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It is my Christmas wish that if news management types do see the need to cut back on staff, those managers give the traditional media layoff victims the option of transferring their experience, institutional memory and storytelling skills to their company's Web divisions. Talk about investments; retrain these journalists for the new century. Teach them HTML, online editing, audio podcast recording. Let them report/blog, shoot/edit their own video, edit copy, design Web pages, contribute to digital media strategy. Some will say "no thanks" and head for the nearest PR firm or local university. But some might grab the chance to transform into a digital newshound. The cut in pay will no doubt draw blood, but they won't be hemorrhaging on the street. And you get somebody who knows their way around a story...

"It's always good to see search companies competing to provide more privacy to their users, and with this move to anonymize search data after 90 days compared to Google's nine months, Yahoo has sent a serious shot across Google's bow," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation...

Indeed, contact center operations is a fast-growing category of commercial crowdsourcing, Chris Lamb, IBM manager of Lotus Connections, told LinuxInsider. "There is always a percentage of calls that fall outside the routine -- and the regular reps do not have the skills to answer them. We have seen a couple of customers provide their call center staff with the ability to tap into an enterprise's intellectual capital at a moment's notice to answer a query."

In addition, for organizations that operate in a very efficient fashion, this can be a nightmare scenario because they contribute to the pot at the same degree that large, bloated, inefficient organizations do. This actually awards inefficiency because the inefficient unit has headroom to lose, while the efficient one is already operating at minimums and may become non-viable after a major cut. In fact this is one of the executive games, to build up excessive staff so that, during a horizontal layoff, they can sacrifice people they didn't really need in the first place.

The requirement to have a board-approved identity theft prevention program designed and implemented in such short order is an enormous undertaking. The absence of a trained staff to carry out these duties and/or existing internal controls can cause the detection and prevention of identity theft by a creditor to be both difficult to manage and costly. Federal regulators are already inquiring about the status of creditors' identity theft prevention programs. Creditors must therefore begin to take immediate measures to formulate their action plans in order to comply with the May 1, 2009 deadline.

Allen, whose group has worked with YouTube in the past in helping parents post videos asking for help in finding missing children, said the Center will take in any information sent from YouTube regarding suspected child exploitation. Trained members of its staff will then notify law enforcement if necessary; YouTube's moderators and customer support staff will not be asked to make those decisions...

As for enterprise users, IT staff might be unwilling to support a third device if they are already supporting a desktop/laptop and a mobile phone. "This could be another rogue device in the enterprise," Hazelton said, noting that some employees might even be willing to pay th...

Tech bloggers are being let go; freshly unemployed newspaper reporters are wondering if they should go into PR or explore the joys of freelancing. Hell, the Hollywood Reporter just laid off a reporter and a columnist who focused on technology's impact on entertainment. Why in the world would you sacrifice the staffers who had the contacts and knew how to make sense of all the digital changes impacting our leisure time? What, Internet film piracy, Hulu.com, "Lazy Sunday," Blu-ray and a writer's strike prompted by new media revenues weren't enough to convince you that the media business is changing?...

Where did Google get its startup funding? Well, part of it came from Kleiner Perkins. And everyone knows the studios are staffed by rich liberals who tend to support Democrats. Then again, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been an unabashed Obama backer. See? Hard to pin down Identi...

Have you ever answered one of those "how was our service?" questionnaires to let somebody know you weren't happy with the experience you'd had, and then never heard anything back from the business that asked? Or maybe this holiday season your boss asked where the staff wanted to go for the office party, only to have him pick his favorite spot regardless. If you've had one of these experiences, or one similar, then you know what it feels like to be asked your opinion and have it ignored. When it comes to Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) this is a cardinal sin...

By 2013, according to Forrester Research, businesses will be spending almost US$4.6 billion on Web 2.0 tools -- advanced Internet technology and applications like blogs, wikis, RSS and social bookmarking that promotes greater collaboration among Internet users, content providers and enterprises. In an April 2008 report, the research group forecast 43 percent annual growth in the social media market for so-called Enterprise 2.0, as organizations invest particularly heavily in social networks. The report includes survey results that suggest the world's biggest companies are the most interested in adopting the new technologies, with 51 percent of firms employing over 20,000 staffers either buying or considering buying Web 2.0 tools. The smallest firms showed the least interest, with just 33 percent of those under 100 employees either deciding to or thinking about purchasing Web 2.0 technologies.

Once voice and presence are built into the network, innovation is limited only by the imagination of the IT staff. Voice as a user interface capability can streamline complex business processes, dramatically improve the user experience and reduce costs. But one of the barriers to communications-enabled applications has been the requirement for developers with Java and specialized computer-telephony integration (CTI) knowledge. Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax, HTTP and XML are now making it possible for Web developers to quickly embed voice into business applications in mashups that can be quickly developed to enhance applications across the entire organization including sales and customer service.

"The paid staff doesn't make content decisions -- we leave that in the capable hands of volunteers, including what content should and shouldn't be there. There has been some coverage of that particular image in the past and yet the image has remained online. That is because the community has determined it doesn't warrant being removed." ...

Strategic action toward solving these issues is being inhibited by three major factors that challenge business executives, line-of-business management, front-line end users, and IT staff alike. Fifty-three percent said the top inhibitor involved required data that is difficult to access and integrate from source systems. One third (33 percent) identified a lack of top management commitment to projects, while just one one-fourth of respondents (26 percent) said lack of IT resources/bandwidth was the top inhibitor...

The IT staff tracks who clicks on the bait in the message. The results are used to educate workers about spam, according to Dykstra At a company meeting, the results are divulged. Often, when repeat messages containing spam elements are sent to the same workers, the same worke...

With Mark, in effect, you'd see each of the sub-brands get more emphasis and a willingness to grow the company and not shrink it, though I would expect he too initially would cut staff sharply to give himself some headroom but then allow the various divisions to build out as needed.

Ideally, companies should flag as confidential the accounts of people with unlisted numbers or those who otherwise would need to keep their data confidential -- such as senior politicians, famous athletes or movie stars -- so that they are not accessible by regular staff, said Markovich...

The squeaky wheel gets the grease -- the first time. The next time it squeaks, start planning to replace the wheel (and keep in mind that the "wheel" could be a network device or a member of staff) If a management tool is failing to live up to expectations, get it fixed or get...

Add staff cutbacks, higher ticket prices, and beefed-up security to the mix, and you're looking at a volatile situation. Airlines, however, can buck the trend, and they can do it by putting in the extra mile when it comes to customer service The Employee-Customer Connection...

Even retailers that are fairly solid are worried, according to a survey Hay Group released Monday. It found that retailers are scaling back on staffing, sales expectations and sales promotions, compared with activities of just two months ago. In August, retailers still though...