With only two weeks left until the end of this year’s Blogging Idol contest, bloggers tackled a range of new subjects this week such as growing contact lists of social networking sites, cloud computing and online gadget reviews
Blogger Kevin Pashuk said more IT professionals should consider a “Friendectomy,” especially with Facebook and LinkedIn friend lists often reaching past 500.
“We come from an industry where people like Sheldon of Big Bang Theory can exist and pass for normal, in a strange kind of way. While bright and brilliant, we didn’t get to be so good at programming, or troubleshooting networks, or building systems by being party animals,” he wrote.
“So I find it interesting how Social Media has removed the barrier for those of us who kept close to a small group in school, are now suddenly compelled to link up with everyone who wants to be our friend on Facebook or LinkedIn? Are we secretly trying to make up for all those times that (insert rejection event here).”
Pashuk said he disagrees with many social media pundits that say “more is better” when it comes to contact lists. If social media is about relationships, he wrote, make them genuine relationships.
“I say it’s time for a Friendectomy,” Pashuk wrote. “Go through your contact list in LinkedIn and Facebook and delete those who are only mere acquaintances.”
Contestant Ron Van Holst blogged about a recent Trend Micro conference in Ottawa and about the general state of cloud computing. He said that if Canada wants to dominate the cloud hosting business, vendors have to work on safer and more reliable ways to deliver compute capacity.
“There are Canadian companies like Entrust and others that are security leaders, so we have the opportunity to be global leaders,” he wrote. “We have already shown the world that our banking system is more reliable than that of our neighbours to the south, that’s already a big step towards encouraging enterprises to do more business in Canada. Let’s also make Canada the safest place to do business online.”
For blogger Don Sheppard, the rise of cloud also has a close connection to the “Bring Your Own Technology” movement that has swept over many enterprises. This will bring new management complexity to IT staff, he added.
“Today, the management domains for personal and corporate systems are relatively independent and are managed separately,” Sheppard wrote. “In fact, control, over what attaches to a corporate network promotes this. BYOT and shared applications could make the governance and management of systems much more complex with the potential for many finger-pointing issues.”
“It would seem that a new generation of management and chargeback systems will be needed to allow shared personal and business domains to be managed separately even when the physical infrastructure is shared.”
Rounding out this week’s recap, Pashuk warned of “Black Coffee Syndrome” for potential buyers of new devices such as the RIM PlayBook and Google’s line of Chromebooks.
“If you had asked my opinion of black coffee in the first week, my review would be less than favourable – completely opposite to what it is now,” he wrote. “I would say the same for the Blackberry Storm (when I had one). I hated it at first, but grew accustomed to its quirky screen and quite liked it later. As long as I compared it to an iPhone it lost, but when I evaluated it on its own merits, I was OK with it”
Unlike reviewers that only get to test drive devices for a couple days or weeks, he added, users have to live with their devices on a three-year plan or IT refresh cycle. And sometimes technology needs a little time to grow on you.