Article RoundUp: Benefits of Telecommuting to the Queen on YouTube to Tech Policy on the Hill

Coming off of a short hiatus over the holidays, here's a collection of articles I've read and enjoyed over the last couple of weeks dealing with a broad range of topics related to the deployment, development, adoption, and use of broadband and broadband applications.

Ten Advantages to Telecommuting
Here's an in-depth listing of ten reasons why telecommuting's great, including things like conserving energy, improving productivity, and so on. What blew me away the most, though, was when this article was written: 1994. For all intents and purposes this was before the Internet, before broadband to homes, before the explosion in applications that expand what workers can do from home. I can't help but get a little depressed that we've known why telecommuting is great for so long, we've got more tools than ever to make it happen, and yet we're still a ways off from the practice being commonplace, we're just now passing legislation to get the government moving on this, and we're hearing stories about major corporations like AT&T; backing off from the use of telecommuting. I know there are a lot of issues to resolve in implementing telecommuting in organizations, but hopefully we'll soon be able to move beyond these hurdles so that we can start realizing all the benefits of telecommuting laid out in this article.

Teens and Social Media
Here's an interesting report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project about the use of social media by teens. Social media is defined as things like blogging and creating profiles on sites like Facebook and MySpace. I'd encourage you to download and review the report, but the point I wanted to highlight here was their finding that girls are more engaged with creating Internet content than boys. While apparently this isn't new news, it was new to me. I guess I'd always assumed since boys were more likely to play video games and computer nerds are most often of the male variety that these trends would translate to social media, but that isn't the case. Not sure exactly what it means, but it sure seems like good news to me.

IBM Virtual World Defies Laws of Physics
As corporations moved to create virtual presences in Second Life, virtual worlds garnered a lot of hype without having a lot of substance. This article, though, suggests that there is a place for virtual worlds in business as evidenced by the successes IBM has begun to realize through the development of its own internal virtual world called the Metaverse. I'm personally of the opinion that virtual worlds won't take off in a big way outside of gaming until we realize some more advancements in the technologies that allow users to interface with them, but it's interesting to note that a lot of development is happening in this area and successes are being realized.

High-Tech Brings Rural Towns Back to Life
The title of this article pretty much sums up its contents, but it's vital tha we continue to elevate the importance of broadband to the economic viability of rural communities. This article summarizes a number of success stories happening around the country where through broadband and high technology rural communities are realizing the benefits of economic development that new innovative companies can bring.

Queen Launches YouTube Channel
The Queen of England has started up a YouTube channel in order to spread her Christmas message. And I'm not sure how to read this: either as a bellweather moment in the adoption of online video, another example of the growing awareness around how social media can be used to spread messages, or a sign of the coming apocalypse. But in any event , it certainly is a notable moment in Internet history when a head of state, ceremonial or not, embraces it in a reasonably significant way.

Tech President Primaries
Here's an interesting attempt by Internet news site TechCrunch to hold their own online political primaries in order to decide who they should endorse as the Tech President candidate based on a poll of their readers. While I'm not sure if they've covered all the relevant issues related to technology that a president will have to deal with (most notably the adoption of broadband applications) and some of the issues are more esoteric (like the need for more H1B Visas for immigrants wanting to work in technology fields in the States), in this day and age it is vitally important that whoever becomes president is not only aware of but proactive in furthering a technology agenda, so it'll be interesting to see who comes out on top of this virtual primary.

Quiet Year for Tech on Capitol Hill
This short article reviews the relative dearth of movement on many technology and Internet-related federal legislative issues this year. I wanted to include this link as while '07 may have been quiet, I'm expecting that '08 will be a different matter entirely as (hopefully) Congress begins to face up to the many challenges and opportunities created by the Internet as like it or not at some point more legislation and regulations are needed, the question is whether or not we can get them focused on matters of substance and robust debates on real issues rather than spending all their time focused on piracy and kiddie porn.