ReadWriteEnterprise

In September 2010, the U.S. Senate debated the latest draft of a bill for combatting online piracy. You may think you've heard of this bill, but there's a good chance you haven't. It was called COICA. It had a provision that seemed strange, as though it belonged to another era.

It called for the creation of some type of site or service that would publish a list of Web sites suspected of trafficking in illicit or counterfeit intellectual property. The hope was that someone might write a plug-in or a browser patch that would act the same way anti-porn filters work, by denying users access. The concept was denounced as a kind of blacklist.

If you are using a spreadsheet to track your data center equipment inventory, then take a moment and read this post. You might want to consider using something else that can actually track your assets. From where I sit, many IT managers grossly underestimate the efforts in this process.

Imagine your staff is ordering equipment for your data center and it's going right to the storeroom, not just without being deployed, but also without being inventoried. Then it sits there, depreciating in value and collecting dust. This is just one of the horror stories I've heard in the field. The company this happened to ultimately discovered that, in just a six week period, it had accumulated more than $700,000 in depreciation costs for assets that were not being used.

As we begin a new year, I thought I would take a moment to review where Web publishing has come and where it seems to be going. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the "golden age of blogging" into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era.

That isn't to say that blogs are over: we at RWW certainly don't think so. But the very nature of the blog is changing. The days are coming to an end when, as Scott Fulton has said most recently: "You can have freedom from bias or you can have freedom from oversight. You cannot have both." Jon Mitchell wrote earlier in December about new ways of writing, publishing and advertising online.

When it comes to downloading digital music, there is free and then there is legal, but seldom can you have both from the same site, and make money too. Noisetrade.com has been doing this for the past three years.

Certainly, there are lots of other music download sites, and we have written most recently about Soundcloud, as one example. But it is worth looking at what Noisetrade is doing to see what could be the ideal small-business content download site.

How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT's biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World's Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.

This isn't a completely new problem. In 1980, I took my second job, about two years after I started work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. My father was not happy about the switch. He was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition. What would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo these many years ago

It was NCSA Mosaic that introduced the world to the Web. Since that time, the browser has become the principal software-based element in all the world's digital communications and transactions. It is the harbinger of a very powerful new class of dynamic language interpreters, making JavaScript the unlikely, though undisputed, vehicle for conveying interactive functionality. And for some manufacturers, it is the center of an apps ecosystem unto itself.

So the browser is in no danger of disappearing. But as the Web expands into a delivery mechanism for all forms of applications and services, is a stand-alone, exclusive window into the Web, complete with bookmarks and toolbars and add-ons, truly the most sensible usage model for a system that may yet embrace all of computing? This is a question Mozilla began asking last summer, and whose answer remains inconclusive.

A few weeks ago, RWW Channels Editor David Strom posted Why BYOD Isn't a Trend. He skewered the notion that BYOD is new, noted that IT leaders have dealt with user-purchased tech for generations, and declared the "consumerization of IT" a new name for an old trend.

Strom's take away: BYOD has been around since the '80s, and the only change is that it is now writ large, thanks to low-cost smartphones, tablets, and Internet-enabled access to corporate data. But he asked the wrong question and missed a much more important point, about how rapid the influx of tablets is changing enterprise IT. Don't ask if BYOD is a trend. Ask what IT leaders are doing about BYOD.

The memo has already gone out to the various book editors, news editors and technology analysts: The proper phrase is not "tablet PC" any more. A tablet and a PC are perceived by both consumers and businesses as two separate classes of device. You probably saw the TV ads this season where Santa's elves kicked out the 4G smartphones and tablets, and dispensed with the old gifts nobody wants. "Bye, bye, computer," the elves sang to an old Johnny Mathis tune.

Since its very inception, Microsoft's business model has been about leverage. It uses its established foundation in one popular platform to extend another. The advance of the tablet had been announced further ahead of time than Margaret Thatcher announced the surge on the Falklands. It's not like Microsoft didn't see this coming. But in 20/20 hindsight, it's remarkable to see now how the company appears to have actively worked to thwart that advance, to slow it down, by introducing potential form factors that could deflect interest in tablets - for example, an embedded device that could reveal the weather forecast and present your e-mails, that could be sewn to one's luggage.

Earlier this fall, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by PhoneDog.com against one of its long-departed employees, Noah Kravitz, has merit. According to Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, the company is suing Kravitz over three points, including trade secrets and misappropriation of the account. The ruling, reported by Goldman and the New York Times, states that Kravitz is liable for several hundred thousand dollars in damages, calculated at $2.50 per month per Twitter follower.

This isn't the first conflict over who owns your Twitter account, and it certainly won't be the last. When Rick Sanchez left CNN he kept his account but changed the name. This is what Kravitz did when he left PhoneDog.

New rules will go into effect in a month for US airline advertising that take the emphasis off the asterisk and adds transparency to their add-on ticketing fees. Ironically, some of the low-fare airlines such as Spirit are fighting the changes, claiming freedom of speech infringement by the government. I guess the right to deceive their customers should be part of the Constitution, or at least left to free enterprise to sort this all out.

The rules were supposed to go in effect earlier this fall, but were extended to January 24th to give the airlines time to legally outmaneuver them. I mean, to comply.