J. Wilcox over at Microsoft Monitor tries to determine if the new file system, dubbed WinFS, in Microsoft’s NG:OS Longhorn, will indeed be considered “new“:

“If Mr. LaMonica’s WinFS description is accurate, then WinFS really is Microsoft database technology running on top of the existing NTFS file system.”

Ross Mayfield posted an excerpt from an interview with the CSO of Salesforce.com in regard to Social Networking. The interview was conducted by IBDN, but I wasn’t able to find a direct link. However, here’s a quote from the M2M blog:

IBDN: We know that consumers will pay to find a date, but will they pay to find business contacts?

FULBRIGHT: Yes, one name for them is “leads,” and sales and marketing organizations pay thousands of dollars for leads today. Leads are the life-blood of every business. Another type of paid business contact is called “candidates,” and again companies have been paying recruiters or internal referrals thousands of dollars for great candidates for at least 50 years.

Especially now, with tight budgets, businesses must run more efficiently and want to find the right contacts to meet their needs, in as streamlined a manner as possible. To the extent that businesses can start with warm leads instead of cold leads, and an existing pool of candidates when they have an opening, they will save millions of dollars.

I’d like to add that companies such as MediaMap and Vocus specialize in facilitating the “lead” connections — especially in the Public Relations industry, which is an industry that feeds on “social connections”.

Heh, RobotPolishers’ has created RSS feeds of MTA’s services updates for the NYC Subway over at Disorient Express:

“So out of frustration, sheer geekiness and a desire to toy around with RSS, I decided to put together some feeds of the MTAs service updates, based on a program scanning their own weekly website updates.”

I had a chance to take a look at the new 4.0 version of Jahia and I must say that I am very impressed. As 100% Java solution, it’s a competitive alternative to SharePoint.

Jahia is not quite Open Source however, you do get the source code, but the license model is “Jahia Collaborative Source License (JCSL)”, which roughly means that you can either pay for the license in dollars or pay with code contributions to the project. Certainly an interesting model that is similar to Sun Collaborative Source License (SCSL).

Some of the other interesting facets to Jahia are the stack of Java Open Source Projects that the default install includes. Like for example Tomcat, Slide WebDAV, the Lucerne Search Engine, Struts, OpenLDAP, and HSQL Database Engine.

As far a features go, it definitely crosses the line between CMS and Portal, by integrating rich CMS functionality with workflow and versioning as well as document management (check-in/check-out) with WebDAV access. This is all on top of a highly-configurable “portlet-based” interface framework.

Nice.

Penn State University has released a new search engine called SMEALSearch, which is focused on indexing academic and business white papers, articles and reports.

“SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts.”

However, I’d love to see the code release as an Open Source Project. [hint-hint-nudge-nudge]

Unfortunately, I haven’t been using any IM clients recently due to the fact that their usage is banned and blocked where I work (more on that sometime).

Anyway, it was intriguing to read via Jeremy Zawodny Blog about Yahoo’s new IMVironment (e.g. plug-in) for its Messenger client that allows users to search collaboratively.

“Pull up a map or yellow pages listing together instantly. Working with a colleague in another city? Search together in real time for info, images, news…”

Hmmm, it does seem like an obvious feature. I’ll have to check it out, but not at the office ;-)