In the news this morning

Community Groups Short on Tech -an interesting article because so many of these excuses are what I hear at my work. While not a “community group” we are a not-for-profit, so our budgetary constraints are a bit tighter than most businesses, and our vision and tech expertise is a little bit less as well. That leads to not using technology very efficiently, which drives me nuts!

Seems like the klez virus has picked up an infection of CIH and is helping spread that around too! I’m thinking it’s a good thing I sent out an email to staff a couple of weeks ago about klez and it’s many variants. My advice to people was simple, if you don’t know absolutely, 100% for sure what an attachment is or why you’re getting it, call the person it’s from before you open it and make sure it’s not dangerous. That way I don’t have to worry so much about making sure they all have the latest virus definitions or we’re blocking the right attachment types on the mail server. I do those things as well, but that won’t stop every virus from getting through, as we all know. This becomes a pretty effective backup plan. And yes, although I don’t know if my little corner of the world is indicative of the rest of the internet, we’re still seeing a handful of klez infected emails everyday. Luckily we’ve had no infections ourselves. (Via Lockergnome Bit’s and Byte’s)

Dan Gillmor and Robert Scoble are both blogging their notes on the WWW conference. in Hawaii. Sounds like a tough life, doesn’t it? Good stuff, though. Most interesting, to me, was Tim Berners-Lee’s condemnation of the idea of having the internet run on patented specs and all users paying a royalty. “Royalty free is an essential ingredient to the Web phenomenon”

Meryl presents us with an interesting little controversy. You can see my reply in the comments.

For the record, in response to Jim’s post of May 8. (Permalinks seem not to be working over there) I wasn’t talking about his blog, nor am I down on ranting and display of raw emotion. We all have that in our online lives as much as we do in our offline lives, and there is a place for it in the blogging world, I think. I do plenty of ranting about things I hate here, I’d be a hypocrite if I expected everyone else to display anything less than their true selves, good and bad. My beef was more against folks who seem to have gotten obsessed with specific subjects, or have taken a sort of mob mentality within the blogging community. (My group of friends all agree with me, so we must be right and you must be stupid, etc.) I wonder about them, and worry that they are creating an atmosphere that discourages open discussion instead of encouraging it.

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