Most importantly, I wanted to let you all know that the landing page and RSS feed URLs have both changed. There are HTTP redirects in place for both (which I noticed this morning caused a bunch of old RSS entries to be marked as “new” — oops), but just in case you need to know them:
Happy Monday and welcome to the new Cisco blogs! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to bring you a new and improved blogging experience. Be sure to check out our new Cisco blog hub page where we highlight content from across all of our blogs. You can now easily get to all of our social properties like Twitter and Facebook via the “Follow Us” widget. Be sure to click on the “More” link to see our newly launch Social@Cisco site where real-time conversations are happening across our blogs, communities, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube properties. Here’s a quick snap shot of some of the major changes to the blog site:
It seems like everything can and is going virtual…including concerts, elections, contests, and more. In this blog post I am going to ruminate on examples that are trying out virtual for the first time or pushing the virtual envelope further than before.
Concerts uStream seems to be the winner in the live virtual concert race. Cisco and AT&T just yesterday hosted the Doobie Brothers live as a pre-cursor to their new album release.
My prediction (via my virtual crystal ball) is more of these mega concerts will take place, REO Speedwagon preformed later on the same day as the Doobie Brothers, but the game changer here will be the focus on exposure for smaller/indie bands. This is much like the way MySpace changed the music publishing industry forever by enabling a viable marketing engagement to a large and highly engaged audience of music fans around the globe, difference being this time it will be live ! For example, check out “Stripped Down Live with Curt Smith”. This weekly show, hosted by Curt Smith of Tears for Fears, features a different musician who comes on and shows off their acoustical talent. You can and will see these types of experiences happening on the web as well as immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life, which has launched many an indie musicians career. Take Keiko Takamura who recently debuted her 1st album which she co-financed with Linden Dollars from her Second Life Fans. Check her out below.
I’ll save mobile for a later date as that is a blog post in and of itself
Haystack was supposed to be a revolutionary tool in the cause of freedom. Billed as a sort of steganographic communications tool for censored Iranians, the software hurtled to popularity in the media. But last week, it seems to have fallen quickly out of favor. Code that was not made generally available was reviewed by Jacob Applebaum, who was frank in his assessment. Applebaum is well-positioned to offer an expert opinion here, as he works for the Tor Project, which has significant experience designing software to anonymize network traffic. In the wake of Haystack’s trouble, I’m reminded of how our fragile psychologies fall victim to trusting things that we should not.
Starting this morning—Monday, September 27, at 10am GMT—cyber criminals sent spam email messages targeting users of the LinkedIn social media community. This is the largest such attack known to date.
