Weekly digest week 45 2009

This week items about traversing corporate firewalls, is Google going evil, six social media trends for 2010 and what online gaming might teach software delivery teams.  I would like to thank Jolijn Posthuma and Rena Patel for providing links for the last few weekly digests. If you have any links that should make this weekly digest, please let me know.

• Brands Are Not Allowed To Make Mistakes, But People Are
  When Scott Monty from Ford or Richard from Dell make a mistake, they correct it. People respond, trust is earned, the brand is protected and everyone moves on.  When Motrin, Wal-mart, Target, Hasbro, Ticketmaster or any other brand make a mistake in social media, credibility is lost. Consumers lose trust and the offending brand becomes a slide in one of the countless number of PowerPoint decks detailing what *not* to do.
• Traverse Corporate Firewalls – Wired How-To Wiki
  Censorship has never been popular with American citizens. Unfortunately, censorship is very popular with American corporations. Whether to keep you from wasting your time checking Facebook or to curb potential infiltration by viruses, most corporate networks impose some level of censorship on the sites employees can visit or even the protocols they can use. The situation is even worse for those outside the U.S. Many countries outright ban certain sites and others provide only limited access to sites hosted outside the country.
• HYPE framework [Flash]: New creative code framework by Branden Hall & Joshua Davis
  Created by Branden Hall & Joshua Davis, HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.
• The four pillars of collaboration
  IBM and Microsoft both offer quite good collaboration functionality. Which do you go with? That depends on your organization’s approach to messaging and IT infrastructure. If you have decided that your collaboration strategy will focus on a suite approach as opposed to best-of-breed technologies, then you will most likely take a hard look at IBM and Microsoft to meet your needs. Both IBM and Microsoft have produced a suite of integrated technologies that deliver a collaboration functionality that addresses all four of the collaboration pillars. Microsoft delivers collaboration functionality in a combination of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/ Exchange and IBM delivers the functionality in a combination of Quickr, Connections, and Lotus Notes/Domino.
• Has Google Gone Evil?
  In most technical circles, Microsoft has been considered the evil empire for many years. Well, Microsoft may have a new challenger for that title as Google has decided they want to rule the world, and the blogosphere has started to notice. Google has been given a free pass for quite some time because they changed the way we use the internet. They were the cool company to work for too. It is interesting how things change over the years.
• What online gaming might teach software delivery teams (PDF)
  How can we harness the enthusiasm of online gaming communities to improve software delivery by globally dispersed companies? This paper explores ways in which virtual teams might work more closely together.
• What Social Media Monitoring Won’t Get You
  Companies, brands and their respective marketing and public relations managers are clamoring to know what people are saying about them on the web. I would offer that social media monitoring has been the single-largest technology-based industry boom in the last 10 years, though search engine optimization firms might win that title.
• Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 – Solving a Sudoku using Recursive Subquery Factoring
  Oracle Database 11g Release 2 introduces a new feature called Recursive Subquery Factoring. My collegue Lucas sees it as a substitute for Connect By based hierarchical querying, Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 – new style hierarchical querying using Recursive Subquery Factoring. When I first was thinking about a pratical use for this feature I couldn’t come up with anything, but on second thought:: solving Sudokus!
• Introducing Closure Tools
  Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we’ve built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We’re happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.
• Marine Traffic
  It provides free real-time information to the public, about ship movements and ports, mainly across the coast-lines of Europe and N.America. The project is currently hosted by the Department of Product and Systems Design Enginnering, University of the Aegean, Greece. The initial data collection is based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS). We are constantly looking for partners to take part in the community. They will have to install an AIS receiver and share the data of their area with us, in order to cover more areas and ports around the world.

Light reading:

• The Myth of “Good Code”
• A Pocket Guide to Social Media and Kids
• Six Social Media Trends for 2010
• A summary for Flash 10.1, Flash Mobile, Flash on iPhone, Air Mobile
• Want to know how to federate with Google Wave? We’ve got the complete guide!

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In order to do so:

1. Click the following link: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/11/03/238190/vote-in-the-computer-weekly-it-blog-awards-2009.htm
2. Choose “Capgemini CTO Blog” in the category CIO/IT Director
3. Choose “Capgemini Technology blog” in the category Company/corporate: large enterprise
4. Choose one of the following Twitter colleagues: @nikhilnulkar or @tomsmiled or @rickmans