CIO: Nobody to Play With. Lowry spent the next two years laying the very real technical groundwork for his dream of a fully collaborative computing environment. And, indeed, Goldman is now ready to collaborate on a grand scale. But its partners and suppliers in the automotive supply chain are not. [Tomalak's Realm]

Financial Times: How the banks poured money down the internet drain. This week Bank of Ireland became the latest to conclude that stand-alone internet banking was unpopular with customers. It folded its F Sharp offshore web bank back into its mainstream operations, at a cost of several million pounds. The issue for BoI was that [...]

NY Times: Page by Page History of the Web. Brewster Kahle wants to create within the Internet a library that is as vast as the infinite library of my dreams, and as personal as old Mr. Rosenberg's lap. And at the same time, he is teaching us a parable about what we used to call [...]

Dan Bricklin: Web Services, Business Models, and Storage. To me, the implications are that services must be structured so that people feel they have independent full access and control of their data. One way to do this is to make sure they can easily export it in a form they are comfortable with to keep [...]

NY Times: Companies Move Away From Centralized Offices. These days, with businesses reconsidering the desirability of everything from opening mail to clustering people in urban centers, many companies are taking a closer look at the so-called distributed workplace — and studying the handful of corporations that have chosen to adopt it. [Tomalak's Realm]

Joel Spolsky: For the umpteenth time, I found myself dependent on a code library which had a crashing bug that was unacceptable in code I shipped. What are you supposed to do if you're the chef at Les Halles and your fishmonger is giving you smelly fish? Today, you need to know how to work [...]

Writing James Pryor is a popular young Harvard philosophy professor who shows The Matrix in class to illustrate points about Epistemology. His article Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper is one of the best tutorials on any kind of writing: Pretend that your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean. He's lazy in that he doesn't [...]

MS XML Parser Version 4: Don't Look Back. With their latest XML Parser release, Microsoft seems to be saying: “Out with the old, and in with the new.” How will this lack of backwards-compatibility affect your own XML efforts? Michael Classen investigates. [WebReference News]

Washington Post – Editorial Op-Ed – A Panicky Bill. By overwhelming majorities, both houses of Congress have now passed legislation giving the government greater latitude to monitor communications and otherwise pursue and detain suspected terrorists. Leaders of the effort were celebrating the complex bill's enactment yesterday as a major bipartisan accomplishment and great success that, [...]

Article: “Building Community at Work”- published in Executive Update. Quote: “Traditional management makes it challenging for people to work across organizational boundaries, share knowledge, and understand – let alone address – the multidimensional problems associations confront in today's marketplace. An age-old solution with a human face is already at work in your organization: community.” [Serious [...]