myDigitechnician: Highlights: NN for 03 Apr 2007

This week's NEW NET post brings you highlights of the past week in tech issues and news.

These highlights are not necessarily the most important tech news for the week, but they are worth reading for specific reasons. In no particular order, the highlights are:

Most Useful - although not everyone will find each of these useful to them, they all have immediate usefulness to some people, as opposed to being a thought-piece or a humorous look at tech.

NN item A.2 -- developing an online persona will be most useful for 16 to 40 year olds who plan to look for a job with medium to large companies, or even small tech-savvy companies.
NN item D.3 -- if you use or want to try open source productivity software, consider using or upgrading to OpenOffice 2.2.
NN item E.1 -- those who would like Gmail to be their main email tool can use it to archive old emails that have potential future value.
NN item E.4 -- if you feel Google is more useful than evil, try out their Notebook tool for easily grabbing and organizing web information that interests you.

Most Innovative - for today's post, this category relates to things which make a significant change and address a pressing need; their probability of short term success in the market is ignored for the nonce.

NN item A.3 -- Project Agape seeks to spread and enable altruism and activism using some of the same viral characteristics that made Napster, Facebook and other websites successful.
NN item D.1 -- c,mm,n is an example of open source hardware; by establishing some early models for collaborating on physical products, rather than only software, c,mm,n could enable many more well-designed, easily-modifiable, complex hard goods.
NN item I.2 -- SpaceX is lowering the cost of putting 'stuff' into space. SpaceX and many other space start-ups are thriving on innovation the way similar companies did in the early days of automobiles, aviation and personal computers.

Most Thought-provoking - some of these items provoke pleasant thoughts, while others are significantly less enjoyable.

NN item A.4 -- hundreds, maybe thousands, of posts and articles appeared on the web over the last week related to how Kathy Sierra and many other women online are treated unfairly and threateningly by a vicious but vocal minority.
NN item A.9 -- no one can predict exactly how the web will evolve over the next ten years, but there's a 99.99% probability tomorrow's web will be as different from today's as today's is from bulletin boards of ten to fifteen years ago. Cybertwins or a derivative may be part of that future web.
NN item B.1 -- My cynical guess is some of the students upset by the plagiarism screener Turnitin.com are students whose papers would be flagged by the screener. However, the suit appears to have a lot of merit, and it begs the question, should you and your children include "copyright by..." at the bottom of everything you write.
NN item H.1 -- It is apparently not illegal yet, but Circuit City's downsizing policy seems to remove much of the incentive from doing a good job. Maybe their policy would work better if firing highly paid workers went all the way to the top, rather than stopping with the hourly or middle management workers.

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 03 April 02007, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 6:45 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.

A. The ‘net