You you have finally decided to join the masses and join a social networking site. Which one do you choose? For the most part it is the same as picking your fashions, you go with the what is most popular with your friends. Most people do not choose MySpace because it is free and has tools - it is because their friends are there. How would you like to be the only person you know inside of Orkut? What is the point of being in a social network with no one you know? I use both Facebook and LinkedIn. ...     Read entire post

At first blush the Twitter micro-blogging service strikes me as a terrible idea. But after using it a little bit and thinking about implications, I can see some benefits to it. In its current form, it assumes that people are attached to a network-connected computer or cellphone most of the time. This is true for many service and office workers. But it is not true of many leaders and certainly not soldiers. Also, if a soldier has time to type into Twitter, then he is probably not doing anything i ...     Read entire post

It is actually called Analyst Space for Exploration (A-SpaceX), but I-Second Life, Intelligence Life, or Second Intel Life would be easier to understand. SL is popular for both creating 3D content and for chumming around with virtual friends. The Intelligence community can make good use of both of these. A 3D space is a natural space in which to combine and manage information. But given a number of different sources of info, what is the best spatial tool for organizing it? Sticking photos on on ...     Read entire post

On the Internet there are two dominant ways to search for information. The first is to hit one of the search engines and let it do the walking for you. Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and a host of others will giv eyou thousands of possible matches on your search. This is great when you are looking for someone elses information - like an organization's web site. But when you want to understand a topic or a term better, this is a terrible approach to learning about it. The second dominant way to find infor ...     Read entire post

Do Soldiers Blog? Do they take pictures of their tours? Do they drink beer? ... Of course the answer to all of these is "yes". Blogging has become a favorite form of expression for soldiers in Iraq. Below is a list of several soldier blogs and an interesting article in Wired magazine. After checking these out, lets explore some interesting questions: Why do soldiers blog? I am not a psychologist or a sociologist so I would welcome comments from anyone who understands these topics be ...     Read entire post