I should be shot?

My latest column "When change is wrong" details my odyssey with  Lotus Notes -- how I inherited it, decided to migrate from it, and ultimately decided not to go through with it for sound business reasons.  Just a few minutes ago, I read a post in our forums from Ken Yee (maintainer of the Lotus Notes FAQ) that said I should be shot for using Lotus Notes for only e-mail because it offers so much more.  In my column, I had complained about how tightly-coupled all the parts of Notes are, and Ken sees that as an advantage:

This tight integration is precisely why Notes does what it does so well. It was the first widely available PKI infrastructure, so your users can sign and encrypt documents. Security is an inherent part of the infrastructure, down to the document level, and even field level if you use encryption. You have applications (and their constant improvements) that replicate out with your data, so you don't have to have a separate infrastructure to push out new applications to users. Your users can run Notes apps remotely. All of this packaged in a RAD (Rapid Application Development) environment that lets developers (and even power users!) automate a company's unique workflows. Your developers don't have to waste time building their own pipes and infrastructure and can concentrate on making your company more efficient.

And, finally: 

Having someone like Chad as a CTO to guide your company's technology decisions is pretty scary 

I guess every day at InfoWorld is Halloween. :)  In any case, I would suggest that Ken read Ray Ozzie's essay "Extreme Mobility," which carries some extra weight since Ray drove the original concept and development of Notes.  Ray's eloquent and credible critique of Notes and his description of the design decisions behind Groove resulting from his experience in building Notes really resonate with me as a daily Notes and Groove user.  Groove has it right because Ray has it right.  (So does the CIO of a 100,000+ employee company, whom he quotes anonymously.)  It feels good to be on the phone, drop a file into a secure "shared space" and have the person on the other end say almost instantaneously -- "got it!"  No dealing with replication, firewalls, or other annoyances.  That's the way collaboration needs to work in 2003.

The new environment we're all operating in does create a certain amount of fear, but I'm guessing that the folks at InfoWorld who are being productive with Groove wouldn't see my leadership as "scary" -- they're too busy feeling empowered.

New InfoWorld RSS feeds and changes

We just added a bunch of new RSS feeds here at InfoWorld. You can see the entire list on our homepage.  Each of our top-level Tech Index categories now has an RSS feed, and we also threw in a Test Center Reviews RSS feed so those of you with RSS readers can more easily keep up with the product reviews we are doing every week.

Responding to the suggestions of folks like Dwight Shih as I promised, we've also made our feeds less "parsimonious" (as Dwight put it). Instead of just using the "deck" (journalism jargon for what you might call the sub-headline) as the description, we're using the first paragraph of the story, which certainly makes the items a bit fuller.

On the advertising front (see pointers to earlier discussion here about ads for NewsGator), we are trying out a new way of advertising using an auction-based system (similar to Google) called Industry Brains.  We're already using Industry Brains on our site (see "InfoWorld Marketplace" at the bottom of our homepage, for example), but it will work in our RSS feeds like this:  Advertisers currently bid on links in our News section.  The top bidder will receive ad placement in our Top News RSS feed for the first feed of the day (i.e. not every time the feed is updated).  The ad link and copy will appear in the description of an entry after the editorial content and indicated by "ADVERTISEMENT" text.  As I said in our early trials of RSS-based advertising, we're experimenting and look forward to your feedback, either via e-mail or in your own weblog.  Matt McAlister, our director of online product development, is driving this effort, so feel free to e-mail him if you have questions or comments.

As a final note, I just have the privilege of announcing this -- Chris Lin on our development team did all the work with her usual speed, ingenuity, and good humor. Thanks, Chris!