ReadWriteEnterprise

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.

The segment of the media delivery industry that may yet take off for consumers consists of programming and services that are delivered to newer HDTVs "over-the-top" (OTT) - meaning, outside of the cable or satellite provider's pipeline. Naturally, the Internet is the delivery medium here. In prior years, analysts have wondered how (or whether) traditional programming from multi-service operators (MSOs) like Comcast would compete.

The answer we may get from CES 2012 is that it won't have to. Semiconductor maker Broadcom is set to demonstrate a new class of system-on-a-chip (SoC) components that could be integrated into set-top boxes (STBs). This new class, numbered BCM72xx, would deliver OTT services alongside cable channels, in a format that would enable MSOs to utilize Android as the operating system, and Sling Media as the streaming provider for wireless devices. It could be the formula behind the phrase, "Goodbye, TiVo."

A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks' need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks - by implication, Facebook - would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

"Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers' financial services strategies," reads Weiss' conclusions, "and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users."

If you thought you had your online banking security situation under control, along comes this chilling blog entry from security vendor Trusteer about some really nasty stuff they observed over the holiday break. And especially for those of you that have chosen paperless statements, you want to read it carefully and understand the exploit.

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.

Just ask the man who signs my paychecks... or at least, go back to October 2007 and ask Richard MacManus, the founder and EIC of this publication. He would tell you directly and succinctly that ReadWriteWeb is not a blog. That is, by the definition of that time, it's not a one-man show. "ReadWriteWeb has evolved," Richard wrote at the time, "into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person."

Over the years, the complaints I've received from readers (we all receive some) center around the notion of bias - a tendency to interpret a story with the appearance of a certain slant or, perhaps more accurately, from an angle somewhat askew from the angle most others use in their interpretations. If a blog were truly by and about one person, then the appearance of bias would be impossible to avoid. Typically with publications, it is plurality that enables the reader to see the complete picture of subject matter. Plurality, for any organization, requires organization. And at a time when the Web publishing industry's definition of what we do evolves faster than our ability to do it, organization has been difficult to achieve.

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.

The Web publishing world was saddened to wake up this morning to the news from three nights earlier, repeated from a presumably reputable source, of the passing of the Golden Age of Tech Blogging. The Age apparently succumbed to complications following a series of seismic shifts in the industry, brought on by corporate media interests who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to believe they can make money publishing blogs.

Casualties include various editors for some of the industry's most renowned publications for several weeks running, who have evidently been hired by identically-sounding media firms to produce similar-looking publications, with equally ambiguous editorial responsibilities.

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.