SOA: Please, please ... I apologize in advance for introducing yet another buzzword into the IT lexicon, but Dave Linthicum, in something of an Edgar Allen Poe moment perhaps, woke up and wrote one down: Blurring. "Blurring is the notion of blurring the line between your enterprise applications, and services and information found on the Internet. Or, blurring the lines between your SOA and the emerging Web 2.0," he explains in A buzzword is born. "The advantage of blurring is that those tasked with building enterprise applications can now leverage Web-based services that they did not have to create themselves." The downside, of course, is that zero population growth for buzzwords is not yet upon us.

Best of the blogs: Second Life now has its first virtual world millionaire, Anshe Chung, a real estate mogul whose holdings have even led to a real-life -- yes, as in outside the Secone Life realm and in the physical, concrete world -- ventures. But even her experience does not prove that Second Life will prove anything more than an escape from the real world, Ted Samson suggests. Doing business in Second Life.

The news beat: Corel says it will put a foot in both the ODF and Open XML document format camps with its WordPerfect software. Broadcom buys LVL7 Systems for its software that runs switches and routers for SMBs. And, of course, today is the day Microsoft launches Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 -- and the worldwide festivities began at three locations in Asia already.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 30, 2006 04:46 AM