Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Screening Room #11: PowerSchool.  The November episode of The Screening Room features PowerSchool, Pearson School Systems' popular student information system (SIS). I'm joined by Pearson's Paul Smith and by Sharlene Karbowski, an IT administrator with the Westside school district in Omaha, Nebraska, where PowerSchool has been running since 2001. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:31:52 PM      Google It!.

StatCounter - great free web tracker (and why that's important). http://www.statcounter.com/"> ... To me, web trackers (and services like Technorati) represent one side of the equation - how to find out who is reading you and how people are finding you. The other side seems obvious, and yet many fail to grasp - point to others, as they are looking at their referrer logs too! While some might look on this as evidence of the essential vanity of bloggers, I'd argue that it is instead a critical aspect to becoming a good (read "connected" or "social") blogger and an emerging online 'social' skill.[EdTechPost] 12:44:33 PM      Google It!.

Who Says Money Can't Buy Friends?. Courtney5000 writes "It looks like some users of popular networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have stooped so low as to actually pay real money for friends. These friends aren't even real believe it or not. You can apparently choose from a selection of 'models' to leave you customized comments to look like you have friends and are popular online. This is unbelievable!"[Slashdot] 10:24:43 AM      Google It!.

Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source. K-boy writes, "Last week, the press (and Slashdot) reported that Birmingham City Council had decided to ditch its open source project because a report said its trial had cost £100,000 more than it would have cost to buy Windows. However, Techworld has discovered that the opposite is true, and the Council is actually planning to use more open source software as well as to roll out Linux in the next few years. The head of IT was interviewed and he gives a fascinating rundown of the problems he had getting open source working with his systems. More interestingly, he points out that now the trial is over and he and his staff have the technical skills, they expect to save lots of money in future by going open source. Oh, and the report's figures were based on the special rates that Microsoft gives Councils just to make sure the short-term budget look worse [~] £58 for a Windows license as opposed to the normal £100."[Slashdot] 10:19:49 AM      Google It!.

Here[base ']s My Number (for Today). Guard cellphone privacy with a number for each relationship. By ANNA JANE GROSSMAN. [NYT > Technology] 10:15:52 AM      Google It!.