Hewlett-Packard scientists found a company’s power and communication structure may be as simple as examining patterns of e-mail exchanges.

“Because [Email] can be captured and stored, many scientists are eyeing e-mail as a tool to quantify exchanges that in the past have taken place in hallways or meetings. The researchers in this study said e-mail flow could provide a window into the communications structure of an organization.”

Fast Company reports that, “The United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations.” (via sysrick.com)

Apparently a group of French Sony researchers thought it would be interesting to have the Aibo Dog Robot and a “REAL” Dog compete for a piece of raw meat.

What were they thinking?

Did they really expect different results?

Ha! My wife Catherine goes off on SuicideGirls.com

From Business 2.0’s The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business

“One question might be, and I’ll be as direct as I can be about this, what is .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it’s a product, it sits in one place, it’s got a nice little box. In some senses, it’s a very good question.”
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft .Net briefing day in July

“We don’t have the user-centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion of context.”
- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on the same topic at the same briefing

“Our biggest problem was policing the use of .Net. Things like .Net Enterprise Servers. That’s a great example of where the confusion came from, because it looked like we were slapping .Net on a bunch of random products.”
- Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft’s platform strategy group, in August on ZDNet News

“It’s about connecting people to people, people to information, businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is the benefit.”
- Steve Ballmer, trying again, in an October interview with News.com

Umm, Nice try .. However, The Scobleizer seems have it.

jasnell has an interesting observation: “If InfoPath does for XML and Web services what Excel did for Spreadsheets, bravo to Microsoft, good job.”

While reading the comments on Seb’s Towards structured blogging, I found a link to the following research going on at HP:

Semantic Blogging for Bibliographies: “The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging.”

There are some interesting new features in the latest release of Freenet:

Like for example, “Forward Error Correction and Healing” or FEC, which not only allows for larger files to be shared, it also provides a “healing” feature, so that parts of files can be re-created.

In addtion, “Anecdotal evidence suggests that FEC allows the reliable downloading of files as large as 600MB from Freenet at average download rates as high as 90k/sec on a broadband internet connection (which compares quite favorably to more conventional P2P applications).”

Hmm …

From Discover “… the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups.” (link via BoingBoing)

From Jon Udell’s latests InfoWorld column:

“Making knowledge more available gets easier with Weblogs, improved information sorting, better user connections”

“Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they’ll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents.”

More good stuff on Jon’s blog