Unfortunately the website was mostly down at the time, so it wasn’t possible to answer immediately.

However, I have taken a quick look tonight and note that the Sourceforge.net rankings are able to be manipulated if one wanted to do so, as the formula is quite clear. However, as Sourceforge.net notes, those statistics are not the only way by which a project should be assessed. The ranking statistics are a good indicator of the project’s activity level rather than the quality of that activity.

The point should be made that the incentive of an project author to manipulate the rankings process is fairly low given that, in general, the potential monetary gain would be fairly minimal.