Photo Credit: Kaia Gets Caught! by marcus_in_ny

Kaia, the cat in the photo above (no, she's not mine), is symbolic. If she looks like an LOLcat that's my intention. Kaia represents consumer social networks and free collaboration tools like Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs and LinkedIn. The faucet and the pipes you don't see here are your IT infrastructure. The water is the essential stream of data and information that businesses need for knowledge work. All of this combined represents a giant trend to watch - Data Leaking.

In the business world, information technology (IT) pros plays an incredibly valuable role. As geeks we may not love them all the time, but they do keep mission-critical services like email up and running to "five nines." However, corporate IT is at a major crossroads and things are about to get a lot more complicated.

In a few years mid-level knowledge workers will be dominated by Generation Y. As has been well-chronicled, this demographic has a very different view of digital tools. They grew up with the web. Facebook was part of their college and now their professional lives. They live online and use these technologies to nurture and grow both their business and personal networks.

That's where the drama begins. The pace of innovation in the consumer Internet sector will always outpace what the enterprise can do. It's a tortoise and hare scenario that's really not corporate IT's fault. As a result a lot of work - especially anything that involves collaboration - is leaking outside the workplace and CIOs are left to deal with the risks.

Employees, frustrated with the tools they are given, are simply taking matters into their own hands. Data is leaking away form corporations into social networks, which are becoming the new intranets and extranets of tomorrow.

Top-tier reporters I know are using social networks to bring together their sources into working groups or simply to connect. Many others - both PR pros and journalists - are using Help a Reporter. One Fortune 500 marketer I am consulting has set up a site on Ning to bring together some of it's more digitally savvy employees. James McLaine writes that DDB Worldwide, the largest ad agency in the world, is running a private Facebook group to organize and run a mentoring program. Nielsen exec Pete Blackshaw sheepishly admits he has moved non-proprietary work to the cloud. I am sure that many other examples abound.

Corporate IT knows that Data Leaking is going to be one of their top challenges. According to Forrester Research, 79% are concerned about the risks of unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 tools by their employees (see chart below). The data also shows they know they need to lead the way. However, that's the challenge. IT pros will never be able to keep up with Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter and others who are creating tools that consumers fall in love with and integrate into their own lives. It's just not the way companies operate.

The new world of work thrives on online collaboration. The companies that continually build walls around their employees won't be around a decade from now. As the Wikinomics blog indicates, this requires a new breed of CIOs who are willing to let their employees go and tap into their innovative spirit, rather than try to shut it down (a whack a mole scenario). The more liberal an IT department is, the more likely it is they will be able to innovate using a mix of external and internal tools.

The ramifications of this trend are huge. As knowledge work moves to social networks and "the cloud," the rewards increase thanks to enhanced collaboration. However, then again so do the risks. Cloud services like Apple's MobileMe, Google Docs and Amazon S3 all have had high-profile outages in the last month. We haven't seen a massive security hole rupture in any of these systems yet, but that's always a possibility as hackers increasingly turn their attention to these super high-value targets.

PR professionals have a lot to gain from using these tools. Collaborating on multiple drafts of a press release on Google Docs or Microsoft Sharepoint is a snap, as is interacting with reporters and bloggers on Facebook or LinkedIn. However, there are laws like Sarbanes Oxley to contend with and overall risks of downtime and/or potential security issues.

Once again, it comes down to trust and everyone's own risk/reward levers. But something tells me that as Gen Y dominates, they will trust the web. And that means, like or not, data will flow away from internal servers towards open systems. That portends big things.

Listen to interview of David McGuinty on Bill C-555 by the folks at MobileSyrup.

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An article by Kevin Parkinson on GlobalResearch.ca talks about a few issues with our incumbent monopolist phone and broadcast undertaking companies (wired and wireless). I am glad that these issues are increasingly being covered by people on all sides of the political spectrum(s), recognizing the importance of this infrastructure to our future economy as well as society as a whole.

Seems like everyone has a take on what has happened to the Tourist Trade this season. I did a straw poll and WEATHER and the COST OF FUEL seem to be far more dastardly than the pittance for parking fees. People are far less willing to chance bad weather reports because of the huge investment to fill their gas tanks should the weather actually be as bad as the weather man predicts. I think it would be fair to BLAME THE WEATHER MAN for such poor turn out. Maybe the high cost of stuffing the kids' mouths with exorbantly expensive tube steaks and other fast food slop might also contribute to the problem. It remains a problem when you can park for a day for less than the price of a hot dog and fries. Can't remember the last time I could afford a hot dog at Sauble...I think I bought it at Marge's.

Apart from becoming more and more unpleasant, recently business travel is also becoming far less necessary. With videoconferencing technologies improving and fuel prices rising, more businessmen and women seem to be choosing the option to stay put and use new technology to cut down on travel.

Most bloggers have tried some sort of advertising as a way to make money, but how many of you have paid for advertising to promote your own blog?

Recently I have experimented a little with the banner ad you see here. I have gained some interesting results which I thought I would share with you:

I’m by no means the first to advertise a blog, John Chow famously would use adwords placed on blogs with cheeky messages to promote his own blog.

Unsurprisingly my results fall into good and bad. My design skills only stretch so far so some of the blame has to rest with my meagre artistic ability!

• Costs range from $10 up to $1000 a week
• BUT It is possible to find a good fit for your blog in the $10-$20 range if you ask around
• The higher prices do not necessarily translate into better results!
• You need to place your ad on a blog that matches but does not 100% overlap your own audience
• Investigate carefully your exact ad placement AND what will happen if the site sells another ad after you - you don’t want to be pushed down below the fold after paying
• Experiment with ad copy, ad format, site category and landing page for best results
• Closely compare the cost per click against Adwords, in my case only one blog provided better ROI than Google 
• In my case conversions and bounce rate beat both my previous Squidoo Squidoffer and StumbleUpon advertising experiments
• There is branding benefit from 125x ads but don’t take that into account in your ROI calculation as it is hard to measure. Just assume any advertising helps get you better known.

My session did go better than I expected and I was happy to finally get to meet Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive who was the moderator for our panel.

I did manage to shoot some photos, but not too many. I've posted them as a Flickr set. If I get any tomorrow, I'll post them as well.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for SF for a brief visit.

The fourth release candidate for Movable Type 4.2 is out now, and apparently it is the last one prior to the release. Check it out if you want to be bleeding edge.

Om Malik of GigaOm fame has announced that his company, Giga Omni Media, have acquired mobile gadgets blog jkOnTheRun. No amount have been specified.

The reason for buying the blog is of course that it is a great one, filling an empty space in the GigaOm network. The choice was to either build a blog in this niche from scratch, or buying one. With that in mind, the deal was and is probably a no-brainer.There’s a reassuring launch post over at jkOnTheRun as well.

We are quite honored that Om Malik and company like what we do here on jkOnTheRun and very happy to be joining them. Our blogging has a great fit with the other work they are doing and we think you’ll find the total package to be a great stop on your web visits. We are confident you will find this change to be a very good thing for jkOnTheRun and that you will enjoy what we do even more.

Meanwhile, Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch does some predictions for the blogosphere, interesting insights for sure.

I predict that this is just the beginning of the process that will accelerate over the next 12-18 months. Larger blogs lacking the stomach for competition will sell to large media corporations. The more competitive large blogs who want to see this thing through will start to acquire the smaller ones and group by topic areas. Whoever builds the network of the most interesting and prodigious voices will eventually “win.” Or perhaps everyone will win, but to different degrees.

This plays nicely with Om Malik’s words from the announcement post:

I think in many ways that is the blueprint of our strategy going forward: When we find blogs that allow us to dig deeper, to complement and extend our areas of coverage, we will acquire them. If we can’t find ones we like, we will build them.

• people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they're sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand
• collect everything you can look at that's relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it
• define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic
• explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is
• when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you've shown (show, don't tell, and this question answers itself)
• this works best for complex problems
• all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable

Michael of TechCrunch fame is reporting that Google is in talks to purchase Digg for approximately $200 million.

(TechCrunch) Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside of Google, and the two companies are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source. [...]

The companies are now in final negotiations according to our sources, although it could be a couple of weeks before it closes.

Even though Google already has a social linking service, they are probably attempting to keep one of the internets hottest properties away from Redmond giant (who already run ads upon Digg).

While owning Digg will help the search engine giant compete against Yahoo Buzz (as well as Del.icio.us, a service Yahoo! acquired earlier), integrating it within Google News could help distinguish that property from upcoming rivals (like Topix.com).

Digg is a popular serviced used by millions of users around the world (note: especially geeks), although one may wonder if Google’s acquisition of Digg will cement its power even further online (not to mention kill of the countless Digg clones that have popped up over the last few years).

Bill Snyder has an article calling Google "Microsoft's evil twin" because if it completes its merger with Yahoo it will have 90 percent of the advertising market and will be able to jack up the price of online ads. Snyder cites the concept of "network effects" and suggests that Google's market share advantage will "weaken of Microsoft's e-commerce infrastructure will further discourage competition and stifle innovation." This argument is confused. Almost every business enjoys "network effects." Wal-Mart, for example, is able to use its large base of customers to extract lower prices from suppliers, and is then able to use its lower prices to attract more customers. That's a network effect, but it's not a problem. What regulators have traditionally been worried about is not "network effects" in and of themselves, but network effects combined with technological lock-in.

In the Microsoft antitrust case, for example, the "network effects" argument was that various vendors had invested billions of dollars in research and development on technologies surrounding the Windows platform, and that these investments created an almost insurmountable barrier to entry for new operating system vendors: the creator of a new OS would have to persuade hundreds of companies to spend billions of dollars re-designing their products for a new platform. In contrast, the switching costs in the advertising market are extremely low. A small website owner selling inventory on one advertising network one week can easily switch to another the next. Larger sites might take a little longer but it's still not a large investment. Switching costs are even lower for advertisers, who can advertise on multiple networks simultaneously and shift their allocations on a daily basis.

There are a ton of small advertising networks focusing on niche advertising markets. Without the risk of barriers to entry due to lock-in, there just isn't much reason to worry about Google's large market share. If advertisers and website operators become frustrated with Google's advertising network, they can and will switch to another one. And Google, knowing how low the switching costs are, will still have plenty of incentive to treat its customers well.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

OTTAWA-Located two hours north of Montreal, the Algonquin community of Barriere Lake came to Ottawa to protest government interference in their reserve.
Demanding a meeting with MP Lawrence Cannon and a government-overseeing of governance reselection on their reserve, the community aims to correct a March coup d'etat carried out on their reserve.

The community's Customary Chief, Benjamin Nottoway, speaks with RabbleTV about the recent events on the reserve, the governance difficulties, and the struggle to protect the land.

Terry Matchewan, an Algonquin man who was part of the delegation to Ottawa was attacked alongside four other Algonquin men by Gatineau police and speaks of their targetting and wounds.