commbasics

Thought I would end the year with my position on the Wikileak issue.  I think it stinks and find myself in the weird position of supporting the governments' opinions. I've written rather extensively on the subject of journalistic ethics and Julian Assange violates everything I know to be journalistically ethical.  He is lower in my view that the National Enquirer and the paparazzi crowd.  Wikileaks is not even a decent whistle blowing entity. It is a self-important, self-righteous entity. There was no thought, research or consideration to the consequences in the action.  What Aftenposten in Norway is doing with the Wikileak documents is journalism. They have their reporters going over the information to find what should be covered; what actually affects the reading public. That's what real journalists do. I remember when I was a copy clerk in a daily paper and a reporter was looking for corruption in city government. He attained copies of city council...

I've known about this for some time, but I was asked to keep mum about it.  Patrick Mannion left EE Times a few weeks ago, as Brian Fuller reported before Thanksgiving.  Today I got permission to say that Patrick has gone back to his roots and become director of content for Hearst Electronics Group which covers Electronic Products, Electronic Engineer's Master and Electronic Products China. Patrick started his career 20 years ago with Electronic Products.  Fuller is taking over his responsibilities while EE Times looks for a replacement. That last statement fills me with joy.  This was not a layoff.  This was personnel acquisition.  Haven't heard that from the media for some time.

Salesforce announced yesterday at the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco that a free version of their Chatter social collaboration tool would be available in April 2010 and it comes close to being a game-changer in the effort to monitor, control and use multiple social media platforms.  But the concept of “free” is loosely defined.   You don’t have to be a Salesforce license holder to use Chatter, but the company you work for does.  And you can only invite people within that social community to participate.  That means you can’t include any external business or personal contacts.  You still have to maintain your own method for managing that.   There are lots of free and commercial tools for that task.  Too many, in fact, and one is as good/bad as any other.  My hope for Chatter, when I started hearing about potential free management tools, was that it would be a way for common folk to get ahold of all that information without having...