Federal acquisition wiki

Alice Lipowicz reports that GSA is testing a Better Buy wiki.

I knew that once the civil service was given the chance they would enthusiastically adopt social media. Collaboration is what government service is all about, so it is just too useful not to be used.

DC Hackathon

RHoK #1.0 – RHoK’s First Global Hackathon

Random Hacks of Kindness is going global! On June 4th through 6th, 2010 RHoK, in collaboration with the Crisis Commons, is hosting its second hackathon. This event is going to be a global gathering of hackers in many locations around the world, coming together in real time for a marathon weekend of coding around problems relating to natural disaster risk and response.

The Main Stage for RHoK #1.0 will be in Washington D.C., where events will kick off with a June 4, 2010 reception at the Department of State, followed by forty-eight hours of hacking madness at the Microsoft offices in Chevy Chase, MD. Simultaneously, hackers will be coming together on every continent for five global satellite RHoK events in Sydney, Australia; Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; Jakarta, Indonesia and Sao Paolo; Brazil.

This international group of hackers will be working on problem definitions contributed by Crisis Commons, The World Bank, the State Department and teams on the ground in Haiti. Don’t miss RHoK’s inaugural global hackathon. Register below for one of RHoK #1.0’s six global locations.

New to me local marketing communications blog

rp3 Agency

Is Facebook more trouble than it is worth?

I am beginning to think so. Everyday brings more stories about Facebook's ever changing privacy policies and the ever more complicated steps users must take to opt out of Facebook anti-privacy default settings.

The most annoying thing is that you have to keep an eye on this and continually adjust your settings to maintain the level of privacy you want. It is very difficult to do business with a company that continually alters their policies.

And that doesn't even include Facebook's continuing problem with security vulnerabilities.

In my industry I am more or less expected to maintain a Facebook account in the event that a client wants my company to build a Facebook site. Otherwise I would probably pull my account. As it is I have taken to posting every Facebook privacy breach story that I see on my facebook account. It is just my little way of telling Facebook that they have a problem.

Note - Pip.io has better privacy settings. If it catches on I am moving my material there.

Edit -
Richi Jennings has an excellent run down of the controversy.

New to me local tech blog

Thinking Clearly, a semantic web blog from Clark and Parisa

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' meeting

Dan Gillmor makes a good point:

Is there another big public company whose top people sit and take questions like this? #brk2010

My congratulations to their investor relations team who must have spent weeks preparing for this.

Also, some seriously good reporting by Gillmor with pithy comments at 140 characters at a time. Not so easily done.

Records management blogging

Via Digital Landfill we learn that AIIM has launched a Records Management Community.

Ethical organizations do not traffic in stolen property

I am with Jeff Bercovici, Apple has grounds for suing Gizmodo.

It seems that one of Apple's engineers accidentally left his new iPhone at a restaurant and the person who found it rather than than return it decided to sell it to Gizmodo. This is not the relationship of a news organization and a source, it is the relationship of a fence and a thief.

We have seen this over and over again. News organizations would seem to think themselves above the law. Truly shameful.

Edit -
It seems that the Superior Court of San Mateo shares my view that news organizations are not above the law.

Scott Adams comments as only he can.

Uh-oh, San Mateo law enforcement may have overplayed its hand.

Oh my goodness, it appears law enforcement might have had a conflict of interest.

New to me local tech blogs

The DLT Blog


Managing Experience, John Whalen's ideas on User Experience, Social Media, and Persuasive Design from Washington, DC

Everybody is managing editor

John Byrne has a post about how those of us who read news online do not have a favorite news organization. That is certainly true of your humble servant. I have favorite reporters. I even have favorite sections of certain news publications. But I don't have a favorite publication.

I have an RSS reader with feeds from all my favorite reporters, bloggers, etc. I suspect others are the same way.

Every time I go anywhere, I always ask people what their favorite source of technology news is. I am struck by how often they tell me that they simply have a handful of Google News Alerts on the topics that interest them the most and read whatever comes up that day. Press releases are considered very reliable, readers are interested in what companies say about themselves.

Readers have been empowered by the Internet and news organizations have yet to come up with the right business model to profit in the new environment. Those of us in public relations must hope they find a profitable model soon.

My unvarnished opinion

From Thursday's For Immediate Release we learn about Unvarnished, a social media site that lets anyone say anything about anybody. Create an account, create a profile on any acquaintance, and say what you want.

Did someone create a profile about you that was derogatory? Well, just create an account and refute what was said. Persuade your friends to create accounts so that they can defend you. What a terrific business model, what a terrific way to build site traffic.

It would be nice to think that this would be a way for Dilbert, Wally, and Alice to tell the unvarnished truth about their pointy haired boss. It is just as likely as to give the pointy haired boss a chance to trash the reputations of Dilbert, Wally, and Alice so that they can't get jobs at better companies.

Let me bring my very Washington, DC perspective on this; this will quickly degenerate into a cesspool of partisan smear jobs which will go much further down the food chain than is presently the case. I mean if you can damage the careers of every precinct captain of the rival party, or at least the ward chairs, you can go a long way to destroying most of your prospective opposition candidates before they even think about running for office.

The possibilities of dirty tricks are endless. Are you a company who has been attacked in the press? Just create a profile of the reporter and allege that he is the office boor. Is your company being threatened with a product liability suit? Don't just smear the lawyer and the plaintiff, smear all the potential witnesses in the case.

Are you an oil company? Is there an assistant professor at some community college somewhere getting locals all riled up about global warming? Create a negative profile and prevent him from getting tenure.

Are you a hostile intelligence agency? Is there an engineer who is working on a breakthrough weapon that your country is not ready to counter yet? Create a smear profile on Unvarnished and see if you can get his security clearance yanked.

Did someone create a negative profile on you? Presto Vivace's advice would be to create an account and use the facts to refute the negative remarks that were made. Then ask your online friends to write something nice about you, on their blogs, relevant Ning communities, any online community that would be visible to your professional milieu and ignore Unvarnished. Don't give it more online visibility, don't build its site traffic. With any luck the site will fade away as one of those Web 2.0 projects that just did not work out.

Edit -

Todd Defren has a somewhat different perspective, but takes a very similar view of Unvarnished.

Wasily Kandinsky Animation

18 marketing agencies who should hang their heads in shame

YouTube's response to Viacom's lawsuit:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

I am just going to assume that Google would not make such a claim unless it could prove it six ways to Sunday.

In which case we have 18 marketing agencies from the sock puppet school of marketing. Sigh.

Surely all of Viacom's shows have fan clubs; most likely Facebook pages. That is what fan clubs and Facebook pages are for. Before a show you send out Tivo alerts; after a show you send out the links to online video on your own site. You put social tagging on your site, and then you just let nature take its course.

Edit -
It seems that Viacom has unearthed some incriminating internal Google emails.

New to me local PR blogs

bwfpr; the official blog of Brotman•Winter•Fried Communications

CRT/tanaka Blog

Feds launch Smart Grid blog

EETimes reports that NIST has decided to launch a blog to give the public a chance to comment on standards for home-to-smart-grid interface. I trust people will look at it, because now is the time to comment.

State of deployment of IPv6

Command Information has an informative post on this complete with spreadsheet.

Today in content management

Rutrell Yasin reporting for Government Computer News:

The Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information is looking to deploy cloud-based customer relationship and project management software over the next six weeks to its Regional Extension Centers.

The Labor Department is making similar moves.

How to migrate your blog to SharePoint.

Lora Bentley of IT Business Edge interviews Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for information management solutions at HP.


Welcome to the Real Story Group; also on Twitter.

All from Presto Vivace's Google News: Content Management Systems.

The Kneber botnet and the day's Gov IT news

Jaikumar Vijayan reporting for ComputerWorld:

Security researchers at Herndon, Va.-based NetWitness Corp. have unearthed a massive botnet affecting at least 75,000 computers at 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide.

The Kneber botnet, named for the username linking the affected machines worldwide, has been used to gather login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems for the past 18 months, according to NetWitness.

Congratulations NetWitness for a job well done.

John Foley of Information Week interviews Casey Coleman, CIO of the Government Services Administration.

William Welsh for Washington Technology: GSA, DISA launch commercial satellite solicitation

WFED's Max Cacas reports on AFFIRM's meeting on cyber security.

William Jackson for Government Computerter News: Second draft of Smart Grid security architecture released for public comment
If you have an opinion about this, now is the time to comment.

All the day's government technology news on the Presto Vivace's Google News Government IT section.

New to me local tech blogs

On Queue, from agencyQ
Bethbeck's Blog
Alliance Interactive
Co-OpTek
Community IT Innovators
Aptify CEO Blog
Spider Bytes, from Spider Systems: an informal mix of whatever is on our minds. We write about all kinds of things, ranging from new product features for our customers to technical tips for other software developers.
QSM, The Intelligence Before Successful Software Projects
Inventory & AIDC Software Blog
Attensity Company Blog
Inside Intellectual Property, from Legal Advantage
Franconnect
Enterprise Content Management - the Indigo Arc Viewpoint: Discussion about Content Management strategies, tools and issues; the overlap between Enterprise Architecture and Content Management.
CYNCZ, your contacts anytime anydevice

There is a limit to what PR can do for you

Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath

Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.

Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.

Of course we are not really in a post bail out world, otherwise Congress would not have prepared the ground for an additional $4 trillion bail out.

Angry citizens are already moving their money. Things can only get worse if banks continue to award outrageous bonuses to management so out of control that they require multiple trillion dollar bail outs.