technology

At the moment, both Bloglines and LinkedIn are down -- the former showing a generic "back-soon" splash, the latter claiming an upgrade is under way.

(Unless it's one whoa-nelly upgrade, I can't imagine prime time is the best time for a scheduled service window.)

Anyhoo, I see no blog buzz on these outages. What's the scoop?

Five minutes later: LinkedIn is back, but if it's upgraded, the new stuff has all the subtlety of a recluse spider.

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.

Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher, writing at GigaOM, describe the top five reasons technology executives fail. The short form:

• Failure to build a world-class team.
• Failure to execute.
• Failure to lead/motivate/inspire.
• Failure to manage operationally.
• Lack of financial acumen.

Abbott's and Fisher's explanations focus on technology executives -- for example, the admonishment that "your senior technology officer does not need to be the brightest technical mind in the business." Their logic, nevertheless, also applies to other kinds of executives, from creative leaders up to CEOs.

Anyone else had issues getting into LinkedIn the past few days? I've received a couple of invitations I wanted to act on this week, and both times, from two separate places, with access to other sites working fine, I've been unable to get there.
That includes attempts in the past few minutes (writing this Friday afternoon at 2:55 p.m. Eastern time).

Maybe I should be thankful, but LI is the only social network I've ever felt met any practical expectations.

CNET reports the folks at AT&T (I was about to say "the eggheads" or "the boffins," but the spokesman quoted is from legislative affairs) claim the Internet will hit its capacity by 2010 if big bucks aren't invested in infrastructure.

At their worst, I'll admit, open-source software communities can breed flame wars, ugly breakups and needlessly forked development roadmaps. But at their best, you have to admit, open-source crowds share ideas, solve practical problems and tip hats at each others' successes.

Witness the Drupal community's post congratulating the developers of Joomla -- arguably Drupal's biggest competitor for mindshare -- on their new release.