Proud Member of the Pradipta 416

So I woke up this morning to have coffee, and used my iPod touch to check email. I was surprised to see a number of messages with the same title. Little did I know it would lead to some funny distractions throughout the day...

J.Y.

EFF Releases 'Best Practices for Online Service Providers' Whitepaper

eff.org: "Online service providers (OSPs) are vital links between their users and the Internet, offering bandwidth, email, web and other Internet services. Because of their centrality, however, OSPs face legal pressures from all sides: from users, industry, and government. As an intermediary, the OSP finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties. The USA PATRIOT Act and other recent legislation have also provided the government with expanded powers to request this information. As a result, OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP’s goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties..."

EFF has drafted a thoughtful resource intended to help both OSPs and consumers. Read the full whitepaper online or download the PDF at www.eff.org

Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)

Via techcrunch.com: "Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)?"



Read the full techcrunch article and see more nifty data tables...

Coworkers.com Launches New Profile Badge Feature

"By simply inserting a couple lines into your HTML source, you can quickly display one our "badges" wherever your like... you can even show your Coworkers rating inside any web page! Each badge links directly to your public Coworkers.com profile page. Just go to our "Tools" page, login, and get your code."

This is a nice new way to share your profile information. Some of the badges even show live rating statistics, both overall and detailed.

The 50 Most Important People on the Web

pcworld.com: "Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus."



read more | digg story

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn - by Guy Kawasaki

"Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It works well for this because it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries. However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn..."

Some great practical tips for using LinkedIn, all rolled up into one well organized blog entry.