The CIA blogs

The CIA is blogging! Probing Galaxies of Data for Nuggets.

The CIA has debuted its Open Source Center, part of the reorganization following the failures of intelligence collection related to 9/11. (Good thing Open Source Media, OSM changed its name back to Pajamas Media, or it would be called a CIA front!)

It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia warehoused on the Net.
--------

By adding the new center, "they've changed the strategic visibility," said Douglas J. Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. ". . . All of a sudden open source is at the table."

Searching for Ads of Interest

Everyone agrees that there are way too many ads. But when you are in the market for something, ads can be very useful. Now Tivo, the company that helped viewers skip commercials will soon help viewers find advertisements of interest. I think this is a promising development for better marketing to women and boomers.

TiVo Users Soon Can Search for Ads From the Wall St Journal (subscription only)

TiVo Inc. is partnering with several big ad firms to offer its users a system that lets them search for commercials centered around a specific topic. Expected to launch next spring, the feature comes as Madison Avenue is contemplating a number of ways to reach consumers who use technology to avoid traditional advertising.
____
People who watch traditional television are forced to view commercials in random fashion, regardless of what they may be interested in buying, says Tom Rogers, TiVo's president and chief executive. "We're flipping the dynamic," he says, allowing TiVo subscribers to search for ads that match their interests.
TiVo users will be able to set up a profile of products on their television screens by clicking on categories such as automotive or travel or typing in keywords such as "BMW" or "cruises." On a regular basis, TiVo will then download relevant commercials to TiVo recorders over the Internet or, for those users who don't have broadband, send the video via traditional broadcast signals. The commercials will appear on-screen in a folder next to the list of television shows TiVo users record.
Advertisers, in turn, will be able to select the keywords and categories with which they wish to be associated for their ads. TiVo is in discussions with advertising agencies about the best way to price such advertising, but one option is to let advertisers bid on keywords as they do when buying ads on Internet search engines.
___
Indeed, ad executives suggest advertisements will have to evolve in two ways. They will either need to generate enough buzz so that consumers are eager to find out more about them. Or they will need to become less filled with hype and offer more bare-bones information, much like Internet paid-search ads

Blogging in China

So who are the leaders of the online revolution in China? It's party member and dance girl and the New York Times has the story, Party Girl and she's a blogger.

What I find wonderful is the irony of people speaking their truth to each other in personal weblogs can undermine a rigid, authoritarian regime.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new.

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

Sly and sardonic, Chinese blogs are growing quickly, already 1 to 2
million, despite censorship

What I found surprising to me was the notion that in China, the concepts of private life and public life have only emerged in the past twenty years.

47 Hacks

I like Steve Rubel's pointer to the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging.

1. Using Free Blog Hosting Services
2. Ignoring the Basic Principles of Good Web Site Design and Usability
3. Being the Jack Of All Trades
4. Not Posting Regularly
5. Publishing Badly Written Posts
6. Spamming and Stealing
7. Failing to Establish a Personality

Steve has also posted

Ten wikipedia hacks

Ten RSS hacks
Ten Technorati hacks
Ten Blogging hacks

Why is we love numbered lists of things?

Selling your bank door-to-door

Seth Godin has seen a sign of the times. When financial services becomes a commodity, bank vice presidents take up door-to-door selling. I've seen real estate agents do the same thing.

Not what it used to be,

Carbon dioxide storage a success

This is very good news on the global warming front. Carbon dioxide storage a success,

In the Weyburn project, the carbon dioxide when pumped into the oil reservoir increased the pressure and brought more oil to the surface. It increased the field's production by 10,000 barrels a day and "demonstrated the technical and economic feasibility of permanent carbon sequestration," the DOE said in a statement.

Such a process can enhance oil recovery up to 60 percent, extend the life of aging oil fields by decades, and provide a permanent repository for the carbon dioxide in geologic formations, the DOE said.

If the methodology could be applied worldwide, from one-third to one-half of the carbon dioxide emissions that go into the atmosphere could be eliminated over the next century and billions of barrels of additional oil could be recovered, the department said.

The project is a joint effort by the Energy Department, the Canadian government and private industry. Carbon dioxide is piped from the Great Plains Synfuels plant in Beulah, N.D., where it is a byproduct from coal gasification, to the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Turnkey blogging systems for verticals

Kevin O'Keefe has done a fine job providing lawyers and law firms with at urnkey blogging system at LexBlog.

Now Paul Chaney, at Radiant Marketing is introducing something very similar for another vertical, the real estate and mortgage industries, at Realtors Conference & Expo.

It's called Blogging Systems and you can read what Paul has to say about it here.

Congratulations, mazeltov, best of luck with this new venture to a vertical that sorely needs it.

Online banking customers scared off

Online ID theft worsens, scares US customers All I know, being required to change passwords every 3 months is a pain. I don't do it so I don't bank online. I'm waiting for the RSA SecurID Appliance. Flash demo here

"Consumers can do everything right—not give out passwords or financial information—and still become victims," said Susanna Montezemolo, a policy analyst at Consumers Union, in an interview.

An October survey commissioned by Internet security company Entrust Inc. and released at the forum found that 18 percent of Americans who have banked online now do so less, or not at all, because of security concerns. Ninety-four percent say they're willing to accept extra online security protections.

---
The council, composed of U.S. regulators including the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., expects banks to require at least two forms of authentication when the risks of online breaches are too high. The second form can include smart cards, tokens that generate random passwords, or biometrics that identify fingerprints or handwriting.

Some 10 million Americans are ID theft victims each year, the Federal Trade Commission

--Consumers, moreover, complain about cumbersome security procedures. Tuesday's survey showed 81 percent don't want to pay for extra online banking protection.

Half of all women want to pack it all in

More than half of female workers have already left or are seriously considering escaping conventional nine-to-five working in a bid to invent their own working patterns, according to a new report.

They are instead preferring to follow a career path offering flexibility and professional autonomy rather than fit in with the demands of the corporate world.

This includes planning to set up their own businesses, retrain, work flexibly or pursue a "portfolio" career.

Perhaps most worrying for employers is the finding that almost three quarters of the female professionals polled said they were disappointed with their career progress to date.
----

Geraldine Hetherington, chief operating officer at Hudson UK, said: "Many women have tasted corporate life and have decided there are better ways of making their mark on the world than following the traditional working model set before them.

"It's not just the demands of family life that are encouraging women to reject working conventions in favour of their own methods; in order to have more control over where, when and how they work, they are setting up their own businesses, retraining or pursuing a 'portfolio' career," she added.

I'm not surprised at all.

Flight Patterns

Air traffic in the US as seen by the FAA, expressed by Aaron Koblin where you should go to see more beautiful images.

The Scent of Female Urine Spurs Mice to Sing

Here's some news I don't think I'll ever forget. Mice Sing for Sex.

Spurred by the scent of female urine, mice serenade females with ultrasonic songs, which, when lowered in frequency so we can hear them, sound a lot like birds whistling.

I just listened to one chirp his passion over at Scientific American.

The War of Attention and Web Services

The War of Attention.

Scobel's my man this week. He says Silicon Valley got my attention: the future of web businesses after speaking with Steve Gillmore, a whole story in itself. Scobel pays attention.

Steve Gillmore who blogs at ZDnet and who started attentiontrust.org calls it the Attention War. You own yourself and your data, but who owns your attention? Do you? Or do the search engines and merchants? This opens up a whole new territory and not just for lawyers what with talk of cartels, attention meta data both in and out of clouds. And who are the combatants? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Skype.

Could it be that Microsoft is paying attention? On Tuesday, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie will likely shake up the industry with details of their rapid move toward the attention economy. The key to this reboot is the understanding that page rank, and the fundamental search methodology of people looking for information, is about to be flipped on its head to a new model where the information is provided gestures of intention that allow it to target the user. The key is the same fundamental that drives RSS: the invitation on the part of the user to address information inward.

Back to the future of web services and Scobel

Here’s the new Silicon Valley business plan. You build a service. Add a Buzz Gadget (Google/MSN/Yahoo are working on more to come). Add a Monetization Gadget (Google calls that their Web Advertising Platform — MSN and Yahoo are working on their own). Mix and mash and we have a business. Guess what? This business will be very profitable. Why? You develop it cheaply and if you did your job right, a boatload of people come and visit your service, like it, keep coming back, and hopefully they click on the ads (the more they click on the ads, the more money you make).

It's attention to the needs of individual customers through the power of capturing little bits of information that coalesce into the delivery of more of what I want and that continues to evolve as more data about me is collected by search engines to deliver ever more thrilling stuff and very targeted ads all through the power of artificial intelligence.

Women make 75% of all travel decisions

Women make 75% of all travel decisions (for their families, their businesses and themselves) as well as making up 43% of all business travelers reports Marti Barletta in Ad Age.

Hotels and destinations are beginning to take note. Those that don't are missing out the very people who make the arrangements for vacations, weddings and anniversaries for groups of family and friends.