Corporate blog

There’s one month left of Summer, and whether you spend these dwindling days basking on the beach or languishing at the office, sometimes you just need to unplug for a few hours. So if you want to spend your spare time boning up on the blogosphere, you’re in luck. There are a bunch of books that can help improve your thinking about the value of social media to the enterprise. With that in mind, here’s a short list of some of that excellent social media related reading:

It seems that everywhere I look, there’s someone telling us why corporate blogs are not only a waste of time if you’re looking for something to read, but they offer no value and should be taken down as soon as possible. The detractors claim corporate blogs lack transparency, fail to adapt to the changing times, and generally play the PR game without ever admitting issues or entering into a discussion with the reader. I think that’s pure rubbish.

Sun Microsystems continues to run amok in the open-source world, open-sourcing software in every direction. Today, it is in the direction of digital-archiving software, which has been used to capture and maintain "business images, records, consumer- and corporate-created digital content, e-science work, and high-performance computing (HPC) data for hundreds of years." How does Sun expect to make money? In this case, it's the hardware, which makes a lot of sense: Sun StorageTek 5800 Open Edition can be downloaded for free, allowing developers to experience the simplicity of storing and retrieving fixed content data and metadata efficiently. The purchase of the ***

Mozilla Foundation today announced the formation of a new subsidiary group titled Mozilla Messaging.  The new group will be focused on taking Mozilla’s mail client Thunderbird to the next level of competitiveness against established mail clients, including Microsoft Outlook.  David Ascher will head the new subsidiary that is not only aimed at email, but Internet communications, as stated on in his blog post announcing the new group. Mozilla’s ***

Despite SunRocket's recent implosion, venture capitalists are hot to invest in voice over IP start-ups. A company called Jaxtr announced Tuesday that it's raised $10 million. The company, which hopes to emulate the success of eBay's Skype, actually attracted some of the same investors as Skype. Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital, all early stage investors in Skype, contributed to Jaxtr's first round of funding. Jaxtr is one of a growing number of IP telephony start-ups hoping to make it big. These companies are leaning more toward Skype's business model as a complementary voice service rather than billing themselves as a replacement to traditional telephone services. This was the strategy that Vonage and SunRocket took when launched. ***

Skype's service appears to be up and running again for the most part, after software issues Thursday prevented millions of Skype users from signing on to the IP telephony application. Skype officials say the outage was not due to a cyberattack or network upgrades. Instead they attributed the issue to "a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user's own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network." As of 11 a.m. GMT Friday, the company said that the software had started to stabilize. Some users have reported spotty service, but when I tried the service earlier today, it worked just fine. Pundits and bloggers are already lining up to take swipes at Skype, which is owned by eBay. ***

perspective I often get to sit down with CEOs of large companies to talk about new technology. These days, the topic of conversation frequently turns to Web 2.0--how to sell insurance or aircraft parts or cars when the 30-second TV spot and the one-page newspaper ad are dying. Here's what I tell them: • Your company is inside-out in an outside-in world. Imperious CEOs often have trouble with this one. They still see their company dictating pricing, product configurations and service levels--a one-way street, with the company lording over subservient customers. The mentality is: "We'll do what we want to do, and the world will love it." It's this sort of logic that results in GM focusing on trucks ("Hey, it's good for our profit!") in an age of $3 a gallon gas and ***

(Credit: Adobe Systems) Adobe released the public beta of its Adobe AIR runtime environment (previously codenamed Apollo) about a month ago. The software is designed to allow the development of rich Internet applications that work on any operating system. I"m sure that there are technical differences, but it seems a lot like an amped-up widget engine to me. Needless to say, AIR apps aren"t nearly as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash apps (yet), but there have been a few interesting recent developments. The most-polished AIR application so far is Adobe Digital Editions, software for reading, downloading, and managing e-books. ***

(Credit: CNET Networks) Google just put a new feature in its Google Apps for Your Domain suite of services: a "start page." This is a new corporate version of Google"s existing personal start page, for people inside a company using Google"s apps for e-mail and calendaring. The differences between the standard Google start page and this product are that administrators can design the page, can lock down all or part of it, and can give it a custom URL. Setting up a company intranet page is certainly easy with this tool, but Google"s business services are still a bit light. Google hasn"t yet integrated Google Docs and Spreadsheets into Google Apps for Your Domain, for example. Google does have all the pieces (including a ***

Here's a YouTube search you might not have thought of: what is an SOA? IBM is bringing the services-oriented architecture concept to the YouTube generation. Earlier this week, IBM posted the three videos explaining a services-oriented architecture (SOA), according to vice president of standards and open source Bob Sutor, who pointed to them on his blog. The spots are nearly identical in their message but they use different metaphors. There is the building-block concept with neat graphics of Legos and houses. They also used a couple novel metaphors for modular computing systems known as SOA's. It's just like having a wardrobe with mix-and-match pieces of clothing, says one video. ***

VoIP giant Skype is now letting Web sites and other Internet applications tap into the pool of people using the Luxembourg-based company's instant-messaging service. The company on Wednesday unleashed its SkypeWeb and SkypeNet developer tools. By doing so, the company says, it's opening up its platform to people who wants to integrate Skype Instant Messaging--a lesser-known feature of Skype--into their applications. "Skype to wants to embrace the rest of Internet," Skype co-founder Janus Friis said during a recent interview. Skype IM is given away free, along with the company's Net phone software, to people who register with the company. ***