John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 10, 2009

For the past few days I've been focused on a final draft of an essay, co-authored with Tim O'Reilly, focusing on the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit. It's rewarding work, reminiscent of the early days of Wired, when I'd regularly edit or write long form pieces focusing on big ideas and the future, but grounded in real world examples from today. But writing and editing this kind of stuff is also challenging work, and I often procrastinate, as I am right now, by writing a blog post or skimming

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Collaboration 2.0

JUNE 8, 2009

During a telephone conversation between us last week Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch said he was going to pick up on my Collaboration Networks meme, and he has now produced a solid post on this topic. Aaron takes on the number one issue plaguing widespread adoption of broad Enterprise 2.0 strategy: piecemeal departmental use of collaboration tools, [.

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ChiefTech

JUNE 28, 2009

I know I'm repeating myself , but just a reminder that if you live in Sydney and either haven't watched the Us Now documentary yet or simply would like the chance to discuss it further, then join us on the evening of Thursday 9th July at the Australian Technology Park* for a special community screening. Its a free event, but you do need to register - and of course, don't forget to tell your friends about it.

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Government IT 46

Hunton Privacy

JUNE 26, 2009

On July 1, 2009, new laws will take effect in Alaska and South Carolina that will require entities that have experienced data security breaches involving personal information to notify affected individuals of the breaches. With these additions, a total of 44 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, will have active breach notification laws in place.

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Security Passwords Paper Access 40

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

IT

Positively RIM

JUNE 24, 2009

Historical objectivity is always difficult. I never give full credence to, for example, the American Film Institute’s lists of movie superlatives because they always seem skewed toward recent films. That’s not surprising. Can anyone born after 1940 really appreciate the impact of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films? Fully recognizing my historical subjectivity, I nonetheless suggest that Records & Information Management is evolving rapidly.

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Records Management Government IT 40

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 30, 2009

There's quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book "Free" has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing.) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn't convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own.

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IT 68

Collaboration 2.0

JUNE 28, 2009

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle discussed their vision and nomenclature for the next iteration of the web in a webinar last Thursday: I believe the recording will be available online sometime this week, slides are above. With the term ‘Web 2.0′ enjoying its fifth birthday (and supposedly entering dictionaries as the millionth phrase in the English [.

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IT 50

ChiefTech

JUNE 11, 2009

As you may know, in the past I worked at Ernst & Young in their Centre for Business Knowledge , the group who are responsible for the “ KWeb ” intranet. Outside of the top tier accounting firms (who have always understood they are involved in knowledge work), I’ve yet to find any large organisations with such a cohesive or advanced intranet, so I like to track public case studies and articles about Ernst & Young ’s intranet and knowledge management program to see how it is progressing si

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Hunton Privacy

JUNE 17, 2009

The Obama Administration today formally announced its sweeping proposal for new regulation of the financial industry. The plan proposes the formation of a new watchdog agency that would seek to protect consumers’ interests. The proposal raises a number of privacy and data security questions, such as the role of the new financial services consumer protection agency in protecting privacy and data security and the continued role of the Federal Trade Commission as the lead agency in this are

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Financial Services Privacy Security IT 40

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Risk

Positively RIM

JUNE 23, 2009

If the roots of Records & Information Management are at least 2300 years old, why is Innovation a top RIM priority in 2009? Beyond the truism, “Stagnation is death,” the answer identifies key, even vital, roles for records managers and their programs. Certainly, innovation is a hot topic. It is the cover story of the June 15th BusinessWeek and the focus of a fast-selling book, The Innovation Zone , by Delphi Group oracle Tom Koulopoulos.

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Records Management Metadata Paper Government 40

Scary Beasts Security

JUNE 10, 2009

Here's another XXE bug for you (resulting in file theft), just to make the point that this class of bugs is well worth watching out for in client-side applications (such as a browser :) [link] The good news here is that this WebKit regression was quickly fixed by Apple -- and in time for the Safari 4 final release -- so no production browser should ever have been affected.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 11, 2009

Much buzz over the past few days about Facebook's plans to let folks (and, ahem, brands) claim their namespaces on Facebook. IE, Starting this weekend, I should be able to claim www.facebook.com/johnbattelle, just like I already "own" www.twitter.com/johnbattelle ( sort of ). Anil Dash has a very funny send up of all this in a future forward timeline satire here.

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IT 49

Collaboration 2.0

JUNE 30, 2009

The above video clips (from my handheld Flip) are from John Chambers Cisco Live! keynote address today and are specifically two edits about Cisco’s strategic perspective on collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. In the second edit Chambers talks about Cisco’s business architectural re-engineering into a collaborative enterprise, which I have previously written [.

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Security

ChiefTech

JUNE 29, 2009

To quote myself : "I've been thinking about migrating my original blog off of blogger and on to something like a hosted Wordpress site or something similar. Since moving to a Mac in March, I've also found that blogging without Windows Live Writer just isn't the same either ;-) But then I find myself getting caught up on what theme to use, different widgets and all that complication. and all I really want is something clean and simple (I'm sure most of you only read my RSS feed anyway) where I sh

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IT 40

Hunton Privacy

JUNE 17, 2009

As of January 1, 2010, Nevada law will require businesses to use encryption when data storage devices that contain personal information are moved beyond the physical or logical controls of the business, in addition to continuing to require that personal information be encrypted if it is transferred outside the secure system of the business. The new law repeals the existing Nevada encryption law, which will remain in effect until January 1, 2010.

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Encryption Compliance Security IT 40

Positively RIM

JUNE 10, 2009

Last March, I spoke to ARMA’s Denver Mile High Chapter about the synergy of RIM and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Afterward, a respected colleague questioned my slogan, “Everyone is a Records Manager!” He was willing to concede that everyone touches records, but not everyone manages them. It’s true that I am given to hyperbole, and that he has a point, especially in the paper records era.

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Records Management ECM Paper Sales 40

Scary Beasts Security

JUNE 8, 2009

Safari 4 was just released and among the various improvements is a range of security fixes. One of these fixes is for an XXE attack against the parsing of the XSL XML. Full technical details may be found here: [link] Or for the lazy, you can skip straight to the: Demo for Safari 3 / MacOS Demo for Safari 3 / Windows I found it interesting that Safari 3 seemed robust against XXE attacks in general -- there are a lot of places that browsers find themselves parsing XML (XmlHttpRequest, prettifying

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Security IT 20

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IT

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 25, 2009

Facebook's opening up even more, as CNet reports. Facebook has posted an update to its "Publisher" settings - basically, the instrumentation to your status updates - that makes it possible to broadcast the value you create in the social web through composition - of a status update, a blog post, or any other action that you might wish to declare. You can instrument it to be seen only by your network, or your network's network, or everyone - and it's that everyone part that makes Facebook a lot mo

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IT 45

Collaboration 2.0

JUNE 8, 2009

The new Siemens talent managing environment being deployed by SuccessFactors is more like the entire troposphere than a cloud solution; 420k users across 80 countries in 20 languages will be linked and unified in one giant environment. Replacing existing multiple HR talent systems globally with Successfactor’s on demand software as a service performance and talent management [.

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Cloud 43

ChiefTech

JUNE 22, 2009

These are the slides from my PublicSphere presentation yesterday: If it isn't broken, why fix it? View more Microsoft Word documents from James Dellow. BTW There is a great column in the UK's Independent newspaper by Headshift's Lee Bryant about "rebooting Britain" that reflects some of the points I made around the need to understand the potential for Government 2.0 from a different viewpoint, which naturally drives us towards a different approach to the way government and the community work tog

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Government IT 40

Hunton Privacy

JUNE 16, 2009

A lawsuit that will soon commence in Arizona has the potential to alter the data breach liability landscape by making data security auditors liable for data breaches experienced by the companies they audit. The case, Merrick Bank Corp. v. Savvis Inc., has its origins in events that began in 2003, when Merrick Bank (“Merrick”) offered to hire CardSystems Solutions (“CardSystems”) to process credit card transactions for its merchant customers.

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Security Data breaches Information Security Encryption 40

Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

Customer Experience

Positively RIM

JUNE 1, 2009

The RIM world still wrestles with the progression of paper records into electronic records, as well as the integration of the two. Paper or plastic? Isolated or federated? Local or remote? The choices are endless. To successfully address these issues, it helps to know the back-story. How did we get here from there? Until the mid-1980s, almost all business records were physical, that is, the medium that held the information was made up of atoms.

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Computer and Electronics Paper Records Management Libraries 40

Scary Beasts Security

JUNE 9, 2009

Safari 4 also fixes an interesting cross-domain XML theft. Full technical details live here: [link] XML theft can include highly sensitive data thanks to things like XHTML, AJAX-y RPCs using XML and authenticated RSS feeds. The example I have steals XML representing a logged-in Gmail user's inbox: Safari 3 demo for users logged in to Gmail I think there's a lot more room for browser-based cross-domain leaks (sometimes called UXSS or universal XSS).

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Authentication 20

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 10, 2009

Seth has a funny interpretation of what "Bing" stands for: But It's Not Google. This is a week old post, but I was just catching up on my reading. The rest of his post, however, strikes me as not quite right. In it he says: The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google.

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Collaboration 2.0

JUNE 16, 2009

Reuters are reporting that the US State Department stepped in and asked Twitter to postpone maintenance in order not to disrupt service during Iranian daytime. Twitter, in their blog post explaining the rescheduled downtime, said …our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.

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Communications 42

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Analytics

ChiefTech

JUNE 8, 2009

Martin Koser (aka Frogpond) has posted an experts profile about me on the Enterprise2Open blog. It covers my views on: The core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea; The potential of the Enterprise 2.0; Challenges, threads and issues. Tags: Enterprise 2.

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IT 40

Hunton Privacy

JUNE 12, 2009

The UK Information Commissioner is initiating a consultation to develop a code of practice that will help companies address online privacy issues. It is anticipated that the code will provide guidance on the following matters: Operating a privacy-friendly website. Rights and protections for individuals. Privacy choices and default settings. Cyberspace and territoriality.

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Privacy IT 40

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 10, 2009

It had to happen, and it has. Twitter's unbelievable growth numbers have flatlined , or even gone down, if you look at Quantcast (the site is not Quantified). This was predictable, given all the media hype and new folks, and the very real newbie problem I outlined in this post last month. I predict Twitter will address this issue, and growth will resume, but at a more moderate and sustainable pace.

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