web2.0

 If you have read this blog before you would likely notice that I tend to be interested in photography a good deal even if I'm not a very good photographer yet.  Art Wolfe recommended an e-book by a photographer friend, William Neill, and I have to say that I'm impressed, not just with Mr. Neill's photography, but with his e-book publishing style. Not only do you get a cleanly formatted PDF of his photographs, but each photography is a high-resolution file that can be "zoomed in on" for further detail review of the photographs he made.  This is what e-books should be, not merely regurgitations of the print versions with all of their limitations of size, print quality, and weight.  Hopefully McGraw-Hill and other textbook publishers will catch the cluetrain soon and awake to the possibilities of the Internet.  Stop protecting your dwindling print revenue streams traditional publishers!

I just received my invite for Google Wave! Google Wave is the new communications/collaboration/website... thingy, from Google. A better explanation of what Google Wave is can be found here: http://completewaveguide.com/guide/Meet_Google_Wave. So far I am finding it to be somewhat like Facebook on steroids, minus the complete vendor lock-in, but still everything in one place. Anyway, it's hard to explain, but if you would like an invite I have 19 left to give out, so feel free to contact me and I will send you one while supplies last! cavemanf16@gmail.com

My company recently released a website to educate consumers about the benefits of using online bill payment to reduce the risks and hassles of paying your bills via snail mail (aka the US Postal Service). The new site is called eBill Place, and it's really just meant to inform, not necessarily sell the services of the many different financial services and banks in the US that offer online bill payment services. If you do not pay your bills online, and especially if you are afraid of eBills (hint hint, my wife!), then you should read up on the benefits of doing so at this site. I wouldn't work at this company if I didn't believe in what they are trying to do, which is primarily to make some money while helping people pay their bills faster, more safely, and more easily than ever before. (It also happens to reduce the financial hassles we go through with the companies that we all deal with, in my experience.)

I asked the question, "How much personal information should we allow online?" in a previous post titled, Online Personal Information - How Much Is Too Much?. This question has been weighing heavily on my mind this entire week, so I have decided to expand on some of the ideas that I touched on in that previous post, in this article. I will explore the implications of online privacy, transparency, redundancy, accountability, and risks in this article. You will see that there are benefits to walking a tight line of balance between complete online transparency, and the far more prevalant ultra-privacy that our current American society expects in everyday life.

Yubico is a brand new start-up company out of Sweden that I just found out about through listening to the weekly podcast, Security Now.  Steve Gibson relates the story of making a startling find at the RSA Conference 2008 when he came across the CEO, founder, and inventor of the device that Yubico has created to revolutionize pretty much every kind of computer transaction that requires a password.