Stories by: Mark Gibbs

People come and go in your organization all the time. A select few stay for years while others pass through in just months or even weeks. But whether they are lifers or transients, they all leave a digital ghost behind when they exit -- a trail of their interactions with your network and systems.

Last week I suggested that the IT world, particularly when it comes to marketing, is crazy, and I cited as evidence Microsoft's recently announced US$10 million plan to use comedian Jerry Seinfeld to hawk Vista.

The IT world has a certain level of craziness that is remarkable, and nowhere does it show up more than in how various companies market their products. I have all sorts of examples to illustrate this, but given that I have limited space I'm going to concentrate on what I consider to be the 800-pound gorilla of marketing crazy: Microsoft.

Building Web applications that are robust and perform well is hard, but trying to promote them, build a market for them, and then make money from them is far harder. And harder still is when you're launching a Web service that competes with an established brand in the same market.

By and large we have all gotten used to spam and unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). Even if you buy or build the best filters, if you are at all active online you're going to get at least a few spam messages every day. It has become one of those things that you can't avoid, like death and taxes only more irritating.

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

Last week I began to discuss a remarkable virtual-appliance-based system for network monitoring and management called Groundwork Monitor Community Edition.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed WhatsUp Gold and liked what I found. Of course the topic of network management tools is one that is close to the heart of every network manager so a flurry of letters followed.

Every now and then you come across a product that is, what's the word I'm looking for, compelling? intriguing? Way cool? Today's topic is a product that is all of those things. It is the US$99.95 Eye-Fi Secure Digital (SD) memory card for your camera that has built-in wireless networking. Once configured, the card will log on to your Wi-Fi network and automatically upload images to one of a number of popular photo management tools or storage services such as Flickr and Picasa.

Last week I started to enumerate my phone numbers and I wound up discussing Google's GrandCentral telephony service with considerable enthusiasm. While some people, such as reader and fellow Twitterer Allen Clarkson, are big fans, not everyone is quite as enthusiastic.

Here at Network World, we use Drupal for our blogging platform. Drupal -- which runs on any platform that supports Apache (1.3+) or Internet Information Server (IIS5+) and PHP (4.3.3+), and MySQL or PostgreSQL -- is impressive in its scope and the level of community effort that has gone into improving, enhancing and extending its features and facilities.