Blog search, the next step

Right now most of the blog search tools, Technorati, Blogpulse, et al, are reasonably good at finding the most recent links or most recent postings on key words. But what if you want to search the archives? What if you want to know who was linking to you or your clients’ site in January 2005? Currently I know of no good way to do that sort of search. Anyone with an idea is encouraged to post it in the comments.

The trouble with Technorati

Like Media Orchard we have had problems with Technorati. According to Blogshares we have sixty-six inbound links, according to Technorati, fifty-one. Neither site picks up links from Content & Technology Crossroads or Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog.

Measuring inbound links is important, otherwise blog search engines would not exist. If they aren’t accurate, they aren’t useful.

New look for FCW.com

Changing with the times

The redesign began because of our growing appreciation of the Web’s importance. FCW has been at the forefront of Web publishing. Several years ago, when we redesigned Federal Computer Week, we realized that you probably get most of your daily news online. Federal Computer Week remains a news magazine. We see these pages as part of an agreement with our readers that we will tell you what you must know and why you need to know it.

By contrast, FCW.com is akin to the traditional wire services that report…well, just about everything. But we realized that we were not organizing it in the most effective way for you to find what you want.

The good news is that they kept it low bandwidth.

Memorial Day

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal"

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow, this ground -- The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, delivered at Gettysburg November 19, 1863.

Clouds on the horizon

The Cunning Realist

What's troubling is that we don't determine our own interest rates at this point. Essentially, the rest of the world is telling us that if we want to borrow to pay for preemptive wars and a reckless fiscal policy, we can---but other nations won't underwrite it on favorable terms. Think about that the next time your mortgage or credit card payment increases. President Bush gets blamed for a lot, and justifiably so. But this de facto ceding of monetary power to foreigners is an inexcusable and dangerous screw-up. It didn't have to happen.

The origin of net neutrality

Kevin Drum

The 1996 Telecommunications Act defined two different types of service, information services (IS) and telecommunications services (TS), and cable companies were originally classified as IS and telephone companies as TS. Although both cable companies and telcos provide local internet access, the backbone of the internet is carried exclusively by telcos, which were regulated as common carriers under the tighter TS rules. The common carrier rules effectively enforced the principles of net neutrality on the internet backbone.

Save the Internet

When crooks phish in your waters

Phishers are starting to spoof small businesses

Report the incident immediately. Notify the Anti-Phishing Work Group, as well as local, federal, and state law authorities immediately. Quick notification can help shut down the source of the phisher’s attacks and limit the damage. Additionally, reporting the incident to major search engines enables them to attempt to locate the offending servers and add them to their toolbars that are designed to block phishing attacks.

There is some good news though - Hundreds Collared For Global Net Scams

I would be interested in hearing from readers who have done crisis communications in this sort of situation.

Puppy power!

Disturbing news from BL Ochman:

For many years, there has been an unwritten rule in Central Park that dogs can be off-leash before 9 am and after 9 pm. Now some crazies called the Juniper Park Civic Association have brought a lawsuit against the Parks Department to end this privilege for dogs and their people.

The Urban Hound newsletter says "We don't think this lawsuit stands a chance (already, a judge has said it lacks reason). " But the leash Nazis won when they sued to keep dogs on leash in Riverside Park and now no dogs run free there.

A similar arrangement is in effect in the parks near where I live. Ultimately the answer is dog parks.

How Enterprise Search is different from Internet search

Dave Kellogg

Search is predicated on the existence of the thing you're seeking. When you are searching the entire Internet that assumption is usually true -- i.e., something probably exists that answers most any question you can pose. Dave cited a person who diagnosed his dog with lyme disease and thanked Google for it. That person can thank Google -- but, he should probably have greater thanks for the person who wrote the article that helped them do it. This existence assumption just isn't true inside the enterprise.

I had not previously considered this.

Search and user interface

Search should work like magic

Reading this article you realize how much Google has changed the IT industry for the better. Previously there had been all this talk about computer literacy and educating users. You still hear that kind of talk, but Google has shown that IT really can be as simple as a toaster. In the post-Google world it will no longer be possible to market buggy bloatware.

On the importance of getting it out the door

Jim Horton makes a crucial point about press releases:

Of course, the secret behind documents is they rarely have to be perfect. Few reporters quote them in their entirety, and as database documents on the internet, most people aren't able to grasp the subtleties in them.

So why do clients labor so? Time and again, we find they don't know what they want to do and a PR document is the instrument to help them find out.

The influence of wikis, case study

Definition of the Semantic Web:

The Semantic Web is a current project under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium to extend the ability of the World Wide Web by developing standards and tools that allow meaning to be added to the content of webpages. The goal of the semantic web is to create a universal medium for the exchange of data by allowing meaning to be given, using tools and tags, to the content within webpages.

Currently the world wide web contains html, which is a language that is useful for displaying graphics and text but does not lend any meaning to the content it describes. The semantic web will address this issue by allowing content to be described in XML documents using tools like RDF and OWL which are types of tags. These description tags that lend meaning to the content facilitates automated information gathering and research by computers.

In round numbers, this means machine processable web pages that facilitate information gathering software robots, which will be able to automatically pick up on the connections between information in different places.

Semantic Interoperability (XML Web Services) Community of Practice (SICoP)

The purpose of this CoP is to support two CIO Council Committees: (1) the Best Practices Committee's Knowledge Management Working Group and its Semantic Interoperability CoP, and (2) the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee's Emerging Technology Subcommittee in its work with the other two subcommittees (Enterprise Architecture Governance and Components) and the e-Gov Initiatives in their use of Semantic XML Web Services to demonstrate increased accessibility and interoperability. Background on CIO Council's XML Web Services Working Group (August 2002-September 2003): Brainstorming Session and Charter.

The Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice is the federal government’s group to rationalize the government’s XML components in a way that will promote interoperability and information sharing. If you build this kind of software, or any software that is likely to interact with it, the decisions made by the participants on this wiki will have an enormous impact on your company. Their decisions will become the de facto industry standard.

Could there be a clearer example of why wikis must be taken seriously?

Wikis, answer to the email flood?

Shamus McGillicuddy, SearchCIO

Paul Wormeli, executive director of the Ashburn, Va.-based Integrated Justice Information System (IJIS) Institute, has deployed blog technology inside his organization and says blogs speed up collaboration and reduce e-mail.

"With e-mail, if you want people to comment on a white paper, you send it out and get 20 people to look at it," Wormeli said. "A lot of them come back with the same [correction of a] misspelled word or a comment."

A blog, or weblog, is essentially an online diary. In the business environment, a blog allows knowledge workers to share information with other employees, who in turn can provide feedback.

Wiki is a term derived from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means "fast." A wiki is similar to a blog, but it allows users to both create and edit each other's content in a searchable database.

E-mail has proven itself to be an indispensable form of communication, but it has limits as a collaborative tool, experts agree. Enterprise content management systems are important for codifying and organizing important corporate data, but they can be expensive and inflexible. Blogs and wikis can fill in the collaborative gap.

Privacy

Good public relations, good marketing, just plain good.

Venture group selects local companies to pitch investors

Ben Hammer, Washington Business Journal

Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other investors are getting ready for the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association's annual Capital Connection two-day event May 30-31.

The regional venture capital organization expects as many as 1,000 people to attend the two-day event at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in D.C., with visitors coming from the mid-Atlantic, California, Chicago, Texas, New England, New York, Florida, Atlanta and elsewhere.

Keynote speakers are to include "Freakonomics" author Steve Levitt, Inc. magazine Editor-at-large Bo Burlingham and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner.

Reminder, another reason not to be an anonymous source

You are not anonymous.

Edit -

Seriously you are not anonymous.

Bob Somerby talks about journalism, comedy and The Daily Howler

Bob Somerby is a stand up comedian and publisher of The Daily Howler media criticism website. While Somerby follows press error wherever he sees it, his deconstruction of the coverage of the impeachment and the 2000 Presidential election was a forerunner and inspiration for American liberal blogosphere.

Somerby is important to PR, because he teaches us that blogosphere can be our a friend as easily as a threat. It was reading The Daily Howler that made me realize that clients on the receiving end of a hatchet job could get a hearing in blogosphere.

I asked Somerby how he came to work for The Baltimore Sun, and he responded that, in fact, he had never been a reporter; he wrote occasional op-ed pieces on education. He was working as a schoolteacher in Baltimore’s inner city schools and did not think anyone was discussing such systems in a realistic way. He told me that he was inspired by Jonathan Kozol. Somerby had intended to drop bombshells but found he was temperamentally unsuited to the task. Burned out as a teacher, he turned to stand-up comedy.

He opened the Charm City Comedy Club with a friend during the eighties, when comedy was hot. Initially, the club did very well, but when the owner of the building where the club was located went bankrupt, a series of disruptions occurred that made it impossible to keep the club open. The club had handled its own PR, calling the local newspapers and telling them, “Paul Reiser is in town; would you like to interview him?” They were reasonably successful in generating publicity. Incredibly, newspapers turned down an opportunity to interview Rosanne Barr just before she was famous (but when it was clear she was going to be big).

After the club closed down, Somerby went out on his own as a comic and hired a publicist. While he did get some publicity, it was too early in his career for such a step. (Note to fellow flacks; we need to target our marketing to those ready for our services.)

I asked Somerby what it was like performing during the sniper incident. He said it was an odd situation. Somerby found himself experimenting with jokes, worrying “will the audience buy it?”

Much of Somerby’s comedy involves a send up of marketing, and I asked him how he had selected his material. He responded by saying that he didn’t exactly select it, it had grown out of a one-man show that was autobiographical, much of which concerned the role of consumerism in our society.

Somerby observed, that unlike politics, subjects like Kellogg's and Nike are instantly accessible to audiences. (Somerby has a long riff on two scoops of raisins that is indescribably hilarious.)

One of the funniest moments of Somerby’s routine is when he quotes Kierkegaard at length. I asked him how he figured out that comedy club audiences would respond to Kierkegaard humor. He said that he had experimented a few times with college audiences, and they had liked it.

I asked Somerby to elaborate on his criticism of Colbert’s work for the White House Correspondents’ dinner. He said that the discussion about the performance was interesting. Somerby had watched the event live on C-SPAN and didn’t think Colbert was funny. He admitted it is a tough event to work because the most famous person in the world is the guest of honor, and somehow you have to poke fun at him without being rude. Somerby thought Colbert had crossed the line; Comics are hired to make their audiences laugh. Somerby said he simply wouldn’t accept a gig with a group he did not respect.

Somerby has some basis for comparison; he did an event in 1995 where he followed Clinton on stage. That can’t be easy.

Comedy can be very powerful, but, as Somerby pointed out, you have to make an audience laugh before you can persuade them of anything. When Reagan was at the height of his popularity, Robin Williams had a routine whose essential proposition was that Reagan was a puppet of the right-wing. Williams is so funny that somehow the routine was successful in spite of Reagan’s immense popularity.

Somerby thinks that when scientists succeed in mapping the brain, they will discover that jokes bypass the denial centers in the brain. If you’re funny enough you can challenge your audience’s most fundamental assumptions.

Somerby could not specifically remember why he started The Howler. He said he thought it was the ridiculous debate over Medicare and how every story was twisted into a referendum on Clinton’s character. He “couldn’t take it anymore,” so he began to type out deconstructions of journalism. Somerby did not own a computer, so he typed his work up and gave it to his webmaster to put online. He did not have email for the first year. At first, he drove around to libraries to look at microfilm; but later, the Hotline gave him access to Lexus/Nexus. He said it is incredibly useful and that he would nationalize it if he could.

Somerby said that the press got “completely crazy,” reaching fever pitch during the 2000 election. He can’t understand why Democrats do not talk about press bias and described the Democratic National Committee as a dumping ground for party hacks, like Bush’s FEMA. He saw the DNC arranging for Jim Nicholson, of all people, to have interviews with talk radio personalities covering the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Somerby has lost contact with operations at the DNC and has no opinion as to whether Howard Dean has made any difference.

He first learned that he was having an impact when a friend of his told him of being at a meeting and hearing Sydney Blumenthal say, “I’ve found the most amazing website!” At one point, he got a call from Hillary Clinton’s office desperate for a place they could correct wrong information. He also received an email from Michael Moore, asking if he could get updates automatically emailed to him.

I asked him if The Daily Howler had built his audience for his stand-up act. He said no; he even fears it may have lost him gigs. He is sure people have done Google searches on his name and gotten The Daily Howler, and not hired him because they were worried he would rant about The Washington Post. Having seen his act, I can assure readers that his routine is completely unrelated to The Howler.

I asked Somerby if there were any journalists he admired, and he simply replied Krugman. I was stunned there were not a few more, and he said he did not include Gene Lyons and Joe Conason, because he assumed I was only asking about the most famous journalists. Somerby also admires the work of David Maraniss, Michael Weisskopf, and Eric Boehlart.

At one time, he was rumored to be working on a book. He said he was thinking of writing one answering the question, “How did the worst President in history get elected?” Somerby criticizes both the Democrats and, surprisingly, the liberal web for not calling the press on their scripts.

Somerby has mixed feelings about liberal blogosphere; he said a friend of his had characterized it as Nader squared, because of its hostility to several of the best known Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

Somerby has no site statistics, because he is afraid to know how few readers he has. I suspect he would be pleasantly surprised. While he knows what Technorati is, he has never checked his links. Neither has he considered adding comments, especially after the brouhaha at The Washington Post. He said comments were “one more thing to spend time on.” Somerby confesses to not regularly checking his email when he has written something sure to displease his liberal audience.

Every morning, Somerby has breakfast at the local bagel joint and reads The New York Times and The Washington Post. Previously, he also read The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Times. He does not read magazines but does watch cable news, including Hardball, O’Reilly, Special Report and more recently the Abrams Report. He does not watch The NewsHour, as he does not think it drives the political dialog in the United States. Blogs he reads include Talking Points Memo, The Washington Monthly, Firedoglake, Hullabaloo, Tapped, TNR Plank, and Media Matters for America. He also scans Huffington Post.

I asked how he came to coin the phrase Celebrity Press Corps. He said that he wanted a lightly comical phrase to describe the tendency of people to become lazy and fatuous under the influence of money and fame. He characterized nationally known journalists as “flouncing around around like celebrities.”

Inspired by Kozol, Somerby had always want to report on inner city schools. He feels their stories are not being properly covered. Too many of those who write about education have no classroom experience.

Recently, he has started to write about education, drawing on his experience as a teacher in the Baltimore public school system. He said that there are no materials available to help children who are behind their grade level; that what is needed is reading materials, not endless testing regimes.

Edit -
Somerby is writing a book. How he got there. The press corps' war against Candidate Gore: How George W. Bush reached the White House

Blogging and the changing face of PR

What Press Pass? At E3, a Convergence of Card-Carrying Bloggers

The game industry, not to mention gamers themselves, relies on blogs to disseminate information: most of it inside-baseball, much but not all of it accurate, a lot of it quite funny -- if you follow the industry and consider Will Wright a rock star.

Games, which are created by and for young men, are a natural for blog marketing; but this is going to spread to every industry. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did not see the reversal of the media-food-chain, with reporters expecting your client to be mentioned in blogs before they are considered news.

More work.

More opportunities.

Net neutrality, connecting the dots

Tom Foremski:

Yet the startups are too tied up with their ventures and blinkered from seeing what is going on in the political realm, where the Telcos have huge sway thanks to institutional connections that span generations. They are very good at lobbying against any legislation that mandates net neutrality.

Paul Begala on CNN:

AT&T, by the way, wants to take over the Internet and start charging for access to the Internet, which Internet pioneers desperately oppose.

So, now, if you are running AT&T, and the president of the United States comes to you and says, hey, why don't I spy, why don't I snoop through your files there, and you want him to give you permission to control the Internet...

Jason Vest

None too pleased about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth doing the National Security Agency's (NSA) bidding, Arlen Specter says he's going to haul the three telecom companies before the Judiciary Committee for some pointed questions. Deja vu; in 1976, the now-deceased Rep. Bella Abzug did the same thing with three telegraph companies for their similar handmaiden-to-NSA roles. Looking back to those events, we can't help but wonder if there's more history that will repeat itself--will the Bush Administration try, as the Ford Administration did, to extend executive privilege to private industry.

The song remains the same.

Editorial calendars, how important?

Myths About Editorial Calendars

Myth #1: Editorial calendars are static. Once they are set by the publisher for the year, they never change.
Reality: Not even close. Ed cals change all the time. That means opportunities which look promising for a client one week may not be around the next. If you are stuck with the ed cal monitoring task, you will have to conduct twice the amount of follow-up with the reporter or editor in question to determine what the publication is really planning as far as editorial coverage for a given issue.

I am sorry to say I believed this.

ECM West - Call for Papers Now Open

ECM West Conference & Exposition
Powered by AIIM – The ECM Association
November 7-9, 2006
San José McEnery Convention Center – San José, California

AIIM - The ECM Association and Questex Media Group are currently seeking speaking proposals for the new west coast show. Please consider presenting if you have expertise (either technical or strategic) in any of the following topic areas:

• Data Capture/Storage
• Managing the Cost/Complexity of Compliance
• Search & Information Access
• Business Performance & Process Management
• Business Intelligence/Analytics
• Master Data Management/Data Integration
• E-mail Management
• Content Delivery - RSS/Blogs/Wikis, etc,

Session Information

Conference presentations will be 60 minutes in length.

All ECM West conference sessions are educational in nature; company- or product-specific promotion is strictly prohibited. An objective presentation that meets the educational expectations of the audience enhances the credibility of the speaker, the speaker's employer and the event itself.

To be considered for inclusion in the conference program, vendor and consultant submissions must include at least one customer co-presenter. End user panels are also welcomed.

CFP Procedure

Please submit your presentation proposal via our online form no later than Friday, June 2, 2006 at http://cfp.questex.com/callforpapers . Please note that submissions received after that date will be considered on a back-up basis only.

When completing the application, please keep in mind that the most critical parts of the application are the session title, description, and key learning objectives. These three sections are meticulously reviewed when determining the most appropriate topic/speaker for a topic, so please make it a point to be as compelling and concise as possible.

The June 2, 2006 deadline will be here before you know it. Submit today at:
http://cfp.questex.com/callforpapers

Thank you for considering a speaking role at ECM West. We look forward to receiving your proposal! To learn more about ECM West, visit http://www.ecmwest.com.

New Government Concerns with Identity Theft

NCC-AIIM Monthly Meeting, Thursday, May 11, 2006

Speaker: James E. Kasprzak, Ph.D., Professor, National Defense University

Identity theft is a significant problem in our technological society and a concern to government information managers. There were over 1 million cases a year in the United States last year in a "perfect storm" of technological change, citizen perceptions, and criminal activity. Actions that can lead to identity theft include unauthorized access to social security numbers, drivers' licenses, credit card numbers, credit reports, passport numbers, birth certificates, and resumes -– most of which are found in government files. The government information environment used to be compartmentalized with "gatekeepers," but today, with remote access and software insecurities, electronic government information is valuable and easier to duplicate and transmit. The electronic world offers new challenges to government information managers at all levels. Dr. Kasprzak will talk about citizen fears, legislative initiatives, policy approaches, and technical solutions to guard against identity theft. You will leave with new information that will serve you both in your business work and in your personal life.

I saw him speak at the NCC AIIM Educational Seminar, this is not to be missed.

Encouraging news from the National Federation of Independent Business

Reuters

The National Federation of Independent Business reported that its index of optimism among small businesses gained 2.1 points to 100.1 in April, driven in part by expectations of stronger job growth for the second quarter.

Presto Vivace caters to small and medium sized businesses, so this is very encouraging news.

Economic indicators

Treasuries slip as traders eye Fed meeting, supply

U.S. Dollar Slides Against Euro, Yen on Rate Fed Speculation

Gold hits 25-year high, then retreats, silver steady

The great housing bubble has finally started to deflate, and the fall will be harder in some markets than others.

Worrisome.

NIST issues draft guidance for IT security metrics

William Jackson, Government Computer News

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released the initial public draft of its Special Publication 800-80 titled Guide for Developing Performance Metrics for Information Security.

NIST is inviting public comment on the guidance, which provides a methodology for linking information security program performance to agency performance. It is a companion guide to SP 800-55, titled Security Metrics for Information Technology Systems, and uses security controls spelled out in a third NIST publication, SP 800-53 Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems.

If you have an opinion as to how security performance should be linked to agency performance, now is the time to make your views known.

Motorola launches developer forum on internet

Paul Taylor, Financial Times

Motorola, the US-based mobile phone and electronics group, will on Monday launch an initiative, dubbed Motodev, designed to make it easier and more rewarding for software developers to innovate with Motorola, its products and technologies.

Motodev will pull together Motorola’s three existing software developer programmes – Motocoder, which has more than 200,000 members, iDen and Horizon – into a single web-based developers’ forum.

This is just one example of how the use of social software to organize communities is spreading from politics to business.

Once again the Internet lowers the barriers to entry

Sites Let Amateurs Be Published Authors Without the Book Deal

"The book industry is next in line to be 'indied' after music and movies," declared Blurb founder Eileen Gittins, referring to material that ordinary people produce independent of large media companies. "In the past three years there has been a huge shift from people being downloaders and consumers, to being uploaders and producers."

Lulu

Blurb

Public safety blogosphere

First Response Coalition Blog

Arlington Fire Journal, History of the fire and rescue service in Arlington County, Virginia In cooperation with Arlington County Fire Department Historical Society Arlington County Fire Department "First Due" at Pentagon 9/11/01

Chronicles of a Paramedic / Probie Firefighter, From the streets to the back of the ambulance and into the firehouse. I hope to share all my experiences about the job, the camaraderie, and, of course, the fun stuff. Hey! Sign my guest book!

EMT Blog, Ramblings of an Emergency Medical Technician in Rural America

Firefighter Blog, Firefighter stories, news, occassional commentary, general firefighting content.

Homeland Security Watch, News and analysis of critical issues in homeland security today.

Interoperability Streams, Communications interoperability news & views

LAFD News & Information, Los Angeles Fire Department - Media & Public Relations

Medic!, A transplanted EMT family from California embarks on a new life. See my quest to become a firefighter/paramedic, coping with cancer, and other fun stuff.

Miami - Dade Fire Rescue

OPEN TARGET, A blog by Clark Kent Ervin devoted to meaningful discussions of homeland security issues

Roanoke Firefighters, This is an unofficial site dedicated to the past, present, and future of Roanoke Virginia's Bravest

Goliath vs Goliath?

Finance firms may weigh in on net-neutrality battle

The financial-services industry is considering coordinated opposition to the “net neutrality” language in the House’s video franchising bill, fearing a financial hit if lawmakers allow phone and cable companies to charge banks more for secure Web service.

More news from Save the Internet. Major kudos to Doc Serls for being one of the first to sound the alarm.

Information sharing, moving forward

Industry Endorses National Law Enforcement Data Exchange System

N-Dex is a national system to support the investigative process allowing all law enforcement agencies of any size and jurisdiction to share incident related information (not intelligence) to correlate crime information and find suspects. The system has the potential of fulfilling the need to allow local, state, tribal and Federal law enforcement to share incident information that will lead to higher clearance rates and greater productivity and effectiveness of the investigative function.

Justice and Law Enforcement Information Exchange Clearinghouse Goes Live

Yesterday, the IJIS Institute announced that the Bureau of Justice Assistance in the Office of Justice Programs of the U.S. Department of Justice has added an information exchange clearinghouse to its web site to allow government and industry developers to post information exchange package descriptions (IEPD's) about information exchanges that have been documented in law enforcement and justice. The site is at http://it.ojp.gov/iepd/.

The purpose of the clearinghouse is to provide a single source of information on IEPD's that have been developed or are being developed so that others can find models to follow or collaborate on the development of documentation packages for specific exchanges. The IEPD is a well-defined set of artifacts about an information exchange, including XML schema that conforms to the Global Justice XML Data Model (GMXDM). The concept behind the definition of the IEPD and the process which has been developed for creating them is to promote component reuse in the development of information sharing activities in the law enforcement and justice world.

Information sharing has two parts: one is the policy part which decides when, and under what circumstances it is legal to share information; and the other is the technical part which establishes standards and procedures that makes it technically possible to share information. It is the technical part of this that the IJIS Institute was established to address.

How influential are blogs?

In the United States we are about to find out. One thing bloggers agree on is the necessity of preserving the neutral net. To that end Save the Internet was created. Can the collective voice of blogosphere overwhelm the carriers? We are about to find out.

Economic indicators

US yields jump on rate rise talk

US Treasuries fell and yields jumped after a series of strong data fuelled market speculation that the Federal Reserve might not pause its tightening cycle if the numbers continue to signal a booming economy.

Dollar sinks to one year low against euro

The dollar fell to new lows against a range of currencies on Monday as the combination of European and Asian holidays led to thin markets, emboldening momentum traders looking to test the market’s mood.

Gold at new 25 year high

Gold climbed above $660 a troy ounce to new quarter-century highs on Monday as investors sought safety amid continuing tension over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and worries about inflation and a weakening dollar.

Just doesn’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling does it?