Social Bookmarking:

Home | Categories | ABCD |

Link to us:

Add your Blog:

If It's on Super Wall, It May As Well Be Public Record

In December of 2007, a judge, U.S. Magistrate Judge Patty Shwartz, ordered the plaintiffs in two cases (Beye v. Horizon, 06-Civ.-5337 & Foley v. Horizon, 06-Civ.-6219 were consolidated for discovery) to turn over their children's online emails, diaries, and other writings to the court. They had until January 15th to comply. The plaintiffs fought the order, saying the online writings were therapy tools and not meant to be shown to others. However, Shwartz was not swayed.

Horizon believed that the children's writings on their social networking sites and emails could show that their eating disorders are wrapped up in emotional causes, and therefore not the insurer's responsibility (since N.J. law says only biological mental illness must be covered).

On Jan. 24th, Horizon claimed that the Jan. 15th set by Shwartz come and gone with no disclosure on the plaintiffs' parts, even though Beye's parents had turned over the child's Yahoo emails. But the Foleys had yet to disclose their daughter's emails. Horizon insisted the plaintiffs turn over not only the children's emails, but also the corresponding emails and the email accounts of the girls' families. They also requested a mirror-image copy of the hard drive for each computer in the plaintiffs' family.

When it came to disclosing the writings on both Facebook and MySpace, David Mazie, the Beye's lawyer, stated that they have produced what documents they can and they have no Facebook or MySpace pages to turn over. The Foley's lawyer, Bruce Nagel, says "he believes his clients have no Facebook or MySpace pages."

However, anyone who knows a 15-year-old girl, knows that that these statements were likely false, and the lawyers were just trying to buy some time.

As it turned out, Horizon moved to dismiss Beye and Foley cases on the ground that the court should abstain from ruling due to pending state legislation would resolve the issue for good. While the new legislation may provide respite in these particular cases, those who are interested in internet privacy laws and protection are now feeling a knot in their stomach over what may have been.

What You Say Online is Not Private

The internet is not like a diary, although many people use online journals, blogs, and social networking sites to share their innermost thoughts, feelings, and secrets with the world. With a hardbound diary, you only had to be afraid of your little brother finding it under your mattress; but with the web, the words you write are etched in stone for the entire world to read. And even when you remove your accounts and disable your profiles, you may not really be gone. With Google's caching, the Way Back Machine, and even the websites themselves, your data is retained for a lot longer than you may have realized.

Take for example, the U.K. user who realized that he was unable to fully delete his Facebook profile. It seems users wishing to remove their Facebook profiles are only given the option to deactivate their accounts. These accounts become inaccessible, but still remain in Facebook's database. To really wipe out all information, Facebook advises users log in and manually remove all data from their profile before deactivating their account. This greatly concerned Dave Evans, the senior data protection practice manager at the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office: "One of the things that we're concerned about is that if the onus is entirely on the individual to delete their own data," he told BBC Radio 4."An individual who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that's about them, maybe on their wall or other people's site."

Only months earlier, the ICO had been warning social networker of possibly jeopardizing future careers by posting explicit photos or pictures of them "partying."

So What's a Social Networker To Do?

Reputation management companies have stepped in to fill the void in defending users' online reputations. A site like ReputationDefender, for example, will search all information about you (or your child) on the internet, provide you with a report, and then destroy whatever information you deem inappropriate or slanderous. Through non-legal means, the company works with the site owners where your data resides to get it removed. Claiming a thorough process that can remove data from almost anywhere online, ReputationDefender, and those like it, are poised to be the next major companies of the Internet Age. As the GenY and the YouTube Generation enters the workforce, a place still dominated by many Baby Boomers and others who grew up sans internet, the potential damage those MySpace photos could cause will then become much greater.

In the end, the best you can do is think carefully before you post photos, before you blog, and even before you send an email because the internet is more of a permanent record than anything your teachers ever threatened you with back in school.

In the digital age we must all be aware that the illusion of privacy is just that: an illusion. And you may never know went it could come back to haunt you.

(Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/01/21/dlface121.xml and http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1201779829458)

Utterz Expands Media Messaging Service

Multimedia messaging service Utterz is launching an expanded offering Monday morning that will allow users from 17 additional countries outside of the US to post to the service with their mobile phones. Utterz combines voice, video, photos and text to facilitate conversations either on the Utterz site, through Twitter or on your own blog off-site.

In addition to the local phone numbers for 17 additional countries, Utterz is also launching threaded conversations (small but important), webcam video capture and a newly designed site. The cow motif will likely stay, but whatever. (Update: Upon seeing the relaunched site, there's actually a whole lot less cow action! I kind of miss the cow, now that it's gone.)

There's a lot of nice little touches here, check out this embedded player from Utterz for example. That's pretty cool. Except the text is too small.

On Seesmic

The most logical company to compare Utterz to is Loic Le Meur's Seesmic, which I wrote last week transcends comparisons with the leading micromessaging social platform Twitter.

Utterz has far more features than Seesmic and is also very well thought out, at times. It's not as slick and usable as Seesmic. You can fall off a log and participate in Seesmic, once you've gotten access to the closed alpha at least (and gotten over any aversion you have to Silicon Valley hype). The feature gap is big enough, really, that the two may as well be different services. Seesmic is a good place to go and have short video conversations. Utterz is a service you can use to have more complicated and flexible conversations in mixed media. With Utterz you can post an audio message first to your account, then edit the message to add images and text, then have it all appear as a blog post on your off-site blog ten minutes later. That's pretty cool.

Growing Utterz

For whatever reason, Utterz is also growing much slower than Seesmic, despite the fact that there's no invitation required. Utterz says, and I agree, though that there are so many people in this world with a cell phone that there's not much use squabbling over whether one startups few thousand early users are more than another's.

When I asked Utterz though what their path to market would be, they told me it would be "focusing on a particular set of topical interests, like political dialog." Snore.

The strangely disconcerting anti-hero cow mascot and the general clunkyness of the site aside, though, Utterz is a good service. Once users get used to using it, though, I think many will like it quite a bit. Enabling users in 17 additional countries to come on board is a great move and one I'm sure RWW readers will appreciate.

The list of newly included countries follows:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The Industry Standard Returns - Will It Stick?

In 2000, the Industry Standard was one of the hottest magazines on the planet. It was flush with VC dollars and sold more ad pages than any magazine in history. But when the dot-com wave it was riding finally crashed, the magazine receded with the tide and filed for bankruptcy in 2001.That's why when news that it was coming back leaked this fall, it prompted some to declared that the "bubble is back."

The Industry Standard will relaunch today in public beta as a strictly online publication coupled with a futures market. We got a chance to check it out early and speak with Derek Butcher, the magazine's General Manager.

According to Butcher, the magazine's brand still had so much equity left in it, that publisher IDG (who was an investor in the original magazine and bought out the publication's assets) couldn't resist trying it again. Now that Silicon Valley is hot once more, and ad dollars are flowing on the web, it seemed like a good time to try relaunching the business mag. There's just one problem: blogs have this space covered to death.

So rather than focus on breaking news, the Standard is opting to focus instead of analysis of the business and technology news. Content will be short editorials (300-400 words) that break down business news written by outside contributors (that is, bloggers, analysts, and industry pundits will submit content to the Standard for publication). It's an editorial approach that Butcher seemed to describe as one part ReadWriteWeb and one part Huffington Post -- though unlike HuffPo, the Standard will pay its contributors, and unlike RWW, the focus will be on business over tech analysis.

"No single voice will dominate the discussion, which is why we decided to forgo the somewhat print-centric idea of an editor in chief, despite talking to some great people for the position," said managing editor Ian Lamont in a press release. "We want readers to get viewpoints from the widest range of contributors possible, with the common theme being that these contributors are all people who believe that the Web is a major paradigm shift in business."

However, the editorial isn't the most intriguing part of the relaunch. What really sticks out about the new Industry Standard is the prediction market. A prediction market is something like a stock exchange where the cash value of assets is tied to predictions. People invest in predictions they think will come true with the idea being that the more people who predict something, the more likely it should be to actually happen in real life. Most prediction markets in the US use play money because of gambling restrictions, and the Industry Standard's is no different.

Users start out with $100,000 in play funds and invest in time sensitive predictions like, "Apple will ship 10 million iPhones in 2008," or "Yahoo! will accept Microsoft's takeover bid by February 8." Users can also suggest predictions, which are in turn voted up or down by other users.

Prediction markets have shown a remarkable tendency to accurately predict the future, and the Industry Standard's market can theoretically be used to keep writers honest. Any writer who is constantly throwing out wild predictions can have his ideas tested on the open market. Butcher hopes that the prediction market will have a reciprocative effect on the editorial, with writers playing off the things people are betting on in the market, and the market reacting to the things people are writing about.

The market is very well designed and rather easy to use, but will it, coupled with the out sourced editorial content, be enough to recapture the late-90s magic that made the Industry Standard a household name? The other quintessential Silicon Valley magazine of the dot-com boom was RedHerring, which relaunched in August as a web-based publication (including a video site and social network) to little fanfare. RedHerring's traffic has actually declined since then, according to Compete, and even articles on big stories like the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! only attract a handful of comments -- compared to, say over 800 on Digg -- and thousands if you count how many times the story made the main page.

It's possible that the media market has shifted so much since the late-90s that magazines will never be able to reinvent themselves on the web in the face of competition from a now established and well-connected blogosphere and user-powered aggregation of sources (like Digg and Reddit). But the Standard is probably smart to eschew the traditional editorial structure and follow the example set by successful blogs communities like the Huffington Post and Seeking Alpha, by bringing together a group of outside contributors who may already have a readership elsewhere.

Try out the Standard web site and prediction market and tell us what you think. Can the Industry Standard return to glory or will they flame out again? Let us know in the comments below.

Poll: Has Google Lost The Plot By Attacking Microsoft's Bid For Yahoo?

While I was flying halfway across the world, a huge story developed that I am just now catching up on: Microsoft launched a takeover bid for Yahoo valued at $44.6 Billion. In a frankly stunning move today, the Official Google Blog has published a post raising questions about "Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo!." David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer for Google, wonders whether Microsoft could "now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?"

Further, Drummond queries whether Microsoft-Yahoo could "extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?". Specifically he referred to email, IM, and web-based services. He also says that the bid threatens “the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

It's an incredible piece of PR and, some might suggest, fear-mongering. But let's throw these questions open. Let us know in the following poll what you think about Google's response to Microhoo!.

UPDATE: Microsoft has responded to the Google blog post. In a statement from Brad Smith, General Counsel, Microsoft states that "the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising"; areas where of course Google is number one. The lawyers are sniping, this battle is getting heated...

Weekly Wrapup, 28 Jan - 1 Feb 2008

Here is a summary of the week in Web technology on ReadWriteWeb.

Reminder to PR people and startups: If you would like ReadWriteWeb to consider covering your product, you should email us at tips@readwriteweb.com. This address is monitored daily by all our main bloggers. Pitch emails sent to my personal email address almost always get forwarded to the tips address, so skip the middleman by emailing tips! Due to volume, we cannot respond to every email - but be assured that they are being read and considered by our writing team.

Web News

The top story this week came right at the end: Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo!. It's a huge story and Marshall Kirkpatrick had RWW's analysis:

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Read the whole post here

In other news, this week Google announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application. See also: Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

DEMO Coverage

This week the venerable DEMO conference was held and Marshall Kirkpatrick was at the show for ReadWriteWeb. Here is his coverage during the week:

Web Trends

Why the Music Industry is Lying to You

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) last week released their latest report, summing up the digital music landscape at the start of 2008. The IFPI claims in the report that for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads taking place. Or in other words, illegal downloading is happening at a rate that is 20 times that of legal downloading. This, says the IFPI, lead to US$3.7 billion in industry losses. But there are some big holes in that claim.

MTV Election Coverage is a Coup for Citizen Journalism

As part of MTV's coverage of the 2008 presidential elections in the US, the media network assembled a "street team" of 51 amateur journalists -- one in each state and the District of Columbia -- to file blog reports, photos, videos, and audio podcasts about election issues during the course of the campaign season. The videos are being syndicated to MTV's mobile web site, social network, and to the Associate Press Online Video Network. Members of the street team have been outfitted with laptops, video phones, and other popular tools of the citizen journalist via funding from a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge.

How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured

We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global database which will make the web even more connected. The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Web Products

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse

For 2007, our Best Web LittleCo was Twitter, the microblogging/status application that captured the collective attention of Silicon Valley at SXSW last winter and has been on a meteoric rise ever since. We picked Twitter because it "has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging." But, unlike 2006's Best LittleCo YouTube, which has become firmly entrenched in the mainstream consciousness, Twitter still exists outside of most mainstream circles.

Have Facebook Apps Peaked in Popularity?

There appears to be evidence that Facebook users are beginning to suffer from app fatigue, and there is growing discontent about how applications are being distributed and about the amount of noise that the application platform has introduced into the Facebook ecosystem. As Mark Glaser writes on the PBS MediaShift blog, Facebook has a growing trust problem. Further, new numbers suggest that fed up users might have had enough of some of the most popular Facebook apps. This, however, could be a good thing for users and for the health of the platform in the long run.

The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini

Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Christina Aguilera Playboy Rumors

Christina Aguilera has denied rumours she is set to bare all in a post-pregnancy nude spread for Playboy magazine. The 27-year-old who gave birth to her first child Max, in January was reportedly approached by editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner for a steamy shoot in an upcoming issue of the men’s magazine. But a representative for the singer [...]

Christina Aguilera has denied rumours she is set to bare all in a post-pregnancy nude spread for Playboy magazine.

The 27-year-old who gave birth to her first child Max, in January was reportedly approached by editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner for a steamy shoot in an upcoming issue of the men’s magazine.

But a representative for the singer has confirmed the report is “false”, although a close friend of the ‘Dirrty’ hitmaker admits the star is “flattered” to be approached.

While you’re unlikely to Christina Aguilera nude anytime soon - do check out some her sauciest pictures ever.

Scarlett Johansson Lesbian Sex With Penelope Cruz

Scarlett Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that’s slated for release towards the end of the year. Page Six reports that the scenes are extremely erotic and will have people blown away and even shocked. Apparently Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography [...]

Scarlett Johansson lesbian with penelope cruz

Scarlett Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that’s slated for release towards the end of the year.

Page Six reports that the scenes are extremely erotic and will have people blown away and even shocked. Apparently Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography dark room, and it will leave the audience gasping. The women later have a threesome with Javier Bardem (below), who plays Cruz’s husband.

Enough reasons to watch the film and make the wait - Vicky… has December 2008 release date - quite miserable.

Java SE 6 is Available

Sun Microsystems has officially announced the release of Java Platform, Standard Edition (SE) 6 with full support from NetBeans IDE 5.5. Whether working on Solaris, Linux, or Windows operating systems, Java applications can be deployed with confidence.

So whats new in this release?
XML & Web Services
Scripting Language Support
Java DB and Database Support
More Desktop APIs
Compiler Access
Pluggable Annotations
Desktop Deployment
Security
Quality, Compatibility, Stability

Description about the features of Java SE 6 is here.

To download your Java SE 6, click on the title of this post. http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/?

[Resource-Type: News; Category: Java/J2SE; XRating: 5]

Quickly Understand Spring Framework

If you are an absolute new to Spring Framework, this article (found at the title of this post) would certainly help.
It tells you the approach that has been used prior to Spring, what is the need for a framework like Spring and how to use the framework.

I liked the simple example presented and I am sure it will help as a quick start guide.

[Resource-Type: Article; Category: Java/J2EE, Spring; XRating: 4.5]

Free cell phones from Google?

Google Inc.'s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising.

Schmidt acknowledged that mobile phones may never become totally free to the consumer. Newspapers are still not completely free a hundred years after they started relying on advertising, but they certainly are inexpensive, he noted.

Refer title of this post for full story @ CNN money.

[Resource-Type: News; Category: General; XRating: 3.5]

Skype for bloggers

Internet telephony provider Skype plans to offer bloggers and others the ability to hold audio chats in the next version of its net telephone product.

I guess this feature would help professional bloggers. Not sure if this could help other occassional blogger.
Would you like to see/integrate this server in blogs?

Refer story from "The Blogging Times" at the title of this post.

Google Code Search - Only for geeks?

Google launched code search (refer title of this post) for the software developer community.

From this CNET news post, "Google expects that the search engine will be used primarily as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy another person's code."

I had a first look at it and feel its a bit geeky. Although it supports both regular expressions and keyword search, I found keyword search not satisfactory and for a student/beginner using regular expressions may be a bit difficult. And for the experienced developers, they may not be too patient to learn the regex of Google code search. My view :)

Lets hope to see more intelligence from Google code search in the coming days.

My preference as at now still lies with koders as it is simpler to use and the results are also quite near to what you generally expect.

[Resource-Type: News; Category: General; XRating: 4]

Getting all IP addresses of local machine

This is one code that saved hours for me. Thanks to jguru for sharing the code that gives me all the IP addresses associated with my system.

Simply calling InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostAddress() cannot solve the problem as it may return only one IP address.

The code (point to the title of this post) gives you the IP address of all your network connections including your public IP that is created when you connect to internet.

[Resource-Type: Source Code; Category: J2EE, J2SE; XRating: 5]

SysML - Did you hear about it?

SysML that stands for Systems Modeling Language grabbed my attention when I was searching for some UML related tools. Sparxsystems has a tool that supports SysML.

If you have ever heard/learnt about it before, you may want to stop reading further :)

For me, after reading about SysML, it looked like an elder brother of UML and in fact they have similarities in their genes.

Now, what the heck is SysML?
The SysML (Systems Modeling Language) is a domain-specific modeling language for systems engineering applications. It supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems. These systems may include hardware, software, information, processes, personnel, and facilities.

SysML was originally developed as an open source specification project initiated in 2003. The SysML specification is publicly available for download, and includes an open source license for distribution and use.

Wanna learn more? SysML FAQ (linked at the title of this post) is the right place to start.

As for a software engineer, it may not interest much but whats wrong in learning a thing a day :)

[Resource-Type: Weblink; Category: Modeling; XRating: 3]

the end of this MPF blog

I hereby announce that this MPF blog will be removed soon (i.e. all posts apart from this one). If you want to do backups - do it now! I invite you all to join me at my new (and final) personal blog at: ejr44.blogspot.com (and feed URL is: http://ejr44.blogspot.com/rss.xml). There is no comment moderation in that new blog and [...]

I hereby announce that this MPF blog will be removed soon (i.e. all posts apart from this one). If you want to do backups - do it now!

I invite you all to join me at my new (and final) personal blog at:
ejr44.blogspot.com
(and feed URL is: http://ejr44.blogspot.com/rss.xml).

There is no comment moderation in that new blog and since it is hosted by Google I have no information about IP address of commenter if he posts anonymously. All comments are posted and not removed there.

Thank you for reading this MPF blog in past and please join me in the new one!

Francesco Tedeschi :: All this is... Radical

Ciao a tutti,

qui si corre per mettere a posto gli ultimi pezzi del puzzle della stagione di gare 2008.

In attesa della prima gara, ho realizzato un filmato che ho realizzato con uno scopo: descrivere in un solo minuto, cos'è la Radical

Alzate il volume appalla e cliccate qua:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kgFo7QgxMU

Ciao a tutti, e se non l'avete ancora fatto, segnatevi sul calendario la gara di Monza del 27 Aprile!!!

Riccardo Barbazza :: [ ADS ] Nintendo wii: Post-it

Continua la tradizione tricolore :) Leo Burnett, Milano, Italia

Andrey Golub :: Tips for Pursuing a New Career Outside IT

Life in IT can be thankless, but you don't have to suffer. A 25-year IT veteran turned professional coach offers advice on how she and many other technical professionals found fulfillment and fortune outside IT.

Seven Tips for Pursuing a New Career Outside IT

February 13, 2008 — CIO — Let's face it: Life in IT can be thankless. Your work often goes unnoticed, unless you do something wrong. You put in long hours, working evenings and weekends. Expectations are high. Users are seldom happy with results.

Believe me, I understand. I spent more than 25 years in IT, having started as a systems developer and ending as director of career development in a high-tech consulting company. As my career in IT evolved, I realized I enjoyed management and staff development more than technical work. After the IT downturn of 2001, I decided to begin a new career as a professional coach.

It's easy to tire of a career in IT. I've talked with dozens of technical professionals who say they are burned out or who no longer feel challenged by their jobs. Many more senior professionals are forced to consider a job outside the field after being laid off and finding it difficult to land a new job, either because their skills aren't in demand or employers don't want to pay for their experience.

You don't have to suffer in IT. If you've ever considered a career outside the profession, the following seven steps will help you make your move. They worked for me and many others, as you'll see.

1. Identify your interests: What do you like to do?

Tom Prince knew he wanted to do something besides sell CRM software when he was Siebel's vice president of sales, but he had no idea what. After he left Siebel in 2002, he and his wife Mary decided to investigate the possibility of opening a restaurant. They loved good food, dined out often and understood their local, Boston-area market well. They partnered with Lorenzo Savona, a former general manager of two chic restaurants in Boston, who had been planning to build a restaurant similar to the one Tom and Mary Prince envisioned. In 2004, they opened Tomasso Trattoria in Southborough, Mass. Today, they also run Panzano Provviste e Vino, a market and wine shop next door to the restaurant.

"There's so much disillusionment in high-tech. You rarely get the feeling that you're selling people something they really want," says Tom Prince. "Here, we're providing something that people actually know and care about—something that people really want. Food affects their sight, their smell, their taste, their touch, all of their senses."

If you don't have a clear idea of what you want to do, start by evaluating your existing position. Make a list of everything you love and hate about your current job. Use those likes and dislikes to form criteria for a new career. Look for opportunities that feature the things you love but not the things you hate. For instance, if you love your job because of your relationship with your clients, look for jobs that focus on customer service. Or, if you love being the expert and sharing your knowledge, teaching is a possibility.

Also think about what you do in your spare time. What do you enjoy doing most? What is it about these activities that makes them enjoyable? If you love dogs, consider starting a boarding, grooming or training business. If you practice yoga, find out what it would take to become an instructor. Brainstorm ways you can make a career out of your passions the way that the Princes did with food.

2. Leverage your strengths: What do you do well?

For 24 years, Norman Daoust worked in corporate IT roles, except during a sabbatical when he focused on his music. Daoust plays fretted instruments—the guitar, electric bass, banjo and mandolin. After three years of trying to make a living as a musician he decided to return to corporate IT, only to remember exactly why he left before: the inability of large, bureaucratic organizations to embrace and manage change. He had to get out, but instead of going back to music, he opted for consulting in his area of expertise, information modeling and systems integration. He prepared for that transition by participating in several consulting workshops. When he was laid off from his corporate job in 2001, he took the leap. Seven years later he has built a successful consulting practice with many clients and the freedom to make his own schedule, including time for his music.

A great tool you can use to identify your strengths is the book StrengthsFinder 2.0. When you buy it, you get a code to take the StrengthsFinder assessment online at no additional cost.

3. Assess your options: What could you do that reflects your interests and leverages your strengths?

Tom McGoldrick performed many roles during his 30 years in IT: systems programmer, project manager, department manager and senior vice president. He left IT in 2002 during a downsizing. When he stepped back to look at his life, he realized how much his career had taken him away from his family. He and his wife Sue Ann decided to look into running their own business.

They considered more than 1,200 different businesses and eventually narrowed the list down to six. One option was inspired by their beloved pet Labrador retriever, Apollo, who had a champion bloodline. They considered breeding dogs, but further research showed they couldn't make a living at it. When Apollo unexpectedly died, they looked for a burial/cremation facility that would provide Apollo with the honor and respect the McGoldricks felt he deserved. They discovered Paws in Heaven and were very pleased with the care and attention Apollo received there.

In 2003, the owners of Paws in Heaven decided to retire, and the McGoldricks bought the business. Tom McGoldrick recognized that the business savvy, technical knowledge and relationship-building skills he had honed over the course of his career in IT would lend themselves well to running and growing their new business. Paws in Heaven perfectly combines McGoldrick's love for animals with his business and technical acumen.

Focusing on your interests and strengths the way McGoldrick did will help you more easily recognize opportunities as they come along and determine whether they're a good fit for you.

4. Try your possibilities on for size: What would this new career really be like?

Technical graphic designer Marissa Rosenfield Smajlaj was shopping at a bookstore in downtown Boston when she came upon a copy of the book Colette's Birthday Cakes by world-renowned specialty cake artist Collette Peters. As she flipped through the pages and admired each cake, she had an epiphany: "I could do this!" she thought. Smajlaj got a part-time job in a bakery to see if she'd enjoy the work. She loved it, decided to go to culinary school and was accepted at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in London. She completed the Le Cordon Bleu Diplome de Patisserie. The following year, she became a pastry chef at a New York City restaurant. She hasn't looked back since.

5. Be open to opportunities: What's out there?

Bill Sobbing didn't start out as an IT professional. In college, he majored in English. When he graduated, he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. He looked at many different possibilities, but none of them excited him. Eventually, a relative got him a job where the relative was working. When the IT department at Sobbing's company posted an entry-level position, he applied for it and was accepted. Sobbing found a career that interested him and spent the next 20 years working in various IT roles. He enjoyed the work but, like many IT managers, he tired of corporate politics. He decided to become an independent consultant and began working primarily from his home. One morning, he picked up a newspaper and read about a local school, The San Diego Golf Academy, which offers a program in golf course management. He had played golf casually since high school but never considered making it his career. Yet something in the story about the Golf Academy compelled him to check it out. Three years later, Sobbing is general manager of a nine-hole golf course in Phoenix, Ariz. He could never have done it if he hadn't indulged his curiosity.

6. Select the right opportunities: Which are viable?

In 2002, Alan Klug was a senior consultant with KPMG. He enjoyed working with clients, but the consulting industry was suffering from the post-9/11 economic recession at that time. Klug knew future consulting opportunities would be limited and decided to pursue something entrepreneurial. He considered opening a custom closets business, a car wash, and franchising a quick-service restaurant. He developed business plans for each idea, but none of them really grabbed him. Then he came across a small ad in Fortune for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Intrigued by a company that got paid for taking people's junk off their hands, he says he "researched the heck out of it." He learned that it was a lucrative and fast-growing business with a solid strategy and good management team heading it up.In 2003, he became a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? franchisee with four territories. He has since expanded to eight territories. He is on track to become a $2 million business in 2008 and is already thinking about what he might do next. "If an opportunity comes along, don't count it out immediately because it seems too good to be true. Just research it and find all the downsides," he says. "There are plenty of opportunities out there to be exploited."

If you have a couple of options and can't decide between them, take out a sheet of paper and divide it into columns—one for each possibility in question. Write the title of each option at the top of each column. List the pros and cons of each possibility side by side. If neither choice stands out, answer the following questions: What will happen if I pursue this career? What won't happen if I pursue this career? What will happen if I don't pursue this career? What won't happen if I don't pursue this career? Those four questions sound similar, but they're all slightly different and designed to help you explore the nuances of each possibility. Use your answers to those questions to decide which option is the best for you.

7. Create a career action plan.

Once you have decided on a career, you can put together a career action plan. This is a simple project plan with tasks, deliverables and target dates. It includes a long-term career objective (from six months to three years) with short-term tasks and deliverables for the next three months.

If your career objective is, for example, to launch your own consulting business next year, one short-term task to perform might be to talk with several consultants to learn more about what it's like. Other tasks might include investigating what areas of specialization are in greatest demand and what it would take for you to build your expertise in those areas. A deliverable might be to draft a preliminary business plan with a list of potential clients and the financial resources you have available to launch your business. At the end of three months, add new tasks and deliverables for the following three months. This simple approach works well for planning and tracking your progress.

As you begin building your career action plan, answer the following questions:

What do I need to accomplish my goal?
Do I need education, equipment, office or other space?
Do I need hands-on experience?
Do I need financial aid?
Do I need a mentor or a coach?
Who among my friends and acquaintances can provide assistance with my career change? What assistance can they provide: resources, expertise, moral support?

Remember, no one succeeds alone. There's nothing wrong with asking for help. There is something wrong with not asking for help when you need it. In most cases, people are more than willing to lend a hand.

These seven tips come from my own experience as well as the experiences of others. I leveraged my own interests and strengths in training and professional development to move from IT into my coaching business. In my corporate role as director of career development, I coached many IT professionals, from systems developers to executives. In that role, I had the opportunity to try out what would become my new career as a professional coach. Since I wasn't ready to leave my corporate job at the time, I worked with a mentor/coach to develop and implement a business plan that enabled me to remain with my company while I earned my credentials and began to build my coaching and consulting practice. I have been on my own since 2006. I have found great joy and success in my new career, and I wish you the same in your "Life Beyond IT," wherever it may take you.

Joanne Dustin is a certified professional coach and the author of Life Beyond IT: Open the Door...Your Future is Waiting.

Andrey Golub :: MilanIN, il social network degli imprenditori lombardi

by Raffaele Mauro

Collegio Milano Foto MilanIN, il social network degli imprenditori lombardi
Attraverso una rete di contatti virtuali, la nascita di nuove opportunita' economiche

MilanIN, il social network degli imprenditori lombardi

I 3500 iscritti dialogano su internet, alla ricerca di idee e affari

Milano continua ad essere la città italiana più avanzata per dinamismo economico e capacità di cogliere le nuove opportunità tecnologiche. Un esempio recente è il successo ottenuto da MilanIN, una rete sociale basata su internet che mette in contatto imprenditori e manager lombardi.

Il progetto è stato avviato nel 2005, dall’ingegnere Pier Carlo Pozzati e da altri professionisti milanesi, e conta attualmente più di 3.500 iscritti. MilanIN è una rete di operatori economici, imprenditori, manager, studiosi, che grazie all’infrastruttura di LinkedIN, il più importante sito mondiale per il social networking professionale, possono moltiplicare i propri contatti e costruire progetti innovativi. Lo scopo dichiarato di MilanIN è infatti “Stimolare la produzione di nuove idee ed occasioni di business”. Vale a dire che, a differenza di altri club e associazioni, questo gruppo non serve ad una socializzazione fine a se stessa, ma ha l’obiettivo di generare affari ed opportunità economiche per i partecipanti. La rete di contatti su internet permette di identificare individui con interessi professionali analoghi ai propri e, se necessario, poterli contattare in maniera accreditata.

Le iniziative di MilanIN non sono soltanto “virtuali” ma si concretizzano in una serie di incontri periodici, che permettono ai partecipanti di interagire direttamente. Durante gli eventi della serie “Presenta te stesso”, un socio descrive la sua storia personale e la sua attività lavorativa, permettendo agli altri, in un contesto informale ed aperto alle domande, di esplorare interessanti traiettorie di carriera e conoscere persone provenienti da diversi ambiti professionali.

Nel luglio 2007 LinkedIN ha ufficialmente riconosciuto MilanIN come suo “supporter ufficiale”, dato il suo contributo alla diffusione di questo strumento di social network in Italia. Ma perché ciò è importante? Perchè la rete è lo spazio nel quale passa una parte significativa dei flussi di innovazione tecnologica e culturale del mondo attuale. La nuova fase, denominata comunemente “Web 2.0”, è legata ad una maggiore “scrivibilità” di Internet, all’esplosione degli strumenti di social networking e alla produzione di contenuti da parte degli utenti. MilanIN si inserisce all’interno di questa tendenza grazie all’infrastruttura di LinkedIN, uno dei più famosi strumenti per la costruzione di reti sociali on-line insieme a Facebook e Myspace. A differenza di questi ultimi, molto focalizzati sulla ricerca di amicizie e di relazioni amorose, la specializzazione di LinkedIN è di natura professionale. Lo si utilizza per cercare partner commerciali, offerte di lavoro o semplicemente per trovare una risposta a un quesito tecnico. Si tratta di un fenomeno in notevole espansione, che attualmente coinvolge 15 milioni di utenti ed accumula 100mila nuovi contatti la settimana. E' diffuso in tutte le grandi aziende e le università internazionali.

Nella sua teoria dei “sei gradi di separazione”, Stanley Milgram ha affermato che attraverso una catena di sei contatti successivi, ognuno potrebbe teoricamente parlare con il Presidente degli USA. Adesso grazie al social networking su internet e con procedure di referenza affidabili, è possibile allargare i propri contatti fino a raggiungere un numero molto più elevato di connessioni potenziali con persone che hanno interessi comuni. La presenza di MilanIN testimonia che le energie imprenditoriali di Milano sono ancora attive e capaci di agganciarsi ai trend di cambiamento del mondo attuale.

ORIGINALE-
http://www.voceditalia.it/articolo.asp?id=5884

I Feel Good About These Shots

I know I haven’t really been posting about Britney Spears. In fact, I think I cut about 80% of her posts out on a weekly basis. I just don’t want to be part of the problem anymore. But these pictures make me feel really good about her. She just seems better. I know it’s [...]

Hayden Christensen For Details Magazine

Whenever I write a post about Hayden Christensen, I get a slew of emails telling me that he is gay. Here’s the thing - it’s not like I have a chance with him anyway. Can’t a girl just admire a beautiful human being because that boy is fine! The only person his sexual preference matters [...]

: Castle rentals in Toscana-Tuscany Italy : La Torre

HolidayHavens Holiday rental property advertisement description : The only apartment in Tower in the Castle of Orciatico, built in the year 652, newly renovated, Sleeps 4,On the ground floor living-dining room with kitchenette,Satellite television, electric heating, coffee maker, microwave, toaster,gas cooker, fridge, iron-ironboard, On the first floor, a double bedroom with double bed, a bathroom with shower, wc, hairdryer, On the second floor, double bedroom with double bed, On the top floor a large 13mq terrace with a breathtaking 360 view of the Tuscan countryside, In the village 2 grocers, a bar, a bank with ATM machine, a post

Design a Print Ready Valentine's Day Postcard

This tutorial walks you through the process of using Photoshop to create a print ready Valentine's day postcard.

Two Stolen Paintings Are Found - Wall Street Journal

Regina Leader-Post

Two Stolen Paintings Are Found
Wall Street Journal - 1 hour ago
By GORAN MIJUK and KELLY CROW Only one week after Zurich was jolted by a $163 million art theft from a private collection, local police said they had managed to recoup two of the four 19th century paintings.
Zurich Police Say 2 of 4 Stolen Masterpieces Found (Update3) Bloomberg
2 Stolen Paintings Found by Swiss The Associated Press
Telegraph.co.uk - AFP - New York Times Blogs - CBS2 Chicago
all 248 news articles

Ears ringing, Kenya negotiators return to table - Reuters

Voice of America

Ears ringing, Kenya negotiators return to table
Reuters - 3 hours ago
By Andrew Cawthorne NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's feuding parties resumed talks on Tuesday after a torrent of calls from home and abroad to solve a post-election crisis that has killed 1000 people and tarnished the east African nation's reputation.
Kenyan Negotiators Resume Talks The Associated Press</