Today's post, brought to you by the random IM interactions from the fine folks over at the Kalsey Group (why?  Not sure, he was just the last person I IM'd with before crashing last night) will be a little bit different. Rather than my long rants on different topics, today I'll blog just lots and lots of little tidbits.

The Kalsey Group points out that the Amazon API lets you sort electronics by price and that while I attribute their lack of price sorting to maliciousness, it might just be "plain shoddy management".  I'd agree with that. [ Go ]

If you still believe that email marketing works (I don't) then you might want to read the Kalsey Group's essay on it.  [ Go ]

Best Blog of the Week?  IASlash which covers a range of Knowledge Management issues and never fails to impress me.  [ Go ]

The blogger who has lost his way and needs to blog more?  Kjartan over at Natrak.net.  Please come home man.  We miss you.  (No go link since he's not updating all that regularly as of late).

Ray Ozzie has an excellent essay about "What If There Was No Privacy in (work) Email".  It's an interesting question and one that I think about all the time.  I do think his essay is, unforunately, totally self serving since the only privacy alternative to email he suggests is a Groove Space.  Come on man.  People can also have "privacy" with just a Hotmail account.  Yes it's not encrypted but that's not a big deal.  The bigger issue with privacy in work email is the communications between you and your friends / family / significant others that gets mixed in.  Requiring employees to NOT use their work email account for this is a much simpler alternative to a Groove space.  No client software, no training, no costs to the company.  Note to Ray Ozzie: We all know Groove is good but you don't always need to be a schill for your product.  And I'm gonna take flame from the Groove boys on this one.  So be it.  Asbestos boxer shorts at the ready.  [ Go ]

JabberCentral is shutting down.  That's a shame so go over there if you need any of it's resources.  [ Go ]

The Microsoft HTML Help Workshop?  It sucks slimy green toads.  Let's just say that recently I ran out of disc space and the culprit was a 1.7 gigabyte temp file that this little odious troll of a program left behind when compiling a 1.4 meg help file.  No there are no errors on those #s.  Check the picture. [ Go ]

Thanks to my friend Guy Haas for translating "Who Benefits" into latin for a future blog essay.  He used google to do it.  And not the Google translation feature.  It's "Cui Bono".  [ Go ]

Shame on Jakob Nielsen.  I have nothing but respect for Jakob, who is a really sweet guy; I met him back in the ACM Hypertext 9X conference days when he was still at Sun, but Useit.com is getting misleading.  Here's the text I'm referencing.

Learn More

158-page Intranet Design Annual with 104 screenshots of the ten winners is available for download.

It would be nice if he pointed out that "is available for purchase and download".  I wouldn't have bothered clicking on that link if I knew that in advance.  Neither would most people and wouldn't that be more usable?  Still Jakob's essays remain excellent and I have huge respect for the man.  [ Go ]

And Googlefight remains awfully, awfully cool.  [ Go ]

The combination of Google News and blogs really does tranform your view of the news.  Now this may be a lot more significant for Americans than the rest of the world since we tend to be inward looking.  But now when I want to know what's going on in Indonesia, I turn to Joe.  And I feel that Google News has brought me balance by letting me see how news organizations outside the U.S. perceive things.  For example I saw a good article in the Sydney World Herald the other day with an alternate perspective on Bush's intelligence.  While some of us may argue about whether or not Google news is needed or if it's as good as a personal aggregator, I can't see how it's anything but positive.  Sure I can't add my own feeds but that's NOT what's for.  It's a global newspaper that's always updated.  Even in this age of the Internet, newspapers are still useful.  Google News is just a 21st century version. [ Go ]

And for the funniest geek humor of the day, check out Burning Bird's look on programming languages.  I especially loved the take on PHP.  [ Go ]