CBS Interactive's Distinguished Lecturer David Gewirtz hosts ZDNet Government -- ZDNet's politics and policy coffeehouse -- where civics lessons meet technology, nothing is sacred, and everything is fair game.
David Gewirtz, Distinguished Lecturer at CBS Interactive, is an author, U.S. policy advisor, and computer scientist. He is featured in The History Channel special The President's Book of Secrets.
Over at the IT Garage, Doc Searls goes through some history of Microsoft's InfoCard initiative and asks some good questions. InfoCard is an identity metasystem that Doc correctly describes as a "barn raising project" led by Microsoft.
Much of the mistrust that occurs between the business and IT sides of an organization is founded on misunderstanding and questions about resources. Consequently, building a successful IT organization requires a culture of transparency.
The Bain & Co. "Management Tools and Trends 2005" survey asks some rather pointed questions of IT and business managers regarding the relationship between these two groups.
Andrew McAfee, an associate professor in the technology and operations management unit at Harvard Business School, has been studying who uses Web services and why. More interesting, perhaps, are his insights into why using Web services remains hard.
Search390 reports the results of a Micro Focus survey on mainframes and COBOL. According to the survey, COBOL is still the dominant language on mainframe computers and the median age of COBOL programmers is 45-59.
Tim Berners-Lee continues to preach the gospel of the semantic web. Speaking at the Fourth Annual Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston, Berners-Lee discussed how the semantic web could solve problems in the life sciences: Life scientists in particular could find the Semantic Web a useful tool and in so doing "provide leadership to lots of other fields" in implementing this next-generation Web technology, Berners-Lee said.
A recent story in Baseline Magazine discusses what CIOs at various companies are doing to retain institutional knowledge in the face of retiring IT workers. One example, FirstEnergy Corp: As its first baby boomers turn 60 next year, FirstEnergy Corp.
The other day, someone asked me: "do you know of a mapping service on the Internet that shows you drive times as a set of contour lines from a particular location?" I said I didn't, but someone could probably code it up in an hour or two on top of Google Maps.
A recent decision by the WIPO Arbitration Center took the domain name walmartfacts.biz away from Jeff Milchen, a self-described Wal-Mart critic.
CNET News has an interactive map showing municipal broadband projects across the US. I've written before about the need to educate legislators and municipal officials about the benefits of municipal broadband.