I wanted to wish everyone who has stopped to read in 2006 a happy new year and all the best in 2007.

While this site is still in its infancy, I’ve been happily surprised by the positive comments and constantly improving traffic this site has been getting.

I’ve also come across some really great blogs in 2006. I would highly recommend The Digerati Life for its topical and insightful writing about technology.

Also, look for the new edition of Business, Technology and Knowledge, which should be out some time around January 4th. So if you’ve like to have an article included in the next edition, get your submission in within the next few days.

Happy New Year and continued success in 2007.

TheStreet.com has a story about a glitch in the free Gmail service being offered by Google (I found this via Digg).

Apparently, because of the glitch, some 60 people lost almost all of their email permanently. TechCrunch is saying that the glitch was caused by Firefox 2.0, and has been solved when users upgrade to Firefox version 2.01 (so if you haven’t upgraded, you should do so as soon as possible).

While I certainly feel for the people who lost their email (I admit, losing all of your email is a major inconvenience), this is certainly not a security incident that is isolated to just Gmail, Google or Firefox.

The really interesting part of this story though, is on the second page of the article, where Adrian Sannier, the head of technology at Arizona State University (which recently decided to adopt Gmail as their email service in a partnership with Google), points out that despite the security breach, he only ever had a team of 30 people to deal with security at the university, whereas “Google has an army.”

I pointed out in my November Google/Firefox/OpenOffice tips how most organizations could effectively now rely on these freely-available tools. What Adrian Sannier points out is quite a valid extension of my argument: it’s not that most organizations are better served by having Google take care of their email security for them, it’s just that it’s in Google’s best interest to protect the privacy interests of their users.

At an organization like a university or a library, where money is always tight, it just simply makes more financial sense to spend that money elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting more information on ASU’s Gmail partnership, you can check out the Gmail FAQ over at the university site.

Techdirt has an interesting article about how many US internet service providers have sold their customers unlimited bandwitch, and then backed out on that promise.

They argue that they have to do traffic shaping (which basically consists of slowing down the traffic from certain applications, mostly P2P software) in order to allow other applications to benefit from that reduction in traffic (people can access their email due to the slower P2P speeds).

There are two major issues when ISPs cap your bandwidth (which arguably has the same effect as traffic shaping — it prevents you from using up all the bandwidth, thereby giving everyone their fair slice of the pie).

However, there are two major problems with this.

1. If they can’t provide you with unlimited bandwidth, they shouldn’t have sold it as that in the first place. Telecommunications companies are infamous for doing this, not only with internet service, but also with other services such as mobile services (for example, you sign a three year contract, where they give you unlimited evening minutes, and then a year later reduce those minutes to 1000 per month).
2. Internet service should not differ from any other kind of service. Would you be OK with your home phone provider telling you could only talk for five minutes at a time if your call was not business-related? The service provider should not be the ones choosing what you do with the bandwidth they provide you.

Perhaps the answer to ISPs throttling particular types of traffic (for example, BitTorrent traffic) is just to encrypt it all.

Welcome to the holiday edition of Business, Technology and Knowledge.

Once again, we had a flood of great submissions — thanks to all who submitted an article. Here is a selection of the best posts and articles we received for our holiday edition.

Due to the massive amount of submissions we received, we’re once again forced to publish a few days early. If you’re still interested in getting a submission into the next issue, send it in now for the next edition that will out early in the new year.

We’ve all been overwhelmed by the popularity of this carnival! Another big thank you and happy holidays to all you readers (and article submitters).

Brandon Peele presents The Economics of Self-Awareness posted at GT.

Matthew Paulson offers us Of Diets and Dollars posted at Getting Green, saying, “This article compares the average person’s financial life with their dieting. Most people know what to do, it’s just a matter of doing it!”

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Happy holidays everyone!

Besides wishing you a great holiday, I also wanted to let you know about another great Wordpress plugin that I’ve come across: Add Meta Tags.

Improve your ranking in search engines like Google.

If you’re like me and don’t want to go to the trouble of adding all those pesky keyboards to every post manually, this great plugin provides a new field in the ‘Write’ section of Wordpress called ‘Tags’.

You just enter the keywords you want into the field, and the plugin takes care of the rest. Truly a great time-saver that will make your posts easier to find through search engines like Google and save you from having to manually tag everything.

Just a quick find that I thought I would share with you. Come back soon for the next edition of the business, technology and knowledge blog carnival.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

Yesterday, I mentioned the reasons I thought Wordpress was a great learning tool. Stephan Spencer over at Business Blog Consulting also has some thoughts about why Wordpress is a good choice even if you’re not running a blog site.

If you’re serious about getting a Wordpress site started, here are some plugins that I’ve found to be indispensable when I was building this site.

Like most Wordpress plugins, they’re free of course, and all quite easy to set up. I’ve provided links to all the plugins that don’t automatically come with your default Wordpress install.

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While I’ve taken a course or two that has introduced me to the basics of web design, I think I have really learned more in the past few weeks through starting this site and installing various Wordpress themes.

When I started this site, I had virtually no knowledge of PHP. I think there’s really nothing better than playing around with someone else’s code however (and breaking it most of the time) to learn how to do something.

If you haven’t tried out Wordpress before, you can set up a free account over at Wordpress and try it out for free.

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One of the most common things that is missing from people’s writing when they are writing content is that they forget to tell a story.

Of course I don’t just mean telling any story. If the story you are telling is about what you ate today and the types of things you like to do, you are not differentiating yourself from the crowd.

Not only do you need to tell a story, but you need to tell an engaging story that your readers will be interested in.

One more important point: don’t create unnecessary flourishes in your writing or you’ll end up drowning in them. Keep it simple and just write what you mean.

Try out the four tips below in your next piece of writing.

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Welcome to the December 17, 2006 edition of Business, Technology and Knowledge, a new blog carnival.

The original publication date of this carnival was going to be the 22nd of December, but we’ve had such a great round of submissions that we’ve went ahead and published early.

We’re still taking submissions for the next issue however, so get those new articles in soon.

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If you’ve been visiting this site regularly, you’ll notice that it has went through several redesigns in the past little while. I’ve been trying to find a theme that fits with the formatting of the site, but also allows for the customization I need.

I think I’ve finally found both in the modified Mountain theme that’s currently on the site.

It’s blue, it’s bright and it’s customizable. You can download the unmodified Mountain theme over here. It’s a great theme and definitely worth checking out.

If you have a comment (or complaint) about the new theme, please leave a comment.