Now you can monitor the effectiveness and power of your Tweeter outreach - Twitter Grader

iMedia has a good article on how companies like Dell, JetBlue and H&R Block are using Twitter.

BlogPotomac will be held on June 13, 2008 in Falls Church, VA.

Jon Williams has added a nice brief argument for why CTO’s should keep an eye on Facebook:

There are 1,000s of developers (or more) developing applications for Facebook, and you can try all of them out. Facebook is truly a technology marvel. If your not checking out Facebook, you may really be missing something.

Lena West has written a nice summary of how corporations can dip their toes into the world of social media.

The RSS publishing service that we use for our and our clients blogs, FeedBurner, has just been purchased by Google. Blogs At Work Inc. believes that this will only increase the awareness and importance of managing RSS feeds and along with add-on services that Google can provide with their other products. Just as long as they keep it lean and simple.

I usually do not post new client sites that we launch here in the blog, but this case is a little different. MDFORFRED.COM is a grassroots effort to raise awareness and gather information on the candidacy of Senator Fred Thompson for President 2008.

For the past few years my family has been blessed with the privilege of sponsoring a child in India through WorldVision. We recently started sponsoring a second child in Uganda. However, the crisis in Uganda needs more attention and support.

Since 1987, the terrorist group LRA and its leader Joseph Kony have been violently abducting and forcibly enlisting children to fight as terrorists in its war against the Ugandan government. It is hard for me to even type what these children are subjected to but, for those that survive, the psychological abuse is so bad that they often feel that the only people that will accept them are their captors. They are usually forced to kill (often a family member) within the first week of their abduction to make sure they feel like they have no where else to go.

These children need our help. We will be donating ten percent of our profits to help these children. WorldVision has set-up a Children of War Rehabilitation Center where professional counselors help children overcome their traumatic abduction experiences through play and group therapy as well as one-on-one counseling. These former abductees also receive food, health care, a safe place to sleep, skills training and are eventually reunited with their families and communities.

Please consider making a donation to help the children of war in Uganda. Also, become an advocate for these children by contacting your elected officials to convince them that our government needs to do more.

You can also read more about the crisis in Uganda here.

“Our audience is online. They’re having discussions about us and about our competitors, and they’re talking about the marketplace. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it’s important for us to pay attention to what’s being said out there.” - Scott Anderson, HP’s director of enterprise brand communications.

Happy New Year! - from your friends here at Blogs At Work Inc.

The 10 Biggest Microsoft Surprises of 2005. – #2 on the list is “RSS is gospel in Redmond these days.”

The del.icio.us blog announces they have been purchased by Yahoo! Although this is a great validation of the dynamics in the two-way web, it will be interesting to see if Yahoo! can execute better than they have so far with their previous acquisition of flickr.

Google has added RSS functionality to their Gmail (Official Google Blog: A cure for the common inbox). The blog entries appear above your inbox in a headline-like manner pulling a generic set of feeds upon which you can add more of your choosing.

Gmail Clips are certainly not a very powerful or elegant RSS reader, especially when compared to how well Google has implemented Gmail as a web-based e-mail client. Making this even more unattractive for me, is their inclusion of Google Sponsored Links as Clips.

Unlike Dave Winer’s desire that they call Web Clips as RSS more outright, I am glad that they didn’t because these clips would leave a novice RSS consumer with a disappointed opinion as to what RSS is all about.

‘Podcast’ Is the Word of the Year: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

I’d like to thank all of those that made this possible.

From the Web 2.0 world: If you like to listen to music while you work, you may want to consider Pandora. Based upon the Music Genome Project, Pandora attempts to create a radio station based upon the type of music you like, a specific artist, or even a word that reflects the mood you are in.

I like to listen to Jars of Clay a great deal, so I created a station to hear not only Jars of Clay but also to hear some suggestions from Pandora of other artists that fall into the same genre. Now I must admit I am not a music aficionado, so my patience for listening to music can be limited. This leads me to want to skip a song when it doesn’t suit my tastes. Pandora allows me to skip songs and to also let the system know if I do not like a song (although it limits the number of times you can skip a song in an hour).

Since my patience is limited, I am hoping that it will adapt to my tastes quickly enough so that I do not have to stop listening to it because I cannot skip anymore songs. Otherwise, this service will not be for me. But I love the idea, that I can not only pick the station but also that I can refine its suggestions.

UPDATE: I thought you could create a station based upon the type of music or even a word, but I just went to create a new station and it will only use an artist or song. Sorry about that… not sure where I got my idea from above, but that would be even cooler!

I took the family to the members only preview of the National Aquarium in Baltimore’s newest exhibit: “Animal Planet Australia: Wild Extremes”.

Overall we really enjoyed seeing the new creatures and displays but were surprised at how short the tour was. When “wild extremes” opens to the general public, you will want to definitely visit it in addition to seeing the regular aquarium attractions.

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, recently sent out an internal Microsoft e-mail outlining his technical vision for the company. It’s a fascinating read that can be viewed here in its entirety.

My favorite quotes are:

Only a few years ago I’d have pointed to the Weblog and the Wiki as significant emerging trends; by now they’re mainstream and have moved into the enterprise.

and,

At the grassroots level, such projects actively use standards such as vCards and iCal for sharing contacts and calendars. Most all use RSS in one way or another for data sharing. Remixing and mashing of multiple web applications using XML, REST and WS is common; interesting mash-ups range from combining maps with apartment listings, to others that place RSS feeds on top of systems and data not originally intended for remixing.

Yahoo! announced yesterday that it has added RSS support into its web-based Mail program. Currently, RSS integration is only available in the Beta version of Yahoo! Mail. If you have a Yahoo mail account and would like to try the Beta version, log into Mail and click on the link that says “Try out the beta version of Yahoo! Mail.”

The RSS support does also integrate with My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Alerts, but one drawback is that any items read on My Yahoo! do not show up as read on Yahoo! Mail. As far as web-based readers are concerned, its functionality does not match up to NewsGator, but it can be advantageous to have your RSS and mail in one location.

Read tech.memeorandum for more information.

eWeek.com ran an article (Trend Micro: RSS Is Worm Bot’s Next Target) yesterday covering Trend Micro’s warning about worm bot’s exploiting RSS aggregators. What is curious is that this is old news. So why is Trend Micro bringing this up now? Did they need some press or were they just trying to catch a ride on the growing popularity of Blogs?

The idea of a rogue site publishing an RSS feed that could expose the user to a worm is not novel. It’s just a natural progression of virus writers to go from hijacking web browsers (or instant messaging, et al.) to target the growing number of aggregators. They just had to wait for the number of newsreaders to get to the point where it made sense for them to write the worm.

With the forthcoming IE 7 and its support for RSS built in the RSS audience will greatly expand . And yes, just as with any activity on the Internet, you have to be smart. But firewall and antivirus vendors will easily be able to add their existing virus detection definitions to RSS packets.

It is great that a company as large as Trend Micro is acknowledging the growth of RSS but this is not news.

We wanted to take a moment to say “Happy Thanksgiving” to all of our customers, prospective customers and strategic partners. We are truly thankful for all of you. We are also thankful for our spouses and families. What a blessing they are!