Bloggers take note: "Blogging can kill". The NYTimes posted an article about the high stress world of professional bloggers. It cited two recent deaths of well known bloggers. Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology, dead at 60 from a heart attack and Marc Orchant dead at 50 from a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack last year.

A new survey from Forrester Research asked 50,000 large enterprise employees which browser they use on a daily basis. They found that over the course of 2007, Internet Explorer's overall market share in the enterprise decreased by 10%. During that same period they saw Firefox's share almost doubled from 9.8% to 18%.

The survey also showed that most companies are using the 6-year-old Internet Explorer 6. Only 23.4% of companies officially used IE7 as their standard browser.

Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford hopes that a 'Wikipedia' approach can help change the way politics are played. He wants to use collaborative software to keep track of political positions candidates take and hold them accountable to pledges they make.

CIOinsight.com published 12 ways to earn higher IT salaries. Really the title should read "How to Increase Any Salary in any Industry" because the suggestions outlined could be applied to almost any industry.

The list includes the following (I've added my own commentary to all of the bullet items):

1 Work for a Larger Company. Larger comanies (>$1B in revenue) consistently pay more than smaller companies.

Grid computing has been around for over 12 years now and its advantages are many. Grid computing can be defined in many ways but for these discussions let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs (e.g. perl scripts, database queries, etc.) across a distributed set of resources instead of one central resource. In the past most computing was done in silos or large SMP like boxes. Even today you'll still see companies perform calculations on large SMP boxes (e.g. E10K's, HP Superdomes).

MIT is working on a project that will allow electricity to be transmitted without the use of any wires. Marin Soljacic and his team at MIT have developed a technique to allow them to transmit electricity wirelessly over short to mid range distances.

I came across a service called Twitter a few months back. At first I brushed it off thinking it was probably a fad that would slowly fade away. But after looking at it a bit more closely I think that this idea may have legs especially in a society where information overload has caused our attention spans to shrink.

Twitter is in a category called "microblogging". What is Microblogging? Basically it gives you the ability to send very short (less than 140 characters) messages to family, friends, co-workers, or other people in your network.

How did Blu-ray come out on top? I'm sure we'll see many Harvard Business Review case studies on this. Everyone is already comparing this to the modern day VHS vs Betamax battle of the early 80s.

Just like Betamax Toshibas HD DVD format looked very good.

- They were first to market
- Quality was just as good as blu-ray
- Extra capacity for movie extras
- Lower cost for disk production. HD DVD didn't need blue laser diodes
- Almost just as many movie titles as blu-ray.

In hindsight they made several strategic mistakes: