New to me local tech blog

Bojanglin

The method in Murdoch's madness

I wrote off Murdoch's latest threats to remove News Corp feeds from Google News as so much blather until I read Boing Boing:

So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

The problem with the deal to give Google the exclusive right to index MySpace is that it cheats the users whose postings create the value of MySpace. If I am a musician who is obliged to give my music away for free on MySpace to presuade fans to come to my concerts, I want the widest exposure possible. As Google is by far the largest search engine, I might overlook this limitation, or I might not. I might find a place to post my music that was visible to as many search engines as possible. Murdoch simply does not understand the online economy.

The problem with KickRSS

I wanted to create a public RSS reader of all the local tech, marketing, and PR blogs. I wanted one where the new posts would automatically float to the top, so readers could track the local zeitgeist.

Alas, my Tech on the Potomac KickRSS list does not seem the work that way. It appears to favor the blogs most recently added to the list rather than the most recent posts irrespective of blog. Can any of my readers suggest an RSS tool that would do that? If you remember the old Blogdigger tool, you will know what I am talking about.

Nominate your customer

The 2010 Federal 100 nomination form

Federal Computer Week is now accepting nominations for the 2009 Federal 100 awards program, which recognizes individuals in government and industry who have played pivotal roles in the federal information technology community.

Deadline: Dec. 11.

If your customer looks good, you look good.

Did the stimulous reduce EHR adoption?

Shahid Shah thinks that the "bill probably has frozen more customers into waiting than encouraging them to buy." Software Advice is conducting a survey on the subject.

Which vendor not to choose for your EHR system

The Washington Post: Electronic medical records draw frequent criticisms:

Legal experts say it is impossible to know how often health IT mishaps occur. Electronic medical records are not classified as medical devices, so hospitals are not required to report problems. Many health IT contracts do not allow hospitals to discuss computer flaws, say Koppel and Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Anytime a vendor wants you to sign an agreement that you will not discuss flaws in their system, that should set off a warning bell not to go near that vendor.

A more citizen centric FCC web site

Arts Technica reviews the new improved FCC web site:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a big step towards becoming more accessible on Friday, with an impressive upgrade of its Electronic Comment Filing System. The new EFCS offers far more searching capability, formatting flexibility, and bookmarking power than ever before. The system offers text searching and RSS conversion, and it makes it easier to comment on proceedings. EFCS 2.0 still doesn't go quite as far as we recommended last year, but it's another example of how the Commission is turning fcc.gov into a true public resource.

If the other agencies follow suit the collective impact will have an enormous effect upon a citizen's relationship with their government. I wonder if pubic affairs PR practitioners understand that.

How to publicize your Firefox extension

Today was spent listening to Steve Auerbach’s interesting presentation on Firefox extensions, and I got to thinking, how would a developer publicize their Firefox extensions?

Firefox lists extensions in order of number of downloads, and it shows the average ratings and links to reviews. Clearly you need to get your Firefox extension reviewed before users will try it.

The only thing I can think of is to send the link to any discussion list you participate in, and to members of any relevant user group you are a member of.