In a Web 2.0 era where a prospective employer is more likely to Google your name than to check your references, what is your online presence saying about you?

A surprising number of people still seem to fall into one of two categories when it comes to posting their profiles online: they either indiscriminately post everything about their lives, blissfully ignorant of how it may affect them in the future, or they avoid putting their name on anything online, blissfully ignorant of how an online presence could help them. If you fall into either of these categories it may be time for a change.

Check out the full article on www.internetevolution.com and join in the great discussion on the topic.

OK, so 8.0 isn’t the greatest rating ever, but given that they take into account relevance of content (relevant to what I don’t know) and frequency of updates (there is no April) I’m pretty happy with it.

Now, if you’re interested in the best technology blogs around, check out their Technology Blog Directory. Many of the top picks are focused, professional blogs, not like the crap you’ll find here. There’s some great stuff to check out though and in general I would agree with their rankings.

The Oracle ACE Program is designed to recognize and reward members of the Oracle Technology and Applications communities for their contributions to those communities. These individuals are technically proficient (when applicable) and willingly share their knowledge and experiences.

The program comprises two levels: Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE Director. The former designation is Oracle’s way of saying “thank you” to community contributors for their efforts; we (and the community) appreciate their enthusiasm. The latter designation is for community enthusiasts who not only share their knowledge (usually in extraordinary ways), but also want to increase their community advocacy and work more proactively with Oracle to find opportunities for the same. In this sense, Oracle ACE is “backward looking” and Oracle ACE Director is “forward looking.”

The ACE award seems like a great way to recognize and encourage people to contribute to the Oracle community as a whole. ACE directors additionally commit to being involved in their local Oracle community, posting to the Oracle forums and a handful of other community-centric activities.

There are currently 159 people in the Oracle ACE program and if you frequently surf for Oracle information you’ll recognize many of the names (e.g. Doug Burns, Steve Karam and Tom Kyte, just to name a few.) I’m thrilled and honored to be part of the program and plan to keep contributing where I can!

oracle, oracle ACE, database, database administration, dba

Enter DeesInBox.com. Dee handpicks the best forwards to post on DeesInBox.com including jokes, stories, funny videos and pictures.

The site is great! You can go to the site anytime you need a little distraction (instead of being distracted when others send you forwards,) follow along through RSS, leave comments, and if you really must send something to all your friends, you can send a link instead of forwarding bunches of pictures.

Check out DeesInBox.com any time you need a good laugh or to catch up on the latest jokes, forwards and viral videos.

spam, funny, fun, forward, email, humor, video, viral video

The outside of the laptop which showed up in Andy Armstrong’s mail July 5th read “We’ve taken the idea that the outside world is a dangerous place for unprotected content.” and the inside reads “And shredded it.”

Thanks to Zach for posting the full text of the interior which reads:

“To derive maximum benefit from your business critical content, you need to share it across a wide user base. But the more people who have access to it, the greater the threat of sensitive information leaking to your competitors. That’s just for starters; content proliferation also raises the risk of regulatory non-compliance and escalating management costs. You know you can’t live without your information, but you’d be forgiven for wondering how to live with it.

Oracle’s recently acquired Information Rights Management solution can help. A key component of our Document and Records Management portfolio, it enables you to share your information when and with whom you want – without fear of the outside world.

But it doesn’t stop there. Should the worst happen – and your laptop falls into unsafe hands – we can even scamble your content before anyone works out how to access it.

We’ll be in touch shortly with more details of how to shred your content management worries.”

So what’s the story? What bandwagon is Oracle getting on here? Only time will tell. Burleson thinks it may be another step in their “unbreakable” theme. I think it may be something with Application Express as a content management system. Something to do with enterprise blogs or wiki or some other web 2.0 kind of content management.

wiki, blog, web, web20, web 2.0, oracle, dba, rdbms, dbms, marketing, laptop

Of the ones listed, my favorite (other than caffeine, of course) would have to be CoffeeSpot by Sadish Bala. Check out the other coffee themes at WordPress Themes.

coffee, caffeine, wordpress, blog, web

From: Donald Burleson

Here are my guidelines for finding credible information on the web, and advice on how-to weed-out crap, sound advice.

In my opinion (and in my own interest) I think everyone should be able to publish anything at anytime.

Me to. I’m all for free speech, but it’s the search engines problem that they cannot distinguish between good and bad information. I don’t like the “clutter” it’s causing for the search engines. It ruins my ability to find credible sources of technical information, and I have to wade through pages of total crap from anonymous “experts”. For example, scumbags are stealing credible people’s content and re-publishing it in their own names, with free abandon. Look at what has been stolen from Dr. Hall.

So the system can (and will eventually) balance itself.

I disagree, not until “anon” publications and copied crap is unindexed from the search engines.

If I’m using Google to find technical information I give zero credibility to anonymous sources, and it would be great to have a “credible” way to search the web for people, so they can find stuff from folks like us, who publish our credentials.

We’re in the information age and the flood gates have opened!

Flood is the right word. Some of the Oracle “experts” who publish today would never have been able to publish in-print, and for very good reason. There are many self-proclaimed “experts” all over the web, people without appropriate education or background who would never be published in traditional media. And just like “Essjay” on Wikipedia, many of them either fabricate of exaggerate their credentials. They carefully hide their credential (resume or CV), so nobody knows the truth.

I think it’s up to culture to catch up to technology

I disagree, it’s not “culture”, it’s a simple credibility issue. And what about Wikipedia? Any 9th-grade dropout crackhead can over-write the work of a Rhodes scholar. That’s not a culture issue, it’s about credibility.

It’s a dictatorship of idiots. One bossy Wikipedia editor tossed-about his credentials (“a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a PhD. in theology and a degree in canon law.”), when in reality he is a college dropout, a liar and a giant loser.

Wikipedia is the enemy of anyone who wants to find credible data on the web, and they are actively seeking to pollute the web with anon garbage. Read this for details.

It’s the balance between free speech and credibility. Just the raw link-to counts are deceiving. I hear that the #1 Oracle blogger got there only because he wrote a hugely successful blog template, totally unrelated to his Oracle content quality.

The solution is simple. Sooner or later, someone will come-up with a “verified credentials” service where netizens pay a free and an independent body verifies their college degrees, published research, job experience and other qualifications.

Until then, netizens must suffer the dictatorship of idiots, never sure if what they are reading is by someone who is qualified to pontificate on the subject. I do Oracle forensics, and the courts have very simple rules to determine of someone is qualified to testify as an expert, and there is no reason that these criteria cannot be applied on the web, assigning high rank to the qualified and obscurity to the dolts. Until then we must suffer weeding through page-after-page of questionable publications in our search results.

My response

it’s the search engines problem that they cannot distinguish between good and bad information. I don’t like the “clutter” it’s causing for the search engines.

There’s no doubt that web indexing and searching is an imperfect science but identifying the quality of resources is beyond its scope. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN should be considered tools to help find a site with information matching a term or pattern, not necessarily a good site.

scumbags are stealing credible people’s content and re-publishing it in their own names

Plagiarism is not a new problem and, as many have found, search engines can be instrumental in identifying plagiarism. The site Copyscape which you pointed out to me makes great use of Google’s API to do exactly that.

> So the system can (and will eventually) balance itself.

I disagree, not until “anon” publications and copied crap is unindexed from the search engines.

If I’m using Google to find technical information I give zero credibility to anonymous sources, and it would be great to have a “credible” way to search the web for people, so they can find stuff from folks like us, who publish our credentials.

And you should not give credibility to a source just because Google finds it. That’s not Google’s job. Google’s job is to find pages (every page if possible) that match the terms you’re entering. Popular sites are weighted to show up earlier in the results, but yes, only because they are popular.

Wikipedia is the enemy of anyone who wants to find credible data on the web, and they are actively seeking to pollute the web with anon garbage.

I think it’s unlikely that Wikipedia is actively trying to pollute the web. Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed for many of the reasons you mention but it remains accurate on many topics. There is no disguising of what it is and it has been largely condemned as an academic resource, but when I need a quick ‘starting point’ reference or the answer to some pop-culture trivia it’s still the place I go.

It’s the balance between free speech and credibility. Just the raw link-to counts are deceiving. I hear that the #1 Oracle blogger got there only because he wrote a hugely successful blog template, totally unrelated to his Oracle content quality.

Actually, I think you’ll find that the #1 Oracle blog you mention is actually the non-topical personal blog of an Oracle administrator. The point that he composed an attractive and well written WordPress theme is a testament to the quality of his work.

The solution is simple. Sooner or later, someone will come-up with a “verified credentials” service where netizens pay a free and an independent body verifies their college degrees, published research, job experience and other qualifications.

Verified credentials would only solve one small piece of the problem. Many people with verifiable credentials are still dead wrong and/or cannot communicate their ideas efficiently enough to be what I consider a good resource.

An even simpler solution already exists. Leading organizations like the Independent Oracle User’s Group could take it upon themselves to compile and publish lists of quality resources in their field. With some additional effort I bet these lists could be combined with Google’s search API to provide a web search which only searches a number of “verified” sites.

This type of compilation would not only provide a fantastic list of resources (especially for beginners) but would also shape search results by increasing the page ranking of sites which the organization identifies as good resources.

web2.0 web, internet, blog, wikipedia, free speach, net neutrality, online, anonymous

I encourage you to read and share your opinions on Don’s article. Below is my response. My next article by the same title will have my response to his response.

Don,

Don’t you think there is some responsibility for the reader to be able to filter their sources for what they are? Is this a matter for legislation or education?

In my opinion (and in my own interest) I think everyone should be able to publish anything at anytime. If I post something that is completely ridiculous on my blog I expect people to tell me that. They might be right, I might be right, but either way at least it’s out there. Anyone can publish and anyone can respond.

Here’s a good example where Matt posted what he thought was a good idea of how to create auto-increment fields in Oracle without the use of Triggers.

I responded with a detailed article demonstrating why his method would not work and he followed up with another article with an updated method.

So the system can (and will eventually) balance itself. We’re in the information age and the flood gates have opened! I think it’s up to culture to catch up to technology. You and I know how to flush out good web resources. The rest of the world will catch up soon.

What do you think?

Andy C posted a short history of Oracle blogging about a year ago. It seems there were a lot fewer back then.

Check out the whole list. There are some great folks on here, many of whom actually post primarily about Oracle!

oracle, database, dba, rdbms, blog

Features:

• No settings
• No configuration
• Use standard script tag syntax
• It works

Instructions:

1. Download it (click here)
2. Unzip it (Hey, I was talking about the file)
3. Move it to your plugins directory
4. Enable it

Thanks to Otto for developing the plugin!

information technology, blog, blogging, blogs, java, javascript, wordpress