Mmm, bacn

We all know what spam is by now, the digital variety, not the gelatin-coated mystery meat in a tin. The attendees of PodCamp2 in Pittsburgh have coined the term bacn to describe “email you want, but not right now”. Examples of bacn: Social network alerts Electronic bill pay alerts Basically anything you solicited by providing… Read More

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent. Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet… Read More

We Were Connect First!

I was excited to see that Dow Chemical launched a social network today. It sounds like a great project, joining Dow’s current and former employees, targeted at different demographics. I especially like targeting alumnae who left for family-related reasons. Great stuff all around, excellent case study of a brick/mortar company embracing new web. What’s the… Read More

11g Doc Gets a New Web Makeover

Yesterday, I blogged about 11g updates to documentation tools that Eddie and I have written. I just noticed that Justin has a post about the 11g documentation as well. Apparently, each page now features comments at the bottom. I had to check this out for myself, and sure enough, here it is. Don’t believe it?… Read More

Search Tools Updated for 11g

Eddie Awad has a post today that some of you will find useful. His Oracle Bookmarklets and search plugins now support the brand new 11g R1 documentation. The Oracle Documentation search plugin I posted also includes 11g R1 now, too. For those uninitiated, bookmarklets allow you to do some pretty sweet productivity tweaks using Javascript… Read More

A New Day

I woke today to a wave of coverage on our little Connect project from ZDNet, namely Dennis Howlett, Michael Krigsman and Larry Dignan. I will spend today riding this wave, hoping not to eat it. Interlude After we went alpha, we needed a name for our little project. In true new web fashion, we offered… Read More

Oracle’s Spin on Lunch 2.0

Tim Bonnemann and Marius Ciorea, two guys at Oracle corporate HQ, have started a Lunch 2.0 series with an Oracle spin. It’s modeled on Lunch 2.0, offering up discussion topics on new technologies, starting conversations around them and educating anyone who has an interest. The lunches have been a big hit so far, even though… Read More

Check out Oracle Events

As Justin pointed out yesterday, Oracle.com unveiled a very cool 2.0 (or dare I say, 2.0+) application called Oracle Events. This is a very useful mashup of the Oracle events calendar, Google Maps (surprise!) and a combination of Siderean Seamark and Oracle’s own Secure Enterprise Search. Many of you will recognize the semantic features that… Read More

Death of an Inbox

In a comment on my first post about the slow death of email as a communication medium, Julie asked: I guess you are talking about email in the context of personal communication rather than business? What are your thoughts on IM for business use, as a replacement for email? My position is that email is… Read More

Good Old Email in its Twilight Years

I’m sure most of you will not agree, or you’ll convince yourself otherwise. News.com has an interesting article with the catching headline, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. This got me to thinking about dead letters, for some odd reason. Like it or not, email is dying. Just like face-time gave way to phone… Read More

More High-Powered Friends?

First, it was Steve Ballmer. Now, Eric Schmidt? What is going on here? I’m surprised Eric would want to befriend me, since I called him coy in this space not once, but twice. Maybe he wants to hire me and doesn’t know I have no PhD, or even masters. D’oh. Seriously, can anyone shed some… Read More

Google Apps Suite Plows Ahead

Business Week has an article today about Google Apps. The suite looks more complete every day. Witness the Postini acquisition, the anticipated release of presentations (a combination of Zenter, Tonic Systems and probably some homegrown mojo too) this summer, the integration of JotSpot features and now, enterprise YouTube. This one jumped off the page for… Read More

Steve Ballmer is My Friend?

Fellow AppsLabb’er Rich, just informed me via IM (which is so 1999, why aren’t we Twittering?), that Steve Ballmer friended him on Facebook. Turns out that both Paul (AppsLab poobah) and I were also friended by Steve. Maybe the rumor is true, and Microsoft is digging out $6 billion for Facebook (Techmeme coverage). Or maybe… Read More