Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

The weekend is always a great time to collect some cool links from around the Web and share them with my readers. After all, what’s a Honeypot without some Honey. So without any further ado:

• Yotel: Hotel chain in a couple of European airports where you can hire a cabin for as little as 4 hours. What an amazing concept.
• Is your personal blog working for or against you? A must read for all bloggers.
• Letter writing is dead. Just join Facebook: The new way to keep in touch with old friends.
• Widgenie: Create your own widget to share your data.
• A 2.5 year old grievance: Blogger gets flame-grilled some something she posted over 2 years ago!
• Visual Trace Route: Find out where websites are in the world
• Firebug Power user demo: Ohh .. great stuff
• Home Pub: Here’s a great Xmas present. Get someone their very own pub.
• Plug into Now: Massive mashup with widgets from all over the Internet
• My mate Pete leaves Izea: He’ll be missed, but family comes first

There should be plenty to keep you distracted when you read this on Monday morning.

Just wanted to let my Manx readers about the BCS Christmas Quiz which is happening next Tuesday. Here are the details:

Our next event is the BCS Christmas Quiz. We have had this for the last few years and it has proven to be a great success for our members. It’s a great opportunity to test your knowledge, network with other BCS members, have a few drinks and some nibbles (a buffet will be provided).

Come along, as part of your team of 4, or alone and we’ll form a team for you. The BCS Christmas Quiz will take place at the Prospect Pub in Douglas on Tuesday 2nd December 2008 at 18:00.

The event is also open to non-members but please contact Publicity to confirm you attendance.P rizes generously donated by WiManx and Central Software. More info here

I came across a great white paper entitled The Business Impact of Social Networking on AT&T’s website. Here’s the blurb:

Social networking fosters collective intelligence, collaborative work and support communities. Tools and behaviors from the consumer world are now making the transition to the corporate world, with diverse implications for changing the way businesses operate. This paper explores 10 opportunities presented by social networking, along with 10 associated challenges.

I found the predictions for the future particularly interesting. Some are intuitive, but some may not necessarily spring off the page at you. Here’s what the paper predicts organisations will do as a result of the proliferation of Social Networking:

• Corporations will change the way they communicate
• Corporations will change their vision
• Corporations will change their organisation
• Collective Intelligence and Customer Experience will lead Innovation
• Networking will be key to Employee Excellence
• Employee mobility will increase
• Corporations will adapt their Motivation and Career Path Systems
• IT/Telecoms Applications will mutate
• Corporate Adoption will happen at different speeds
• Social Networking may allow Increased Revenue

It’s a good read, particularly if you’re interested or work in social networking. I must say, I do find the subject fascinating and now that I’ve finished my MBA, if I do decide to further my studies, this might be an interesting avenue to explore.

I was thinking about technology on my way back from work this afternoon (I have a 15 minute walk which is a great time to think). I was thinking about the first PC I ever got which was an 8086 (with a Turbo button to boost the speed from 4.77 MHz all the way to 10 MHz), CGA graphics and 2 x 5 1/4 disk drives. Oh, and it also had 640k. Now that’s a far cry from the sort of hardware you can buy today.

Organisational computer has changed too. Back in the day it was all about shared mainframes, punched cards and monolithic computer systems. How the landscape has changed. Even hearing about new technologies, like cloud computing or automated OS recovery makes you marvel about how we got from there to here.

The question is .. what will the landscape look like in 10 years?

I was watching a debate this morning on a breakfast show and how some people don’t send Christmas cards any more. Instead there’s a movement to “donate money to charity instead” or “buy a goat in some African village”. While I think these are perfectly acceptable for some people, personally I feel that nothing really beats a Christmas card. It tells you that someone is thinking of you and have a really personal touch. I love receiving Christmas cards and that includes cards that companies I’ve worked with send me.

I like these Business Holiday Cards for example. There’s a huge selection of cards which you can personalise or tailor with your choice of greetings, colours and even your logo or custom artwork. If I was running a business and needed some business Christmas cards, this would be just the sort of service I would be after. They’re also a great company to be supporting because they support the Texas Children’s Pediatric Associates Project Medical Home by donating 4000 personalised cards to them.

Some people thing that receiving Christmas cards from companies can be a bit impersonal, but I like the fact that I’m remembered, especially when it’s a company where I have built up a great relationship with the staff who work there; good enough that they remember to send me a Christmas card. It’s amazing how little things can mean so much so many years later.

It’s interesting to see that YouTube has announced it’s move towards bringing a widescreen format to it’s website. Here’s the basic announcement:

We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

This is not the first time widescreen videos have been spotted on YouTube however it’s a definite shift in that this will be the default format and uploads will be expected to follow in this format, even if it’s not what user’s expect.

A number of sites are talking about how this is just one of a number of moves that YouTube is making to start making inroads into the living room. The availability of higher definition movies, full length movies and live streaming all point in this direction. Many items we live with today have managed to become part of our everyday lives, from intelligent shoes all the way down to Christian books. It seems Google is working hard to make YouTube fit into this category, all they need to do now is improve application availability and make sure the Cloud is always available and I’ll be ready to hook up my TV.

I came across a great whitepaper by a company called Pragma Systems that talks about their Fortress product line, designed to secure a wide variety of different platforms using protocols like SSH, SFTP, SCP and others. They have a variety of different offerings ranging from server security suites to a secure shell client and have a long list of clients including IBM, Coca-Cola, Dell and many others spread all around the world.

Read the whitepaper here