Online editor Adam Gaffin scouts out the essential Weblogs for pumping up your network knowledge.
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.
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.
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 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?"
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.
"Do you still POP your e-mail? IMAP? Are they secure? Even the people with the most sensitive of access it seems fail to understand how unsecure some of their communications are, or maybe they do and just don't care."
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Piquepaille is a classic blogger, ferreting out interesting stuff, then links to it. Only what he specializes in is exotic, futuristic stuff that really could someday become commonplace. A recent topic: robots with "feminine intuition."
Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News
If you can't get enough wireless news and analysis from our wireless research center, then Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News will help you meet your minimum daily requirement. He has even managed to make enough money from advertising to hire a writer to help keep up with the daily flood of wireless news.
One of the key developers of today's collaborative workplace (think Lotus Notes), Ozzie is another blogger who doesn't post every day. His thoughtful pieces are worth waiting for. For example, when Microsoft lost a patent case over technology in its Internet Explorer browser, Ozzie detailed how work he did in building Lotus Notes might be the prior art that would invalidate the patent.
Dann Sheridan's Weblog: Let the data flow!
Sheridan is the Diogenes of enterprise storage - he has his lantern out looking for one good storage site. When he's not telling you what he thinks of specific storage products, he is discussing new security and management tools.