My blog wishlist

I would love to find the following types of blogs:

• A "China Law Blog" for India
• A blog written by a CIO of a large company on IT governance and management etc
• A great Six Sigma blog
• A great ITIL blog
• A great travel blog, possibly focussing on less well known countries (although I guess the definition of "less well known" depends on what continent you're from :o/ )

Little help?

How do you eat yours?

I was reading an "old" post by Fred Wilson and I was wondering how often most people read blogs.

I read blogs only at the weekend in a feed reader (FeedDemon) so it means I work (should reading in leisure time be described in such a way?) through the previous week's posts on the 54 blogs I'm subscribed to at the moment (not counting the feeds that are in my "Delete?" folder) every weekend. In reality most of the blogs only get skimmed through or not looked at at all..

My problem with blogs around IT is that most of them cover the same issues (possibly because they're all reading each other) A perfect example was the iPhone launch. If you've seen one iPhone post you've seen them all.. yes it looks cool, yes we know you want one when it comes out, yes we know that it's tough to say whether it'll be a success because no journalist has yet had a chance to use it themselves, yes we know that it's unusual for Steve Jobs to announce a product that won't be available for another year, yes we know the walled garden approach of Apple is not smart (but soooo Apple), yes we know Apple is ignoring the Chinese market by not supporting a stylus for character support.

I would love to switch to subscribing to "review" feeds.. where someone who has more time on their hands than me reads a load of the top blogs and writes posts summarising what people are saying in the blogosphere and links to the best articles. That way I subscribe to a handful of blogs say "American Tech Roundup" (TechCrunch isn't this.. and it's too high volume.. the ideal review blog should have say one big post on "Social Networking Spring 2007" etc. rather than separate posts on individual services) "China Business Review" etc and can get the latest news and thinking a lot quicker and more easily than reading various blogs and trying to keep up with a flood of posts.

I agree with the comments on Fred Wilson's post about blogs too.. too many posts too frequently on a blog makes me switch off and usually unsubscribe. It depends on the blog though.. China Law Blog is very interesting to me so I can't imagine unsubscribing. On the other hand I was only subscribing to TechCrunch out of a desire to have an overview of the latest sites launching and eventually it got too much for me to pay attention to compared with the value it gave me.

ISSA / UCD Irish Cybercrime survey

The ISSA / UCD Irish Cybercrime survey for 2006 was released recently.

As someone with an interest in the value and cost of IT for businesses, the cost per incident was very interesting. 75% of correspondents in the survey incurred a cost of over €5,000 to correct security incidents, and 22% of correspondents reported costs of over €100,000.

For anyone inside a company considering the cost of IT security solutions, it's important to consider the cost to the business of downtime (i.e. productivity loss, loss of revenue, etc), the cost of recovering service, as well as the cost of personnel issues resulting from security/legal breaches by employees. Any decent IT security solution can, with the right policies and procedures in place, be worth its weight in gold when compared against the cost incurred from security incidents.

An invitation to participate in the 2007 survey is at the end of the report.

Single sign-on starting to be a reality?

I migrated my old Blogger blog to new Blogger today so now I use my Google user account to log in to Blogger. It made me realise that the amalgamation of some of the major services on the web has made single sign-on a bit more of a reality.

For three of the internet services I use (Gmail / Blogger / Orkut) I use a single sign-on. For two others ( Yahoo Mail / Flickr) I use a seperate single-sign on. Maybe in the not-too-distant future we'll just need a single sign-on for each of the big internet companies; Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL? (Of those, I don't use any services from AOL so that's three usernames and passwords to remember for me.. )

Beyond that are the smaller sites such as DCU mail and Redbrick which I guess will always have their own seperate login information? I wonder if Google will ever try extending their authentication services so external services could allow users to log in using Google user credentials? MSN failed getting people to adopt Passport so I can't imagine them trying again any time soon.

Just a thought.. one less username for me to remember now, yay! :o)

(Incidentally, I like the new Blogger!! Better spell checking tool and more features in the text editor!)