ReadWriteEnterprise

We call it "IT," and the reason is because a physicist first realized that information, like any other subatomic phenomenon, was both a particle and a wave. It was a product unto itself, and Dr. Jacob "Jack" Goldman created the environment for the concept to take root.

I know you're thinking Xerox PARC. Actually, I was thinking the Ford Motor Company.

I started using my first content management system around 1997, when things were crude and clumsy. You would think in the past 15 or so years time would heal all and improvements would be made, but you would be wrong. The modern CMS is still in a state of flux.

In the early days of the CMS we had major players such as OpenText (which didn't really have true CMS functionality until around 2002), Vignette (which was a separate company before being acquired by OpenText in 2009), and Fatwire (which was acquired by Oracle this past summer), among others. Note a trend here? These were gigantic software installations, requiring six figure PO's and a phalanx of consultants to care for and feed these beasts. They were and still are the exclusive domain of the IT department, who treated them like other big-ticket software installations. If you wanted to build a corporate website, you need plenty of time to plan your requirements and implement the code.

There's a good possibility that Microsoft may have made a bigger splash by exiting the keynote address and booth presence at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show than it made by being there in the four years leading up to 2012. If CES were an accurate barometer of consumer sentiment, then today we would all be snug in our vibrating chairs with our femtocell-enhanced home wireless phones (with built-in universal remotes), watching HD DVD movies with "TV Everywhere" live interactive background feeds on our plasma screens through our VIIV media PCs, and with mobile TVs in our shirt pockets feeding us live sports scores via AOL's colossal media empire.

In 2006, the spotlight of the Bill Gates Microsoft keynote was the music distribution service of the future. Called "Urge," it was a joint venture between Microsoft and MTV, at a time when the "M" in the latter's name stood for "music." Users would pay $9.95 per month to stream music videos directly to Windows Media Player 11, and receive songs in a format that was not portable to devices like iPods. That was followed up by the phone service of the future, called "Windows Live Call," which would be integrated into digital HDTVs by way of a partnership deal with DirecTV and Verizon.

I work on a small creative team in Human Resources at Humana, and we're lucky to have access to useful tools and the permission to autonomously scope out and prototype small ad-hoc projects. So last year, when our company began to learn about the Socialcast API, it wasn't long before we started to think of ways to use the discussion data to help build and strengthen our internal community.

There were three main things that we focused on as people began to discover and use the platform:

1. How to help people measure and monitor their level of participation,
2. How to reward people for using the social features correctly, and
3. How to help drive adoption and spread the word about the service.

"The communications public policy effort that may affect all of us the most in 2012... will take place far from our shores," stated U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell, in a speech in Washington before a bar association two weeks ago. "As we sit here today, scores of countries, including China, Russia and India, are pushing hard for international regulation of Internet governance."

We talk a lot, almost ad nauseum, about the "free and open Internet." What we sometimes fail to take into account is that freedom has many... shall we say, facets, which cast different shades of light at different angles. From one angle, the story looks like this: The free Internet is threatened by the incursion of governments that would seek to suppress individual freedoms through the systematic restructuring of Web services, with the burden being placed on service providers to comply. But that's not coming from Comm. McDowell, or from the opponents of SOPA legislation. It's the new populist battle cry of Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister seeking once again to become President.

Today, Yahoo posted on their developer network blog an announcement of a new content analysis API. Its aim is to rank content by overall relevance, point to particular Wikipedia pages and annotate the results with extensive meta-data. The service is available as a Yahoo Query Language (YQL) table and more information can be found here. You can try out a sample query request and see the XML code that is returned in response, as well as documentation for the particular fields that are part of the interface.

The notion of app stores is expanding into the world of printers and HP has made some important strides in the past year after it announced its ePrint line of printers. The apps, combined with an Internet-accessible printer, are both actually pretty neat and I will show you what is involved in getting it all to work.

In what may be the first lawsuit of its kind, the owners of the site TheLiberalOC.com won a judgment against another blogger who cybersquatted their domain and then posted a series of links to offensive porn sites. The site is owned by two liberal bloggers in Orange County, California (not exactly known for the dominance of that particular political persuasion): Dan Chmielewski, a PR executive and Chris Prevatt, the publisher of Thinking Liberally Media. Last week a federal judge ruled in their favor in a lawsuit charging Art Pedroza and the Orange Juice Blog with cybersquatting, trademark and copyright infringement. It is a well-won victory for all of us.

I have written frequently about the BYOD trend (such as my article last week on why managing devices isn't easy. The other side of BYOD is using some form of endpoint management product to make sure that you can track and secure all of your devices. These go under various headings, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM), endpoint security, or network access controls. No matter what you call them, using these products aren't easy and have lots of issues. Fiberlink was game to show me around their software, called MaaS360, and while I don't mean to pick on them I will show you what some of the drawbacks are with using these tools and what you are in store for if you are interested in trying to get a handle on your mobile devices across your enterprise.

Twitter is far and away my favorite social network, but it does have its downsides. The 140 character limit? Nope, I actually enjoy the challenge of crafting meaningful messages in limited space. The problems come in when you have users who don't quite understand the way Twitter is supposed to work, or when people or companies abuse the service.

You might balk at the idea that Twitter is "supposed" to work in any particular way. While Twitter doesn't have a written set of social guidelines (excepting its Terms of Service, of course), it does have a pretty well established set of unwritten guidelines that users should observe. Here's a few things you might want to consider when tweeting.