Cloud Containment
As cloud vendors mature, Web-based delivery of applications, storage and infrastructure is getting more secure and trustworthy. That doesn’t mean that the risks are gone–they’ve just migrated to a more difficult-to-manage form. Today, big-name cloud providers like Salesforce.com offer top-notch security, auditability and compliance. Even Google provides a compliant e-mail hosting solution for regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Providers can now meet cor- porate needs, experts say, as long as companies do their security … Read more »
The Media versus Marginal Cost
If you have two companies producing the same product then, over time, the price to the consumer will eventually start to hover just above the incremental price of each additional product. Not the price it costs to produce products — but the price it takes to produce one more product. Say, for example, you have two newspapers in the same town producing almost indistinguishable products. And it costs, say, $1 dollar to print and distribute one additional newspaper. The newspapers charge $2 for the papers — $1 goes to cover the marginal costs, and the rest is divided between fixed costs and profit. By fixed costs, in this context, I mean the money it costs to produce the first copy of the newspaper — the salaries of the editors and reporters, the rent of … Read more »
How Not To Get Stuck In The Clouds
The promise of cloud computing is that a company can easily scale applications up or down, or move them from internal to external locations, to match demand, optimize performance, or lower costs. In practice, however, users may find themselves trapped in a relationship with a particular cloud vendor, unable to move applications to internal servers or other clouds without rewriting them from scratch. “Many of the customers we have spoken to simply assume that the cloud is open,” said Brian Goodman, IBM’s manager for cloud engineering and experience. “This is a common misconception because of all of the hype circulating around cloud computing.” And, while it might seem that vendors are the one who want to lock the customers in, in many cases it’s … Read more »
Will China own the next Internet?
According to most predictions – including mine – the next generation of the Internet will be three-dimensional, fully immersive, a multi-media smorgasbord for the senses. And, according to those same people – and me – we already have a sneak preview of that Internet in the form of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and virtual reality platforms like Second Life and IBM’s OpenSim. Entrepreneurs always want to get ahead of the new technology. Who doesn’t want to be the Yahoo, Google, or Amazon of this new world? Unfortunately, it’s never obvious at the beginning what exactly it is that the new world is going to need, and who is going to be doing it and how. Oh, and whether it will ever make any money. So far, the two areas of … Read more »
Description vs. prescription
I love the fact that there are always two kids of everything in the world… the binary system is so neat and orderly. There are two kinds of grammarians: the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. The prescriptivists lay down the rules, then want other people to follow them. When someone splits an infinitive, for example, or ends a sentence with a preposition, the prescriptivists get very upset. I fall into this category most of the time. As an editor, I spend a lot of time putting commas in their correct places and mediating subject-verb disagreements. Descriptivists, by comparison, say that language is whatever it is that people talk and write. That language changes, and it changes all the time. And different groups speak slightly different languages, and as they move between groups, people will … Read more »
More on WordPress — it’s starting to look pretty … pretty
I checked out SquareSpace — nice web interface, but seems a little lacking in functionality. Then Ottawa-based web guy Gesman pointed me to a WordPress design site specifically for magazines and news organizations. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for – thanks, Gesman! The designs are gorgeous and don’t look like blogs at all. I particularly love the way the categories are organized on the front page. … Read more »
How to kill your journalism career: The story of J.
We cover a lot of countries here at Trombly Ltd. Some of these countries speak other languages. So we’re always looking for reporters with go od language skills. J. was perfect. Young, ambitious, had the languages we needed — plus, with journalism experience. She wrote ten articles for us. Sure, her work needed work. She needed to improve her reporting, story organization, and grammar and style. But she was well on her way to becoming a solid international business journalism. Plus, we were getting in assignments on the movie industry — just up her alley. On Wednesday, I took her to a meeting with a local media executive who liked her background and was interested in helping us put her on TV. On Thursday, I offered her a part-time assignment editing gig for one … Read more »
Journalism vs. PR
Just came back from a nice lunch at KABB, in Shanghai’s people-watching mecca Xintiandi. Hose Mitamura (author of China s Environment 2008, available from Amazon) and I discussed the differences between journalism and PR. As my staff constantly reminds me, I tend to believe passionately in whatever I heard most recently. In my case, this is Law and Order — I was watching reruns of the show the night before. (I’m not going to say how, except to mention that I was shocked — SHOCKED — to find that there were illegally uploaded TV shows available through surfthechannel.com. Don’t people know there is intellectual property violation going on? The horror!) Anyway, on Law and Order — and in every show that depicts an American-style legal system — every legal case has two sides. … Read more »
Journalists and bad job-hunting skills
Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post (and comments). I don’t know if this is the case just in China or everywhere, but a great number of journalists I interview lately have remarkably poor job hunting skills. It seems that I’m spending this week – like most weeks — up to my eyeballs in recruitment ads and job applications. This time, we’re hiring for a bookkeeper/office manager and freelance writers and copyeditors for a new online magazine about central and western China. I’ve been seeing resumes from people with nice academic backgrounds and truly horrible work histories. Sure, there’s always the chance that they’re evil people who can’t keep a steady job because of their hobby … Read more »
How to avoid paying bribes
Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. At lunch today I had a nice chat with a lawyer friend about paying bribes. Now, I’m not about to comment on this issue in China (except to say that, for me at least, it hasn’t come up). But I’ll share a bit of my experience in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Again, I’m not often asked for bribes. When I am, I don’t pay them. End of story. But I’ve known colleagues who had to pay through the nose for everything. Every single stamp, ticket, piece of paper, or anything else they needed — the bureaucrat’s hand would come out. Even for simple things like hiring drivers or … Read more »