Blogging for power
Online editor Adam Gaffin scouts out the essential Weblogs for pumping up your network knowledge.
By
Adam Gaffin, Network World
December 22, 2003 12:09 AM ET
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
Each morning, I fire up my RSS aggregator and go through the latest headlines from enterprise-related Weblogs. Here I've pulled
together a list of the 10 I've come to consider essential reading. Their bloggers do a good job explaining the fields they
specialize in, offering unique insights or information you might not get elsewhere.
Phil Wainewright's Loosely Coupled Weblog
Wainewright focuses on "planning, deploying and managing loosely coupled business-process automation." In practical terms,
that means a lot of discussion about Web services. Now, as a relatively new set of technologies and standards, Web services can lead to minefields of misinformation. Wainewright
cuts through the vendor hype and tells you what to look out for - and what all that acronym gobbledygook really means (or
doesn't, as the case may be). He even provides a Web services glossary.
Dave Winer's Scripting News
Winer merits distinction as one of the fathers of today's "blogosphere" for helping come up with RSS, which is the XML-based content-sharing specification many Weblogs use, and for building Radio Userland, a popular Weblog writing application. Love him or hate him (there's not much of a middle ground when it comes to Winer),
his Scripting News is a must-read if you're thinking about the future of information distribution and content sharing on the
Internet.
Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog
Windley, the former CIO for the state of Utah, knows IT. His Weblog covers the breadth of stuff today's IS and networking
pros need to keep up with - from security to network architecture to management (of devices and staff). As you might expect,
he often discusses government networking issues, but also has a strong interest in identity management and network security
in general.

Dan Gillmor's EJournal
Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, was one of the first mainstream writers to embrace Weblogs. More important, his daily writing explores the nexus between
technology, politics and government policy.
Misbehaving.net
Misbehaving.net is a group effort about, and written by, women in computing. Writers not only discuss issues such as the lack
of role models and mentors for women in the field but also pose questions about the basic role of technology: "Do some engineers
design technology to impress other engineers with how smart they are, but are essentially solving non-problems?"
Troy Jessup's Security Blog
Unlike many Webloggers, Jessup isn't compelled to post something daily. But his thoughts on network security are worth the wait. Many of his posts are actually challenges to readers to make their networks more secure. A sample:
"Miscreants compromise our networks using some of the oldest and most basic forms of compromise. Network sniffing, brute force
and stupid things like that. The reasons that miscreants are not dedicated to working around the latest in technology is because
the old stuff still works as good or better than it ever did.
Comment