Friday Links: July 14

People: Further thoughts on Bill Gate's Departure Jason Stamper, blogging in Computer Business Review Online, muses about the fact the Microsoft stock registered hardly a blip on the announcement of Bill Gate's planned departure. When Sun COO Ed Zander left after 15 years there, Sun's stock fell 14%, shaving $2bn from its market capitalization. When it was announced Zander was joining Motorola as CEO, Motorola's stock rose 4.2%, adding almost exactly $2bn to Motorola's valuation.What happened to Microsoft's stock when Gates announced he is leaving in two years' time? Virtually nothing, and since then it has actually risen. PC Privacy: Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 Via the Geeks Are Sexy blog I spotted the announcement of this utility from Microsoft to allow the creation of a password protected folder to your account on an XP-based system. If, for example, your family shares a home pc on which you need to sometimes work on confidential client files, this tool can allow you to save documents with at least some sense that you are meeting your obligations to protect this data. But while it might be useful at home, Geek points out what a nightmare Private Folder will be on your organization's net - it allows users to create folders that are not accessible by the administrator account! Available for free download. Email: Innovations have been slow to arrive. Writing from Zurich, Gabor Cselle is correct when he reminds us how little email software has changed in the last decade. For the last 10 years, the three-pane has been the standard view of looking at email. A pane for folders, a pane for folder contents, and one showing the selected email. Even though mail clients are highly configurable, this has been the standard view of many users. It isn't likely to change soon: The beta of Microsoft Outlook 2007 sticks with these conventions. The rest of the article goes on to present a variety of innovative ideas culled from academic research on new ways to look at email, taking workflow and task-oriented approaches to what has become the predominant form of business communication. Gets you thinking! Email: Knowledge Management Speaking of which. I've commented before on the problem of building truly organizational knowledge to minimize the impact of individual staff departures from your non-profit. In a recent post in her Joining Dots blog, Susan Richardson talks about one specific way in which this happens: the deletion of the departed staff member's email account. One aspect of her solution - just as I was urging last year - is to encourage users to publish valuable information that might otherwise languish in email using some form of organizationally accessible collaboration tools. Blogging: Guy Kawasaki's interview with Technorati CEO David Sifry Technorati has become one of the principle portals for searching the blogosphere, and its emphasis on tagging and pinging have become standard in blog applications. Here Guy talks to David Sifry about how Technorati works, and how you can use it to get more attention for your blog. Snippets: A really nice carousel widget for your websites Via mhub I found this flexible javascript code from Bill Scott. Based on the Yahoo User Interface Library, it lets you create a slideshow or other "carousel" style component in a web app, with very smooth animation options. I've got an application in mind for it already! And now for something completely different... Real Tech News pointed out this frightening bit of silliness... the UK is outlawing energy saving standby mode on office technology, in the belief that people will then shut their photocopiers and other equipment down completey down after each use. Tags: nptech