ReadWriteEnterprise

You might have noticed that there's been an explosion of infographics over the last year or two. Unfortunately, they seem to have jumped the shark a bit lately with companies cranking out any old thing and sticking the "infographic" title on it. We get tons of pitches from companies about their latest infographics, but only a small fraction actually make the cut. While we love infographics at ReadWriteWeb, we want them to be high quality. Want to have a shot at getting traction with your infographics? Avoid these six flaws that doom any infographic.

Given that many businesses plan to roll out some collection of IPv6 equipment in the next few years, it makes sense to set up your own test lab to ensure that you can understand some of the transition issues and deployment problems early on.

In the sponsored brief Building an Enterprise IPv6 Test Lab Jeff Carrell and Ed Tittel dive into what you need to know to build your own test lab.

We do this dance at least twice a year now, and we're starting to get the steps so well memorized that once we hear the familiar tune, we start stepping to the beat without a moment's thought. It's the Anti-piracy Shuffle, and one defining element of its choreography is that we always end up right where we started.

Here's how it goes: You can't run an Internet server that trafficks in illicit content to American clients, from American soil, without violating American law. Makes sense. The magic of the Internet lets someone in America run a server in another country, whose domain may be registered in yet another country, that sends illicit content to American downloaders. It's impossible to prosecute one downloader without prosecuting all of them, otherwise you run into the selective prosecution defense.

It's no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.

But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors' press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.

An article in USA Today this week got me interested in how much the tech firms are paying to lobby Congress. There are a few places you can easily research this information, and to no surprise the usual suspects rise to the top in terms of annual lobbying expenditures.

Email service provider iContact is holding an interesting contest (we aren't involved, just like contests). Make a short video on why you either like or hate social media and post it before December 5th. Simple enough, and it sounds like a lot of fun too.

Another day, another social network. This time it's a oddly named outfit called Unthink that has set its sights squarely on Facebook and Google Plus. Unthink promises to "emancipate social media," but do most users really feel enslaved in the first place? The new social network has good things to say, but the complexity and approach may not be the best way to unseat Facebook.

There are two important concepts first articulated by Prof. John McCarthy of Stanford University, neither of which actually imply that computers will ever evolve to become intelligent, rational creatures. One is that electronic machines can learn functions and processes. Throughout the 56 years since this concept was introduced, it has been declared an undeniable fact numerous times, only for someone to subsequently reposition the qualifications bar for "learning."

The other is that artificial intelligence (AI) is implied by any process which, when done well and correctly, appears to have required human intelligence. In other words, like legislative gridlock, you don't have to see it yourself to know it exists.

From 1962 to present (no, that's not a typo), Vitamin T and An Event Apart have pulled together A Brief History of Web Standards. This infographic has a lot of interesting factoids and information about the evolution of the Web.

Now, when you're thinking "Web standards," you're probably thinking about things like HTML and CSS standards. The graphic touches on those, but pays particular attention to "standards" like typefaces and Godwin's Law (created in 1990, by the way).

We live in an era where it is feasible to manufacture things that seem like truths, and someone is always in the business of trying. If someone were to leak the entire contents of my active e-mail file, all 4.5 GB of it, onto some public wiki for the inspection of the entire world, folks would marvel at the astounding volume of all the bits of seemingly urgent, potentially life-threatening information I have somehow managed to ignore. There are apparently dozens of fellows who worked at, or for, or near Apple who have taken some secret with them out the door and have launched a startup with it. And it is absolutely amazing, the number of distressed foreign ambassadors who need my help in dislodging millions of dollars from American bank accounts.

You would think there was some kind of automated filter, an analysis system to separate the manufactured truths from the real ones. Indeed, industrious programmers are working to build systems that do precisely this. The problem is, more industrious folks are working even harder to devise methods to thwart such systems. The fake facts industry is becoming more clever than the real facts industry.