div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"A new computing fabric to replace today#39;s a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/serverblades.html"blade servers/a #160;and a quot;podquot; approach to building datacenters are two of the most disruptive technologies that will affect the enterprise datacenter in the next few years, Gartner said at its a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/120308-gartner-energy-virtualization-cloud-computing.html"annual datacenter conference/a Wednesday./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Datacenters increasingly will be built in separate zones or pods, rather than as one monolithic structure, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said in a presentation about the Top 10 disruptive technologies affecting the datacenter./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ For#160;recent news#160;on the modular design approach to datacenters read quot;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/03/Microsoft_applies_Model_T_factory_methods_to_datacenters_1.html?source=fssr"Microsoft applies Model T factory methods to datacenters/a.quot; ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Those zones or pods will be built in a fashion similar to the a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/100808-modular-data-centers.html"modular datacenters/a sold in large shipping containers equipped with their own cooling systems. But datacenter pods don#39;t have to be built within actual containers. The distinguishing features are that zones are built with different densities, reducing initial costs, and each pod or zone is self-contained with its own power feeds and cooling, Claunch says./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Cooling costs are minimized because chillers are closer to heat sources; and there is additional flexibility because a pod can be upgraded or repaired without necessitating downtime in other zones, Claunch said. (Read more about how to a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc1/021808-ndc-power-five-steps.html"reduce cooling costs/a in the datacenter.)/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Modularization is a good thing. It gives you the ability to refresh continuously and have higher uptime,quot; Claunch said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"By not treating a datacenter as a homogenous whole, it is easier to separate equipment into high, medium, and low heat densities, and devote expensive cooling only to the areas that really need it, Claunch added./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The move to pods and zones is among what Gartner calls the most disruptive technologies affecting the datacenter. In no particular order, these technologies are a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc3/051908-storage-virtualization-status-report.html"storage virtualization/a ; cloud computing; new server architectures; PC virtualization; enterprise mashups; specialized systems (aka hardware appliances); social software, and social networking; unified communications; zones and pods; and a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc1/"green IT/a .#160;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Many of these technologies have been covered by Gartner in previous lists (including quot; a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/100907-10-strategic-technologies-gartner.html"Gartner#39;s Top 10 strategic technologies for 2008/a quot; and quot; a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/101408-gartner-strategic-technologies.html"10 strategic technologies for 2009/a quot;). Enterprises won#39;t have to wait long to take advantage of these technologies: All these trends are beginning to happen now or will do so within the next few years, Claunch said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"If Gartner#39;s predictions are correct, the server industry is soon to undergo a significant transformation./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Gartner views today#39;s blade servers as an interim technology that will give way to a new, more flexible type of server that treats memory, processors and I/O cards as shared resources that can be arranged and rearranged to suit a business#39;s needs. Like virtualization technology, this computing fabric of the future will make hardware more adaptable to changing needs./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"IT shops will be able to create machines of whatever size they need, and shift resources around as often as necessary, Claunch said. In addition, instead of relying on vendors to decide what proportion of memory, processing and I/O connections are on each blade, enterprises will be able to buy whatever resources they need in any amount, a far more efficient approach./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"While rack servers are self-contained units, today#39;s blade approach allows a combination of some components, Gartner notes. ( a href="http://www.networkworld.com/buyersguides/guide.php?cat=881344"Compare/a blade servers.) I/O cards don#39;t have to be included in each blade because they are accessed over a shared fabric. Memory and processors are still fixed parts of each blade, however, limiting flexibility. If extra memory is needed, you may have to buy another blade instead of just accessing the memory of another one, Claunch said./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"quot;The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger, single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades,quot; a Gartner PowerPoint presentation states. quot;The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner#39;s needs.quot;/pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"For example, an IT shop could combine 32 processors and any number of memory modules to create one large server that appears to an operating system as a single, fixed computing unit. This approach also will increase utilization rates by reducing the resources wasted because blade servers aren#39;t configured optimally for the applications they serve. quot;This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs,quot; Gartner states./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"ema target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com"Network World/a/em emis an InfoWorld affiliate/em/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=df71c541163ff94462c983fa91abb9c5p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=df71c541163ff94462c983fa91abb9c5p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=df71c541163ff94462c983fa91abb9c5 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

pThe home pages at a href="http://nytimes.com/" title="NYTimes.com"NYTimes.com/a and a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/us" title="WSJ.com"WSJ.com/a have a few new elements today. At NYTimes.com, the site is finally opening its Times Extra feature in beta. The feature includes links to other news sites and blogs alongside the newspaper site's own content.nbsp; NYTimes.com readers can choose to view the "regular" unaggregated page by hitting the "Switch Back" button if they don't want to mix outside content. The paper lined up Shell as the feature's launch sponsor. /p p What the NYT is doing with Times Extra is simply expanding the newspaper site's existing aggregation feature which is handled by a href="http://www.blogrunner.com/" title="Blogrunner"Blogrunner/a, out of its pen within the site's Technology section. Nevertheless, it's a big step for the NYT and represents the evolution of its approach to content. Similar ideas are catching on lately at other papers in the face of staffing reductions and other cuts, as evidenced with this week's a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-after-layoffs-newspapers-embrace-content-sharing" title="agreement"agreement/a between McClatchy (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=MNI" class="ticker" title="MNI"NYSE: MNI/a) Company newspapers and the iChristian Science Monitor/i to share foreign news reports.a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=105317p=irol-pressArticleID=1232547highlight=" title="Release"Release/a /p p -- bAds make the front page at WSJ/b: Meanwhile, beginning today, the iWSJ/iprint version will offer "cover wraps" to advertisers. While tabloids like the iNY Post/i and iNY Daily News/i has sold these kinds of print ad overlays, this is the first time the WSJ has given its front page over to advertisers, a href="http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=133002" title="AdAge points out"AdAge points out/a. The inaugural advertiser is Dell Computers, whose promotion covers one-third of the front page and the paper's entire back. Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer at WSJ parent Dow Jones (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=NWS" class="ticker" title="NWS"NYSE: NWS/a), tried to suggest that the policy change wasn't just reflective of the new ethos since Rupert Murdoch took over this past year, comparing the introduction of cover wraps to the creation of new editions like the Weekend Journal and sections like Personal Journal. /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-wsj-targets-nyts-luxury-advertisers" title="WSJ Targets NYT's Luxury Advertisers; NYTCo Stock Hits New Low On Ad Worries"WSJ Targets NYT's Luxury Advertisers; NYTCo Stock Hits New Low On Ad Worries/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-moving-towards-each-others-more-on-nyt-vs-wsj" title="Moving Towards Each Other: More on NYT vs WSJ"Moving Towards Each Other: More on NYT vs WSJ/a/li /ul p!-- iMark Logic Digital Publishing Summit, Thursday November 6, Westin Times Square. Insight and perspective from Outsell, Gilbane, Simon Schuster, BusinessWeek.com, more. Evening cocktail reception. Cost is complimentary. a href="http://content.adbureau.net/accipiter/adclick/CID=000010cb0000000000000000/SITE=PC_US/AAMSZ=PREMB_NEWS/relocate=http://marklogicdps.eventbrite.com/"Register now!/a/i --/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=OhmW9I"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=OhmW9I" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=ZORRO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=ZORRO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Z2ALO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Z2ALO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Ni5zo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Ni5zo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=UWLvO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=UWLvO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=uBgfO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=uBgfO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/474800984" height="1" width="1"/

Neowin: "I have toyed around with Linux on and off for the last few years, mostly with Ubuntu. My first experience of Linux was Ubuntu. At first it was a bit scary, with me wondering if my CPU would implode should I type the wrong command. The more I used Linux though, the more I learnt about my computer."

D'un point de vue théorique, où en sommes-nous depuis les théorisations de la traduction et de la transposition par la linguistique ? Et que nous apprend, sur le fonctionnement de la transposition, l'adaptation d'une oeuvre à un public jeunesse ? « Certes l'autonomie entre signifiant et signifié n'est pas totale [...] : [Traduire...], c'est aussi sortir d'un univers culturel déterminé – avec ses articulations sémantiques spécifiques – pour entrer dans un autre qui ne possède pas nécessairement le même découpage conceptuel, au point que s'imposera parfois une véritable transposition, sinon une suppression partielle ou totale. Mais [...] la plupart du temps, la traduction n'est pas impossible [...] » (Courtès, Introduction à la sémiologique narrative et discursive, Hachette, 1976, p. 38-39) Certaines méthodes d'analyse (psychanalytique notamment) se concentrent sur un texte particulier à interpréter à la lettre, en faisant abstraction de la circulation littéraire : « Un texte, ici, c'est une version, telle quelle, et nous n'accorderons en général aucun intérêt aux autres versions du prétendu ‘même conte' » (Jean Bellemin-Noël, Les Contes et leurs fantasmes, PUF écriture, 1983, p. 32). Dans quelle mesure un conflit entre l'interprétation et la théorisation apparaît-il dans la critique des récits pour la jeunesse ? Est-ce un phénomène propre au récit pour la jeunesse ou au contraire au récit en général, et que la littérature pour la jeunesse, comme objet nouveau d'analyse critique et comme champ disciplinaire, permet de mettre à jour, faisant ainsi franchir un seuil aux théories et critiques littéraires du récit ? À la lumière des phénomènes de métamorphoses du récit, des textes parfois célèbres n'apparaissent plus comme des chefs d'oeuvre isolés, mais comme des versions, des variantes ou des avatars particulièrement réussis. Cette considération historique peut-elle avoir des effets en retour intéressants sur les méthodes d'analyse de ces récits ? On accueillera des communications appliquant ces problématiques à des corpus et des objets variés : ouvrages [...]

The long-anticipated release of the Google Earth browser plugin for Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC) has arrived, about half a year after the plugin for Windows was announced and about 5 weeks after the introduction of the GE iPhone application. Linux users will still have to wait a bit for a compatible version.

You can download by visiting any Google Earth Plugin app or visiting the GE API web site. Attention: the file is 47MB in size, because of the combined Intel and PowerPC compatibility. Go to EarthSwoop or 360Cities to see it in action.

It will be interesting to see if this release will result in more widespread support of the plugin, and I’m curious to see what developers will come up with for their applications.

Thanks to Jeffrey Martin from 360Cities for the tip.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

You may recall, just about a year ago, there was suddenly a bunch of news over the possibility of Canada introducing its a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071210/134616.shtml"own version/a of the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To the surprise of both the entertainment industry (who helped craft the law) and the politicians who were pushing it, the a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071213/105615.shtml"opposition/a to this law was incredibly successful in getting its message out. Starting with calls on various blogs and Facebook groups, kicked off by law professor Michael Geist, the issue became a big one throughout the media. The politicians who promised the entertainment industry that they would pass this law tried to a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071210/134616.shtml"delay/a the introduction, assuming that the opposition, while loud, was thin and would fade away. They were wrong. The issue continued to get attention, and when the law was finally a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20080612/1017381387.shtml"introduced/a, the opposition, across the board, was widespread and strong. It wasn't just a fringe issue among "internet activists." It was something that people from all over the economy saw as a fundamental issue worth fighting for. br /br / But why? br /br / For years, copyright (and wider intellectual property) law has been considered to be sort of inside baseball, something that only lawyers and the entertainment industry cared about. But that's been changing. There are a variety of reasons for why this happened and why copyright is considered a a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081111/0327252799.shtml"key issue/a for so many people in so many parts of the economy. Michael Geist has now put together a film that tries to examine that question. After first discussing how the issue became such a big deal, Geist interviews a number of Canadian copyfighters to get a sense of iwhy/i copyright is an issue worth fighting about: center embed src="http://blip.tv/play/AdzqIovtag" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"/embed /center Not surprisingly, Geist has also made the movie available in a variety of different formats so people can do what they want with it, including remixing or re-editing it. There's the a href="http://blip.tv/file/1513205/"full version/a (seen above), an a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTFEwXi1Pnk"annotated version/a, a a href="http://dotsub.com/media/cdd2f6d7-d101-4142-b18c-3ad11ba79193"version for subtitling/a, or you can download the full movie via BitTorrent at either a href="http://www.mininova.org/tor/2054674"Mininova/a or a href=" http://www.vuze.com/details/2OQKU47Y56JSCE6RXQ2W5JNDSL3KBEM7.html"Vuze/a. Unless, of course, you live somewhere where they claim that BitTorrent is evil and must be blocked.br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081203/1826493010.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081203/1826493010.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081203/1826493010op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1c14b7e79411174ec5ad8a1ed278b03fp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1c14b7e79411174ec5ad8a1ed278b03fp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1c14b7e79411174ec5ad8a1ed278b03f" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=vcWNo"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=vcWNo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/474606566" height="1" width="1"/

Category: Games
Released: Nov 12, 2008
Price: Free

Description:
[Introduction] Whack-a-Halloween is a classical game to improve your reflexes. You are a ghost buster whose mission is to hunt and destroy the ghosts coming to town at Halloween night. Be careful not to hit the young witches, they are our friends. As an optional feature, you can save your highest score to our ranking server and compete with other players around the world. Try hit high score and be on top of the list! Hint to earn high score: use as many fingers as you can to tap the ghosts; get bonus points by hitting more than one ghost at the same time! [Scoring rules] More than one ghosts and witches appear then disappear at the same time. Yout get 1 point for the first ghost, 2 points for the second, 3 points for the third and so on. You lose 1 point for hitting the first witches, 2 points for the second, 3 points for the third and so on. All points are summed up for the final score. [About ranking] The highest score you have achieved since playing Whack-a-Halloween may be sent to the ranking server. Please type in your nick name (this is not necessarily your real name; you can pick up whatever you like) to be listed in the ranking table. Your ranking information is displayed in pink color to differentiate it from those of others so you can figure out which one is yours even in case other people happen to chose the same nick name.

Website: http://www.renacentia.com/ip/halloween
Support Website: http://www.renacentia.com/ip/halloween

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: Whack-a-Halloween

Dans cet impressionnant billet, Luke Kenneth expose les fondements de MVC et voit dans l'apparition des technologies AJAX à base de compilateur un échec de ce modèle : quot; (...) the limitations of the default quot;Controllerquot; behaviour of Web browsers became quickly apparent, Javascript was introduced to overcome those limitations. The introduction of Javascript itself instantly complicated the picture, blurring the lines of responsibility for quot;Viewquot; creation and Model quot;business rulesquot; enforcement (...)quot;. Un exposé riche et argumenté.

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/02/fb/0009fb02.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/02/fb/0009fb02_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_654082"//a/divbr/ div class="center"b Andrew Huangs "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering" /bbr/ No Starch Press | 2003-07 | ISBN: 1593270291 | 288 pages | PDF | 6,8 MB /div

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/d1/fa/0009fad1.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/d1/fa/0009fad1_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_654033"//a/divbr/ div class="center"b Andreas Meier “Introduction pratique aux bases de données relationnelles" /bbr/ Springer | 2006-05 | ISBN: 2287252053 | 290 pages | PDF | 1,4 MB /div

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= st_kia section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Mr. Know-It-All: Call-Center Etiquette, Offensive Podcasts, Awkward Transactions authorName= Brendan I. Koerner creditType= illustration credit= Christoph Niemann -- p strong Dear Mr. Know-It-All, is it cool to ask call-center operators what country they're in? I'm not a bigot or opposed to outsourcing, but I like to know who I'm dealing with./strong /p pFire away with the geolocation query, but be wary of how you broach the topic. Call-center operators deal with countless xenophobic jerks, who typically follow the "Where are you located?" question with a stream of invective. An operator may thus turn defensive in anticipation of the same treatment from youmdash;unless you're careful with your tone and timing. "If the very first thing out of your mouth is, 'Hey, what country are you in,' I think that's rude," says a href="http://www.kathleenpeterson.com/"Kathleen Peterson/a, founder of PowerHouse Consulting, which advises call-center operations. Resolve your business first, then feel free to ask about location when there's a natural lull in the conversation. At that point, make sure your voice exudes affability, as if you were simply inquiring about the weather in Omaha./p pAnd, should you learn you're on the horn with someone on the planet's flip side, go easy on the inane chitchat. "A call-center agent has a job to do and probably doesn't want to answer questions about the population of Bangalore," says a href="http://www.globaltelesourcing.com/exper-colton.htm"Bill Colton/a, president of Global Telesourcing, a call-center service provider./p pThe operator may decline to answer your question or try to convince you that he's in Kansas even though his accent screams Ukraine. Such deception indicates that a company either wants to hide the fact that it's outsourcing or doesn't think too highly of its customersmdash;make a mental note of it./p pstrongI've been helping my nongeek friend build a Flash-intensive Web site. It's gotten to the point where I'm spending a dozen hours a week on it. How should I ask for compensation?/strong/p pYour pal surely didn't intend to exploit you. Odds are he doesn't know how much work goes into codingmdash;an impression you encouraged by not demanding dough up front./p pAssuming you want this relationship to survive, bring up the problem without making your friend feel like a total heel. a href="http://www.negotiatingwithgiants.com/introduction.html"Peter D. Johnston/a, the author of emNegotiating with Giants/em, recommends telling him that a sudden influx of paying gigs precludes you from doing more work, but you'd be happy to point him to a replacement. "That approach can get the issue of time and payment out on the table in a nonthreatening way," Johnston says. Presuming he's hesitant to switch horses midstream, your pal should offer to make his project worth your while./p pRefrain from pressing for back pay, however, or you're likely to look like a greedy ass. Those hours you've already spent slaving away in the digital mines? Consider them a lesson in the veracity of an age-old maxim: "Never mix business with pleasure."/p p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/st_kia2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"emIllustration: Christoph Niemann/em/div /div /div strongEveryone in my office has sharing enabled on iTunes. One of my coworker's libraries contains several podcasts of sermons I find highly offensivemdash;they contain lots of antigay blather. Should I confront her?/strong/p pIt depends on how you gleaned those sermons' content. If you couldn't help noticing incendiary titles along the lines of "Fags Go to Hell," then a little indirect confrontation is in ordermdash;tell a manager, pronto./p pBut if the titles were innocuous, and you thus had to listen to the podcasts in order to be offended, pause a moment before taking action. You may have a valid case, but you'll have to decide whether this fight can ever yield anything more than a Pyrrhic victory./p pIt would be one thing if your colleague was blasting these sermons through her speakers for all to hearmdash;or, for that matter, telling everyone around the watercooler about the Lord's contempt for sodomites. But a shared iTunes environment such as yours is strictly opt-inmdash;you can easily avoid listening to the offensive content./p pThe best meatspace parallel is a coworker who keeps a small stack of religious pamphlets in plain view, which you can just ignore. True, there have been cases in which employers have been successfully sued for writing Bible verses on paychecks or broadcasting prayers over public address systems. But those situations were a lot more in-your-face than what's going on heremdash;in part because they involved bosses rather than colleagues, but also because the employees couldn't escape the proselytizing./p pAn aggressive lawyer could still argue that the mere presence of those tracks on the network creates a hostile workplace. But that strikes Mr. Know-It-All as making a sermon on the mount out of a sermon on a molehill, especially considering that the suit could very well be a losermdash;you might be hard-pressed to prove that the screeds, tucked away in an iTunes library, are severe or pervasive enough to constitute harassment./p pAs odious as you might find your coworker's views, it's probably best to give her a pass. Look on the bright sidemdash;now you know who to avoid at the office holiday party./p pemNeed help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at /ema href="mailto:mrknowitall@wiredmag.com"mrknowitall@wiredmag.com/a./pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:20d0f30c717b55767a97d16ab4484e9d:g1tf9adfc25jpXgkH8uKhMR%2BngoXs%2BDFLKAaS7SFOP%2FLsmDz%2BdZ%2F6fQrx2gCko%2FwpvWvkl9QfvTDow%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f0a383436fbc6fa75c537e470d5de6dc:bFugwmegC8RftsXvM3wKBIF5b9LsYeK6cuDyo3RWg0hgPOsFGY%2B8JjdAtvTrVLTKC%2FVJddTgKHOM'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:c162596b45dd2aaf4f1644ef15064491:jxJd6gkLweGPjQ7tNdPUOWCP%2F2ZdfPQ6SO9V2ASSUZdHik%2FrWfaAfshSTEVebcxTQ36rF1lguDCm'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:02ff51d0d029db5fc136e971b6cd6b84:rcQ6Cotybfh21x45NhbpE%2BXMhW0EYpHhwkXIVs87B7yA%2BVfjzP4jvUE6g5CDDOwgoWK94X7Lmgct'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b2cecfe46439f19c1186d417c1984534" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=2ZiwRz"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=2ZiwRz" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334199" height="1" width="1"/

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/62108?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Zimbabwe+moves+to+tackle+cash+shortage+as+soldiers+riotch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Zimbabwe%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Chris+McGrealc7=2008_12_04c8=1128359c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Zimbabwec13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FZimbabwe" width="1" height="1" //divpThe Zimbabwe government has greatly increased the amount of money people can withdraw from banks from today in an attempt to quell unrest, including riots and looting by soldiers this week, over a cash shortage caused by hyperinflation. /ppThe central bank has raised the withdrawal limit from the equivalent of 18p a day to about pound;33 a week following protests in which scores of troops angry at waiting in long bank queues targeted shops in th capital, Harare, that will only accept payment in US dollars and black market money changers dealing on the streets. /ppThe anger among soldiers and other Zimbabweans is in part because of the difficulty of using the national currency to buy anything but a few locally produced vegetables and bread after the US dollar was made legal tender. /ppThe central bank is also issuing new Zimbabwe dollar banknotes today worth Z$50m (pound;17) and Z$100m to keep pace with inflation officially put at 231,000,000 percent in July but which economists now estimate runs in to the billions./ppRiot police yesterday arrested trade union leaders and broke up a protest over limits on cash withdrawals. The union leaders were detained as they led a march of a few dozen people to deliver a petition to the central bank demanding an end to the restrictions. /ppThe demonstrators carried placards reading "No to cash limits" and "We are tired of sleeping at the banks" - many people spend hours queuing each day just to get enough money to cover transport and a few basic foodstuffs./ppThe police yesterday also broke up a protest by doctors and nurses trying to deliver a petition to the health ministry in Harare objecting to the lack of medical supplies and the closure of some large government hospitals. /ppThe collapsing health service is grappling with the extra burden of cholera. The UN said yesterday that it had confirmed 565 deaths from cholera among 12,546 reported cases but medical charities say the real toll is at least double. /ppOne-third of the deaths were in Harare, where water has been cut off for days because of a lack of chemicals to treat the supply./ppThe government said it will punish troops involved in the protests but some of Robert Mugabe's critics suspect the demonstrations may have been orchestrated to justify a further crackdown on his opponents and possibly the introduction of a state of emergency. /ppThe former home affairs minister Dumiso Dabengwa, who has joined a breakaway faction from Mugabe's Zanu-PF party, told the IRIN news service that the protests may not be what they seem. /pp"I do hope the demonstrations by the soldiers are genuine and that it is not a ruse to come up with an excuse to crack down on the people, or even worse," he said. "You can't rule out what they [the government] might do. They have so many problems ... such as cholera and money shortages. They want to rule a country where they have total control over the people."/ppSuspicion is rife because the government has sought to retain the backing of the army by ensuring that banks regularly delivered cash to the barracks. /ppHowever, the troops still have much to be disgruntled about. The central bank is issuing the new banknotes today as the national currency continues its interminable decline. A new Zimbabwe dollar was launched in August after 10 zeros were wiped off the currency because banks and shops could no longer handle the numbers./ppBut the new dollar has plummeted just as fast, falling from about Z$10 to the pound in early August to Z$3m today for cash. Twenty-seven new currency denominations have been introduced in Zimbabwe this year alone./ppThe government caught up with reality by legalising the use of US dollars and other hard currency in September. Dollars and South African rand were already in use in what amounted to underground supermarkets selling imports. Now the transactions are legal, it is almost impossible to buy anything in Zimbabwe dollars./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/zimbabwe"Zimbabwe/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9v-rkuzkooZ4O2uXuEkN2RsAna4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9v-rkuzkooZ4O2uXuEkN2RsAna4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

"An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations" - Wikipedia

I’ve attended two unconference style events this year (Startupcamp/Barcamp)- and I’ve become a true believer of this format.   Since I’ve seen a lot of what goes on behind the scenes - here are some tips to follow if you want to run a similar show in your location.

1. Get a team of kindred spirits together

This is possibly the most important aspect.  The purpose of these unconferences would be to bring together people of the same feather, and to begin - you will need a core of like-minded and driven people.  The volunteers who help run this show don’t usually look for recognition nor remuneration. 

Everything is fueled by passion.

2. Get sponsors - nice ones

Get people who really want to help, rather than take over your event.  BarCamp Kuala Lumpur had one rule about sponsors and it was that their donation limit would be capped.  This was to prevent any organizer from driving the agenda of the event.  To me, this is an excellent path for any unconference to take.   

3. Set up the venue right

In a nutshell, besides the basics like ease of access, amenities, etc.  You need to get a venue with 3 or more large rooms (for the sessions), and perhaps just as important - a large area to mingle.  For me, a lot of the value I gain from these events would be the relationships built, and the interesting mix of characters and conversations you will get into informally between sessions.  

Make sure all the rooms have an easy to use speaker system.  Some speakers will have video to show on th