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Dennis Howlett has posted a blog on ZDNet that essentially disses next week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference where he's scheduled (apparently, against his will) to moderate a panel discussion on microblogging (you know: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, etc). Enterprise 2.0 is a production of TechWeb (Disclosure: the parent company to InformationWeek). Howlett's blog is called Enterprise Alley. Alleys, including his, are where garbage is sometimes found.

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While there's no shortage of events that you can attend to find out more about the various Internet-based substitutes for the solutions you might normally run on your own servers or in your own data centers, there's no event where the question "Can you run all of your IT in the cloud?" is being asked. That's the public conversation that I and other CIOs and IT pros will be having with Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com at this coming Monday's free tech meetup in Boston. I'm calling it an "Evening in the Cloud" and you're invited to come, join the conversation, network, and enjoy a few cocktails on me. Details are below.

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In response to my last post (the one on why both the NY Times and Mashable.com were off-base about the connection between blogging and heart failure), several readers wrote to offer an opinion about the direction that the NY Times' coverage is taking. Have you noticed the dramatic background music being played on your favorite local or national news program? The river of graphic headlines on most big-league news sites? Some shortcuts in reporting being taken that certain news outlets would never have taken before? You can thank the Internet's....

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OK, I'm going off-campus in this post, but I now feel as though I've joined a "privileged class" that entitles me to comment on the New York Times story questioning the connection between the stresses of prolific blogging and heart failure and subsequently, a completely distasteful post on Mashable.com about being able to see (on a map) where bloggers are "dropping dead." The NY Times piece was shoddy reporting. Mashable was out of line. Here's why.

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If you followed any of my coverage of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology over on ZDNet (before I jumped ship to TechWeb and InformationWeek), then you'll know that I have a different acronym for DRM. I call it C.R.A.P. Originally, I thought CRAP could be expanded to mean Content Restriction Annulment and Protection. But the Free Software Foundation's spiritual leader Richard Stallman asked that it stand for Cancellation, Restriction, And Punishment instead. ZDNet's readers concurred and who am I to argue? Today we have yet another tale of why DRM technology is so deserving of being called CRAP.

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AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management now also known as the Enterprise Content Management Association, says its research demonstrates the increasing degree to which important business documents (let's call them "needles") can get lost in the e-mail "haystack." They might be in there. They're just impossible to find. According to AIIM's press release on the matter, one of the culprits is an insufficient e-mail retention policy as the number of business-critical documents stored in e-mail systems rises. For $65-$75, AIIM will teach you how to manage the problem. But is this one more reason to....

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If running your car on corn oil were possible, the car got 100 miles per gallon on corn oil, and corn oil was 25 cents per gallon, plentiful, and the use of corn oil meant you never had to take the engine in for a tune-up, what sort of rationale would you use to fool yourself that you still needed a fossil fuel-powered car? It's the same rationale that many businesses are using today to justify....

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Here at Startup Camp in San Francisco today, during his keynote presentation, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at a major Sun-Amazon announcement that the two companies will be making tomorrow on the eve of the company's annual developer confab: JavaOne. What exactly that announcement will be was unclear, but Schwartz dropped several hints, one of which had to do with...

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Here at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, IronPort (a division of Cisco) is showing off its latest security solutions -- the S650 and the S350 Web Security Appliances. The S-Series was a finalist in this year's Best of Interop competition. In the new security appliance, the company leverages its SenderBase anti-spam reputation management technology to determine what parts of a Web page (if any) to let through to users' browsers. In the video below, IronPort product manager Samantha Madrid tells me more about the S-Series.

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I'm sure competing solutions exist (or maybe not -- you tell me). But this year's Interop marks the first time I've ever seen an intelligent patch panel: one that drives the visibility into your network another layer deeper than the visibility that might normally end with your routers and switches. The offering -- a Best of Interop finalist -- comes from Panduit, and about the only thing I can imagine coming next might be intelligent RJ45 jacks. Actually, after I finished my video interview with Panduit's Mike Pula (below) and sarcastically mentioned that idea, he didn't laugh and said the idea actually solves a problem.

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You've programmed your firewall to block the ports that some unwanted app is using and that app turns up on your net again. Net-enabled applications don't tie themselves down to one port the way the Web (HTTP, port 80) and other apps do. After some firewall shuts their ports down, they find another port. Using traffic profiles instead of ports to identify more than 600 applications, not only did Palo Alto Networks' series win InformationWeek's Best of Interop in the security category, it took the grand prize as well. In the video below, Palo Alto's Lee Klarich walks me through some of the firewall's innovations.

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Here at Interop in Las Vegas, a handful of exhibitors who also are Best of Interop finalists are waiting to find out if InformationWeek's editors have singled them out as winners or not. One of them is Alcatel-Lucent, who is here showing off its XML API-enabled Omnitouch Advanced Communications Server (ACS). Via those APIs, director of product management Peter Anderholm (pictured below left) claims that enterprises can, for collaborative purposes, easily integrate point-and-click voice conferencing into any application. I caught Peter on the show floor for a video interview.

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It's the eve before Interop here in Las Vegas and we've just wrapped up Energy Camp where, as can be seen from the user-decided agenda, the conversation went deep and wide on a variety of subjects related to the reduction of information technology's carbon footprint. Two key takeaways for me were (1) many so-called "green" remedies have a dark enough side to them that they may not be as green as we think they are, and (2) it may take another 15 or 20 years before we have it all sorted out. It's not as bad as it sounds, but ...

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We're just a few days away from Energy Camp, which we're holding on the day before Interop in Las Vegas. We've got close to 100 people signed up and we're anticipating quite a few walk-ins. So, we're on target in terms of the event's size and intimacy. But even if you don't plan to be there, I've established a way for you to participate virtually by sharing your own energy saving tips and tricks (or just green tips in general). I'm calling it Ways To Save The Earth and it was inspired by some school kids in Massachusetts. Regardless of whether it's big or small, if you've dreamed up a green idea that you think can make a difference ...

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James Governor, who will be presiding over Energy Camp on April 28 in what is probably the least green city on the planet (Las Vegas: not counting how green in emerald-like color the MGM is), has hit the nail on the head in terms of characterizing the new unconference. He calls it the unconference for oil at $120+ a barrel. The cost of oil reached a new high today of nearly $115 per barrel: a grim reality which highlights the fact that what's good for the planet also is good for your bottom line. That's what we'll be talking about at Energy Camp.

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It happened all at once today (and maybe that's why Gmail is still in "beta" after all these years). Both the Web interface and my various e-mail clients (Outlook, my smartphone) that were accessing my enterprise Gmail account seized up on me completely. Standalone Gmail account holders were affected, too (according to a blogsearch on the matter). The cause? An AWOL IMAP interface caused the mail clients to clam up and most of Gmail's Ajax-like functionality vanished at the same time, causing serious browser indigestion. What are the implications?

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Energy Camp, the IT industry's first unconference dedicated to establishing a multilateral dialog between all IT constituencies on issues relating to running green technology and reducing energy consumption, was mentioned in a story by Brad Reed in InfoWorld. I, along with Redmonk principal analyst James Governor (author of the Greenmonk Blog) will be hosting Energy Camp in a few weeks. Somewhat ironically, ...

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In the e-mail world, where possible, I used to urge organizations to stick with the Internet-standard Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) instead of using the addictive proprietary alternatives from Microsoft and IBM Lotus (found in Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes). Now, thanks to Google's GMail service, I realize I may have been mistaken.

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I have to admit that, at first, I didn't get it. Last month, at Mashup Camp in Silicon Valley (the next camp will be in June in NYC), Serena debuted its Just @#$% It!! What are they saying? video.(The video also is embedded below.) The video (now up to 1.17M views) features office workers telling each other to "mash it" as though the word "mash" is a dirty word. Each occurrence of it (and there are many) is bleeped out. By the time the librarian-esque female star of the video has "@#$%-ed" it, the bun in her hair isn't so tightly wrapped, there's a bit more flesh showing below the neckline, and...

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Free people and journalists everywhere are expressing outrage today on the heels of news that 34-year-old Chinese Hu Jia will be jailed for another 3-1/2 years (in addition to the year that he's already spent in prison) for broadly distributing his views on democracy and criticisms of Chinese policies via the Internet. In this day and age of the Internet, did China get way more than it bargained for when it lobbied to bring the Olympics to Beijing?

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Kleer's PR counsel just sent a blast out to say that the company has received $28 million of funding in a Series B round. On video (embedded below), I took a closer look at Kleer's technology during the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and this new injection of cash comes as no surprise given what Kleer's wireless technology can do.

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For a fleeting moment, I thought my Twitter ID (dberlind) got stuck in some viral tornado of fame. For several days, hardly 30 minutes could pass without another e-mail showing up in my in-box saying that someone else was "following me" on Twitter. Did some tweet of mine suddenly turn me into Twitter.com's new Mr. Popularity? Hardly. A pattern started to emerge. And then, on a long shot, I Googled "twitter spam."

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Uh oh. It looks like things are about to become unglued over at Verizon where there's a dispute over the number of HDTVs that were promised to new FiOS subscribers, but that so far remained undelivered. In response to the debacle, Verizon apparently told ABC News that only a handful of customers were affected. But an alleged whistle-blowing Verizon customer service rep says that the number is more like 30,000 and that CSRs are being asked to dial back the make-good for those in the lurch. If the assertions prove true, legal action may not be far behind.

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Are you coming to Energy Camp on April 28 where we'll be having an open conversation about green technology? If not, why not? Why do I ask? I was just checking the logs on our YouTube channel (TechWebTV) and noticed something unusual. Or maybe not.

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For anybody who wanted folder synchronicity between their email client (eg: Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, iPhone, etc.) and their online email service, it was pretty much impossible to find until, in its Gmail service, Google decided to support a special e-mail retrieval protocol (IMAP) that's designed with that purpose in mind. Unfortunately, POP -- the protocol through which most email clients attach to online email services -- can't do the trick. After determining that neither Mozilla's Thunderbird nor Apple's Mac Mail were up to the task of working well with Gmail's IMAP support, I tried Outlook and hit another wall.

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After joining the team here at TechWeb (which includes InformationWeek, Interop, etc.), I was outfitted with a beautiful MacBook Pro with a 17-inch LCD panel. But after three months of usage, the LCD's surface is covered with fingerprints (plainly visible when the display is off). Fearful that I could ruin the display if I cleaned it the wrong way, I hunted down the solution (double entendre intended).

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OK. So things went very badly after, in an effort to drum up more business for its fiber-optic based FiOS service, Verizon offered up free HDTVs. After Verizon had a hard time making good on the promise, the bad news spread like wildfire across news sites and blogs. But did the critics miss a bigger "free car" picture that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz once alluded to?

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At the 2008 edition of the PWN to OWN security showdown at CanSecWest (Canada Security West) in Vancouver, an Ubuntu distribution of GNU Linux took top honors after Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows Vista eventually caved under hacker pressure. All OSes were up-to-date with the latest patches.

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If you're an IT professional, solution provider, or someone else with an interest in how to trim back the energy consumption of technology (especially if you're someone with domain expertise to contribute to the broader conversation about "green IT"), then I hope you'll join me and Energy Camp master of ceremonies James Governor (blog) for Energy Camp in Las Vegas on April 28 (just prior to the start of Interop). Registration is free and it gets you a coveted hall pass into Interop, too.

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To everyone in the hotel that I was staying in while in the U.K. for Startup Camp London (including my co-workers), I apologize for almost burning the joint down. Twice. Thankfully, I'm the only one who paid a price for my stupidity: a bit of damaged finish to my brand new MacBook, a blown-up power supply for an Ethernet hub, and one destroyed power strip.

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As I write this blog post -- a reflection on Startup Camp London -- I'm on a Boeing 777 that's racing across the Atlantic to Boston's Logan airport. This plane is full of technology. Presumably, the first class cabin has seats that can convert into beds or that can pivot and face a variety of directions. I heard that everyone up there also gets Bose noise canceling headphones. I'm not sure. It's a secretive place that only people who've paid 10 times what I've paid to cross the Atlantic are allowed to see. One thing I do know: several of the entrepreneurs we saw at Startup Camp London will one day be able to buy seats in that cabin. For their entire families.

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E-mail and group calendaring are 1990's technologies. Yet, for some idiotic reason, they still only work well when everyone is on the same vendor's system. Interop's general manager Lenny Heymann, who uses Lotus Notes, can invite me to a meeting that ties in a Cisco MeetingPlace-based teleconference, and thankfully, I can accept that invitation in Gmail. But what if that meeting moves to a different time (as meetings so often do)? That's where the interoperability ends. If Lenny changes the teleconference time in MeetingPlace, the notification I get is an abomination of technology that can't interoperate with the originally booked meeting. Who's to blame?

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One of the hotter memes over the weekend had to do with a cease and desist letter that the ever-litigious Apple sent to the operators of the Hymn Project. For those looking to remove Apple's copy protection technology (officially "FairPlay," but I call it "C.R.A.P.") from iTunes Music Store (iTMS)-bought content, the Hymn Project has been the go-to site for utilities that have managed to stay one step ahead of Apple in what has been a cat and mouse game.

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For the longest time, the term "monoculture" was synonymous with Microsoft. But eBay is probably another monoculture, and given the degree to which it so easily empowers businesses and individuals to engage in e-commerce, it also could be just as harmful, if not more so. Need evidence? You know it's a monoculture when, instead of switching to a competitor, an angry customer's only choice is to join other angry customers in a planned boycott.

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