Happy New Year

Merry Christmas

Blog around the Potomac

Shamun Mahmud writes about Security Requirements in Government Cloud Computing and alerts us to the creation of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, and the Cloud Security Alliance.

Van Ristau writes about Ransomware.

Kendall Clark describes the latest work on Stardog (an RDF database), now with SPARQL 1.1.

Jay Selway talks about the complexity of simplicity, including an important principle of mine, "No jargon or compu-speak.

Richard Greco reminds of the risks of unsecured smart phones. Infographic: 20 Years of Technology Innovation

Ronan Wisdom talks about using RFID for healthcare compliance.

David Sprott advises us not to treat business audiences as dummies when we explain Service Oriented Architecture (or anything else for that matter).

Lastly the brilliantly named Flack Ops talks about the curious case of the memo sent out by the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, and the best take yet on the recent Presidential election.

New to me tech blogs

InteleNews, the blog of Intelenex

Perusing Pirooz's World

Avectra Blog

The AKG Blog

MicroPact BPM blog

The Interfolio Blog

Innocative-e Blogs

meetdux.com, project management for sharepoint + sharepoint for project management

Society of Women Engineers Region G Blog

ICF Ironworks Blogs

Best name ever for a PR blog

Flack Ops

Disaster PR done right

Bill Gerth, Comcast Cares

XFINITY WiFi hotspots are listed here http://www.xfinity.com/wifi . Non XFINITY Internet customers will need to click on Complimentary Trial Session

This is a perfect example of public service in time of trouble. It will introduce people to Comcast in such a way as to make a great impression.

Well done Comcast.

Pitching an op-ed to the New York Times

Of all the hoopla about Greg Smith's new book I confess that the process of pitching an op ed to the New York Times was what caught my eye:

Smith decided to submit his piece to the op-ed page of The New York Times — the publication he thought “would have the most impact.”

When submitting his piece to oped@nytimes.com resulted in no response, Smith tried again — this time directly writing to a handful of editors. By the next morning, Smith had gotten the green light.

So the New York Times gets the editorial equivalent of a bolt of lightening and no one recognizes it until he sends it to specific people. This is my experience in media relations. If you follows the procedures laid out by news organizations you, and your client will get ignored. In order to catch their attention you have to send your material to a specific person.

Getting to know SEO

Recently I have begun to research SEO in a much more detailed and comprehensive way. SEO is like those piano exercises from Czerny; not music, but necessary techniques to play music.

So it is necessary to develop libraries of key words to include in your online writing; but at the same time not focus on those keywords. It is necessary to cultivate links, but not spam them. It is the difference between planting a garden and rolling out astroturf.

Matt McGee's piece in Search Engine Land, Ex-Googler: “To Please Google With Your SEO, Forget About SEO” indicates that this is the correct way to think about SEO. You can't forget SEO, no more than you can forget technique when playing music, but you can't let SEO guide your online communications. It is necessary to write for people, not software bots.

New to me local blogs

EDM: effective database management, This weblog is focused on the association management system (AMS) software market. The objective of this blog is to provide a forum for dicussing issues that affect the AMS market and the associations that use off-the-shelf AMS software packages.

Acronym, the blog of the ASEA

Privasoft

Begging the question

Beg the Question

"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

I always get this wrong.