Via Dennis Howlett of ZDNet:

If anyone needed convincing of Twitter’s business utility, today is that day.

Questions:

and…

It isn’t the base search or the blog search either; it’s the news pages of sites like Google and Yahoo getting spammed by promotional messages.

There is no cause for alarm here. The mainstream press isn’t exactly unbiased, one way or another. Major tech sites and big blogs hit the news pages too, and they usually have some type of agenda. Cripes…I’ve seen political blogs make the news - they certainly have something to sell.

The persistence of newsprint remains, despite what the blogosphere thinks. Tech Liberation Front mentions that plenty of newspapers are still showing up in the refuse pile, and notes that a recent poll suggested people still look to papers for local news and information.

I am not sure if the growing amount of newsprint refuse is a sign that people still find newspapers useful, or one of waning in originality of content combined with the inability to just call and cancel their subscription. Could also be that less people are moving nowadays, so they don’t need that paper to wrap their wine glasses in, hence its winding up in the subway bin?

***UPDATE***

Which will run out first: the bandwidth to carry all those RSS feeds (be it new ideas or channels for bits and bytes) or the trees to make that paper? Seems like the blogosphere might suffer from a lack of new ideas as well.

Journalism.org recently released their 2005 report on the state of the news media. We have seen a lot of interesting changes taking place in news. Participatory journalism, centering on the blogosphere, has been the main event. But lets not forget the battles Google News has had and is having, The New York Times purchase of About.com, and the number of longtime nightly news anchors calling it quits.

I think this latest report may shed some light on the underlying issues which created some of the events above, as well as what the future holds. While not a quick read, the report can be printed in parts from the index. You can find it here: State of the News Media.

There has been a lot of chatter about the latest reports from Symantec about security issues. Some say it is valid, and folks should be on guard, while others say it is all FUD to sell product.

I don’t take security for granted, whether it be on a Mac, Windows or Linux, and neither should you.

Rather than try to court even more public opinion on the issue (as most folks are tired of hearing about it), I thought folks would be better served by aggregating some of the existing opinion for you.

IOL of New Zealand has this take on Symantec’s phishing report: IOL: Science & Tech, and Scoop Independent News (from the same fine country), had this view on the issue: Symantec Notes Threat Rise To Confidential Info.

Infoworld noted that botnets are shrinking, something that must be attributed in some part to the release of Windows XP SP2: InfoWorld: Symantec: spam, phishing grow, botnets shrink in ‘04.

Small businesses are not immune either, says InformationWeek: