It is said that our ability to create Web content vastly outstrips our ability to digest it. Consistency in how content is structured, catalogued and managed is consistently inconsistent, to say the least. The problem also persists in the world of digital signage.

Digital signs are the electronic or digital signs that you find in elevators, in lobby kiosks, or even the billboards in Time Square. It is believed that China already has more than 100,000 of these digital signs.

Cisco® today announced the development of a new qualification program for those creating content for digital signage. The Cisco Academy of Digital Signage (ADS) will offer a specialized curriculum focusing on the three vital areas of digital signage:

• content creation
• content management
• content distribution

Continue reading "Content is the focus of new Academy of Digital Signage" »

Setting-up a spoof Facebook site in the name of a celebrity, athlete or politician is a popular past time. For a Moroccan computer engineer and father, his spoof has delivered him to jail -- three years in jail for setting up a Facebook site in the name of a member of the royal Moroccan family.

Fouad Mourtada was sentenced this week on suspicion of stealing the identity of Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid (see Jail for Facebook spoof Moroccan, BBC).

The prosecution had urged the court to impose a sentence which set an example for others. Mr Mourtada was convicted of "villainous practices linked to the alleged theft of the [prince's] identity".

In his defence, he said he admired the prince, and that the Facebook entry was just intended to be a bit of fun.

A website supporting him published a letter addressed to the prince apologising for the incident.

Earlier this week some Moroccan bloggers went "on strike", suspending their regular blog entries for 24 hours in protest at Mr. Mourtada's detention.

According to the website, he told family members who visited him in jail that he had been blindfolded and beaten unconscious at the time of his arrest.

Apparently using Facebook is dangerous after all. While I can’t imagine such severe punishment in the Western World, there undoubtedly will be some price to pay in severe cases of liable and slander when misusing Facebook and other social media that make it easy to spoof people.

“Collaborative tools are overloading employees and killing productivity—to the tune of $588 billion a year, according to a January study by Basex, a collaboration technologies consulting firm,” writes Brian Watson of CIO Magazine (see Web 2.0: Too Good to Be True?). “It’s the money-saving argument that’s getting pushback lately.”

Web 2.0 does not deliver the ROI, does not live up the hype, and is not even close to being a top priority for senior management (not all, but most).

A CIO Magazines study, Top Technology Priorities for 2008 finds that even techies don’t consider Web 2.0 as a priority. A survey of 250 “top IT executives” from a collection of small, medium and large organizations doesn’t even touch on the issue of Web 2.0.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 fails the grade, according to executives" » (on Content Matters)