As an information junkie, I appreciate colleagues and friends sending me links to articles, Web sites, software, and events, that they think I’ll find interesting. And I reciprocate. I’m also a blog aficionado, subscribing when I see a source that looks valuable, relevant, or interesting. Many of your readers no doubt fit the same profile. [...]
Author Archives: Gabe Goldberg Gabe Goldberg Computers and Publishing Inc.
Give Your Past a Future: Archive
July 14, 2008If you manage an ongoing publication or Web content operation, you’re probably overwhelmed with file build-up. Can’t you just hit “delete” from time to time? Not really. The government may require your organization to retain material for specified times—financial records, for instance—but even if it doesn’t, you may find yourself in litigation one day. Then, [...]
Emergency Response in a Flash
July 7, 2008Remote access to one’s primary computer via services such as GoToMyPC is a powerful work tool, saving one the need to cope with unfamiliar system setup and applications. But GoToMyPC (and the free equivalents VNC, LogMeIn, and Windows Remote Desktop) require fast Internet connections for the local and remote system. They also require that the [...]
Lightweight Tools Offer Simple Remote Office Access
June 26, 2008In the old days, I sometimes traveled with a barely portable computer terminal that gave me (slow!) remote access to my company’s computer, a room-sized IBM mainframe. Today, travelers and teleworkers can gain access to distant home or office systems from any broadband Internet-connected computer, using economical services such as GoToMyPC. Much simpler to configure [...]
Don’t Keep Team Members in Solitary Confinement
June 24, 2008Today’s collaboration tools are great—your virtual team members can work just as effectively in another time zone as in the next cubicle. Instant messaging, video conferencing, file transfer, Microsoft SharePoint, virtual private network (VPN), and other whiz-bang technologies can link far-flung team members tighter than people on different floors of the same building used to [...]
Mining Knowledge From the Pre-Digital Era
June 11, 2008We commonly read that the sum of human knowledge increases massively every year. No matter how it’s measured—by count of words, memes, Web sites discovered by Google, or piles of unread books in my office—a problem lurks within these numbers. While new discoveries, inventions, assertions, and prognostications lead the human parade into the future, the [...]
Web Site Visitors Want It NOW
May 29, 2008It’s not your imagination. The world is moving faster and people are less patient. I switched from dial-up Internet access to a broadband connection only four years ago, and I’ve already forgotten what it was like to wait for Web pages to load. Now, when pages don’t load instantly, I’m irritated and tempted to move [...]
Meetings at the Online Virtual Water Cooler
May 21, 2008While I have many friends and colleagues from my time working at full-time jobs in real offices, my personal and professional networks have steadily grown in the 17 years I’ve been a freelance technology writer/editor/consultant. I was lucky that my independent career began at the dawn of the public Internet, which has been a primary [...]
When they err, newspapers run corrections. (Sometimes, that is, for some errors). Book publishers insert errata sheets in textbooks and correct egregious errors in subsequent editions. But the Web, still in its adolescence, has no agreed-upon standard for corrections. There’s controversy over whether to quietly make necessary changes or to update and indicate what’s been [...]
Joining Real-World Secret Societies
May 13, 2008In this hyper-connected age, it’s easy to think that just as all human wisdom and knowledge is available on the Internet, you can use today’s social networking Web sites to meet everyone worth meeting. In fact, both beliefs are wrong. Just as there’s a “deep Web” orders of magnitude larger than the visible Web, many [...]
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