Video podcast: Eric Raarup at the Microsoft Partner conference

The Microsoft partner program is showing new sophistication, according to Eric Raarup, vice president of development for Inetium, in this conversation with David Strom at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Confernce in Denver. Here is the link to the video podcast posted at eWeek.

Announcing DigitalLanding.com, a new site for the digital lifestyle

I wanted to give you a sneak preview of a new Web site that I have been working on over the past year. While the site isn’t complete (what site ever is?), it is at a stage that I would welcome some feedback and you can get an idea of where we are trying to take it.

The site is called DigitalLanding.com and has been produced by Acceller, a Miami company originally founded to develop an ecommerce engine to help people choose the best broadband connection options. They’re expanding on their initial concept to offer additional services such as phone, television (digital cable, DVR, etc.), bundles and more.

The idea is to provide a place where people can go to order new broadband service and then find practical, down-to-earth information about how to use these digital services for their homes. DigitalLanding.com will contain dozens of articles about topics such as picking Internet voice plans, how to create and manage digital music and photos, and the interplay of TV with these things too. Our aim is simple: give you plenty of practical, down-to-earth advice on how to become more productive, and less frustrated, with using your digital home.

The initial site that you see today has a total of ten articles that support the ecommerce engine and just handles cable connections. You enter your phone number or address and get to the part of the site where you can pick your particular cable service plans. On this screen, our content can be found under the “learning center” area. Later this year we’ll expand this to additional content and cover the other broadband service providers. And by expand, I think you will be impressed with what we have in store.

My role has been as the editor-in-chief for the site and responsible for shaping its content. I wanted to take a moment to thank all the writers who have been working on various articles, patiently waiting for the launch of the site. I think you will agree that we have some of the most experienced people in the field as contributors. Indeed, Acceller has a great team of people that are producing this site – gone are the days where a single person could put up a Web site. It has been a pleasure (well, most of the time) to work with such dedicated and talented people. I am very proud of what we have accomplished and hence this short note to let you all know about it.

The DigitalLanding.com site represents a new chapter in my own journey to explain technology concepts. As many of you know, I wrote a book in 2001 called the Home Networking Survival Guide, which unfortunately came out right around 9/11. That book represented many years of informal neighborhood networking consulting where I got to see first-hand the problems that ordinary people have with getting connected and making use of Internet applications. I have built dozens of new Web sites around various specialty technologies and particular audiences but this one is really designed for all of us.

I hope you enjoy DigitalLanding.com, and please feel free to send me your feedback as we continue to upgrade and enhance the site.

Channel Chat Podcast: Eran Farajun, Asigra

My next podcast is a discussion with the EVP of Asigra, a managed services backup provider about some of the issues surrounding managed services in general and how they have set up their channel program in particular..

You can listen or download the podcast here, on the Ziff ITLink community site.

P2P Protection

What happens when you deliberately put a real debit card and pre-paid phone card out on a peer file sharing service and measure how it long before someone tries to access the cards and drain them of any value? About a week, according to an experiment conducted by Tiversa, a company who sells P2P protective software.

The results were reported in congressional testimony today.

The researchers put a file called “credit card and phone card numbers.doc” on a PC running Limewire inside a shared directory, as part of a test earlier this year. Within a few days, dozens of downloads were tracked, and soon the total value stored on both cards was depleted.

This is a very real scenario. While I won’t get into whether P2P file sharing is legit, plenty of people are running this software on their PCs, and they may easily place files in the shareable folder that contain equally sensitive information. The problem is compounded if these services are being run from corporate-owned PCs, too.

So let’s try something out. If you are running a sharing service on your PC, take a moment now and see if you have made yourself an inadvertent target:

Have you set up your entirely hard drive as shareable? Not a good idea. At least change the setting to just the folder where your media files are located.

Is your hard disk not very organized, and you don’t pay much attention to where you store your files? Now is the time to look. The Tiversa researchers found dozens of copies of passports and birth certificates, hundreds of copies of tax returns, and federal student aid applications when they did a quick search of the Gnutella network. It didn’t take them very long to find this stuff, and when they downloaded a few samples they seemed like the real McCoy.

Did the file sharing software add other folders besides the one where you knowingly store your music and videos? They are good at finding all of your media files elsewhere, and if you have an MP3 in the same place where you have your Quicken data, you could be in trouble. Spend some time cleaning house now.

Do you do work on a PC that is also used by your teenagers? You could have saved a work document in a shareable folder by mistake, or not realized that later on the folder became shareable. In a recent study by Osterman Research, 71% of employees answering the survey have checked work-related email from home on a non-work owned computer.  Work is being done away from the office more often all the time.

You have been warned.

Hogwarts IT director calls it quits

I haven’t been as consumed with the whole Harry Potter thing as some others, but I did enjoy the first couple of books. When they started crossing 700 pages I was less motivated to schlep all that paper around. Nevertheless, I did manage to make it down to one of the areas in town last Friday night and observe the beginning of “Potterville” next to one of our better independent booksellers called Left Bank Books. They had closed off the street and had a series of booths and merchants and it was all rather fun, and I got to play a game of lawn chess — but on the street.

Here is a charming entry from Network World that will amuse some of you.

Your boss is spying on you right now. What can you do about it?

By now, most of us know that our Web browsing history is stored on our own PCs, which comes in handy when we want to track down a cheating spouse or errant teenager but is less useful when we are looking at, shall we say, recreational sites at the workplace. But what we are talking about here has to do with more insidious tracking of your digital footprints as you go about your daily computing workday life. When you start thinking about all the ways that you can be digitally tracked, it can make even the least paranoid person sit up and take notice.

In this article published in today’s Computerworld.com, I talk about some of the ways you can avoid detection.

Are you ready for IPTV?

VARs looking to stake a claim in new technology ground should consider television—not getting in front of the camera but rather selling IPTV. Supporting video running over existing IP networks can be incredibly profitable and a powerful differentiator for selling new services and network infrastructure.Video networking is on the rise, to be sure.

The combination of YouTube, improved Web-based and live video­conferencing, and the ease and lower cost of creating video content means that more video will be running across corporate networks. The trick is to ensure that these networks are up to the challenge and can deliver the kind of quality that will make for “must-see TV” rather than a jumble of low-resolution images and out-of-sync sound.
You can read the entire story that appeared in eWeek’s Strategic Partner edition here.

Channel Chat podcast: Marc Osofsky, Optaros

I talk with Marc Osofsky, vice president of marketing at Optaros, about how to develop software as a service applications with open source software. Listen to the podcast here as part of my ongoing series of chats with channel executives for Ziff’s ITLink site.

Pay me to do this job, puhleeze

When I first started writing Web Informant, it was an email newsletter that went out to a few of my firm’s clients to keep them up to date on what I was doing with my Web site. In the 11 or so years (can you believe it) since then, it has evolved into an entire cottage industry that now takes the form of this blog, a series of podcasts, and speaking engagements.  And most of this effort is done without any money changing hands, purely because I enjoy doing it, and because it is a great way to market my own brand. (Well, some money is changing hands shortly — the trademark is up for its renewal and the government isn’t too flexible on when they need their dough.)

So imagine my surprise when I saw this article in the BBC news about someone So Important that he was willing to pay nearly $2,000 a month to someone else to keep up his various social networking sites, posing as Himself and maintaining his blogs, sending emails, and so forth. This seems like a growing career for journalists who are willing to assume other identities. <G>

Take this Luddite quiz

I got the idea for this column from Dennis Drogseth, who has been around in our industry as long as I have, working at IBM, Cabletron, and now as an analyst for Enterprise Management Associates. He told me that he still was a Luddite, even though Dennis is one of those people that can actually speak about routers and SNMP. So I thought up this little quiz that you can give your friends and see how you stack up on the tech scale. Okay, print this out, pick up your number two pencils, and no looking at your neighbor’s paper.

1. How do you communicate with your teenagers?
(a) Still talk to them f2f
(b) Call them on their cells to find out where they want to you to think they are
(c I M them from work when they get home from school
(d) Message them on Facebook or Myspace
(e) Not allowed to connect to them via Facebook or Myspace
(f) Who can talk to their teens anyway?

2. How did you find your present job?
(a) Am self-employed, the ultimate job 2.0 lifestyle
(b) Found it through LinkedIn
(c) Found it through Craigslist
(d) Did all those annoying exercises in “Parachute” and they actually helped

3. When did you last post to your blog?
(a) Last hour
(b) Last 24 hours
(c) Last week
(d) I don’t have a blog and don’t want to start now
(e) Blogs are so yesterday, now I have my own Facebook network and they create all my content for me

4. How many iPods do/have you own(ed)?
(a) Have an iPhone, who needs an iPod?
(b) Have two (or more) – one for exercise, one for cross-country travel
(c) Have one, and replace it every time Apple announces a new version
(d) Don’t want to spend the dough and bought a cheaper MP3 player
(e) Still buy music CDs and listen to them the old-fashioned way

5. How do you watch most of your movies?
(a) Download them legally from Netflix, iTunes or Amazon
(b) Download them via a P2P, you don’t want to know the details
(c) Rent them from Netflix, just upped my monthly plan
(d) Have a DVR and love it
(e) Just bought a DVD for the car to keep the kids occupied
(f) Stay up late and have watched every “Die Hard” at least five times
(g) Go to the movie theaters and suffer with the vast unwashed masses

6. How many speakers are connected to your living room music system?
(a) 7 (and more in other rooms of the house too)
(b) I thought I was pretty cool with 5
(c) Listen to The Who on just 2
(d) Just the one that came with the TV set, thank you very much

7. Do you have more computers than people at home?
(a) Yes, significantly more and it is pretty damn depressing when you think about it
(b) Yes, but only counting the work laptop(s)
(c) No, we are one-to-one
(d) No, fewer PCs than people and have to fight over who gets to use the laptop

8. Do you have a NAS device at home?
(a) Yes, it is the only way to safely store my music, videos, and photos
(b) No, but I do my backups online do I get points for that?
(c) What’s a NAS?

9. How many online photo-sharing services have you used?
(a) Several, and I upload photos to an electronic photo frame too for grandma
(b) Several but they all have issues
(c) One and I am happy with it
(d) Why did Yahoo get rid of theirs, it was better than Flickr anyway
(e) None, still taking my film to the drugstore

10. How do you look up phone numbers?
(a) Bigbook.com or similar service
(b) I go to the company’s Web site and root around for their contact info
(c) I just Google the company
(d) I have that big printed thing from the phone company somewhere around here
(e) I don’t care if it costs me a $1, I still call 411.

11. How do you book your airline flights?
(a) I use Kayak or something equivalent to find the best prices
(b) I go directly to the airlines’ Web sites
(c) I call my travel agent
(d) I don’t want to fly anywhere this summer and deal with the crowds

12. How many digital cameras does your family own?
(a) More cameras than people
(b) Fewer cameras than people
(c) One-to-one, but I still can’t find a camera that has decently short shutter delay.

13. Are you the master of your own domain?
(a) Own several domains, in the process of consolidating them all under one registrar because it is getting out of hand
(b) Yes, own my own domain and run the family Web site keeping track of everyone too
(c) I am a GoDaddy reseller and will gladly sell you a domain if you don’t have one yourself
(d) No, just use hotmail or Yahoo and am happy with that