Friday Five – June 24, 2011
“But, Derek – aren’t you on vacation today and Monday?” you’re asking. Yes, I am. But I already had a treasure trove of material for this week’s Friday Five by Thursday, so I drafted and scheduled this post for Friday. Ah… the awesomeness of scheduled publishing.
#1 – Social Media Policy [Youtube via Digital Landfill]
A brilliant way to present a policy to employees! It’s engaging and gets the message across. Here’s hoping Praxair comes up with something similar (both the policy and the delivery format).
#2 – You, yourself, and Google: Managing your personal search ranking [TechRepublic]
There are a lot of firms and consultants making a lot of money on the web, solely on the business of helping people shape their Google search results. For corporations, brands, and causes, the Google ranking is a kind of web stock price, with just as much obsessive energy invested. For your own name, though, Google has just released a few tools to help you monitor where and how your name shows up, and it’s definitely worth a lunch break visit.
It’s not often that The Google gives you a way to directly influence search results, but this is one of them. The Google Dashboard is also a great tool to bookmark.
#3 – Dropbox Accidentally Unlocked All Accounts for 4 Hours [lifehacker]
Dropbox accidentally dropped the need for password authentication this past Sunday so anyone could log into anyone else’s Dropbox account with any password—all they’d need was an email address. This lasted four hours and, according to Dropbox, less than 1% of users were affected. Still, this is another good reason why you should add an extra layer of security to the data in your Dropbox—particularly if you’re putting sensitive data in there.
The cloud can be a dangerous place, friends. It’s not all puffy white blobs of happiness up there. Give a good thorough thought about what you use cloud services for.
#4 – Firefox 5: New, but improved? [ZDNet]
I’ve liked Firefox since it first showed up. But, this new Firefox 5 concerns me. Oh, it’s a fine browser. But, it’s not a major new release. At most, I’d call it Firefox 4.1, but really it’s little more than Firefox 4.02.
The Mozilla Foundation, following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome Web browser, seems to believe that if they keep popping out new “major” releases every six weeks, they’ll convince people they’re better than the competition. That seemed like a dumb idea to me when Microsoft went from Word for Windows 2.0 to Word for Windows 6.0 back in 1993. The idea hasn’t improved any with age.
I skimmed through a lot of FF5 articles to find one with the tone I was looking for, and this one’s it. I have version number games. Come on, Mozilla, don’t release bug fixes as a major version number. That’s idiotic. On top of that, extensions break because not all developers are going to rush to update their extension just to say it works with 5.x as well as 4.x. For a good laugh, take a look at this and this. Who knew Microsoft could be funny?
#5 – 15 Classic Tech Ads [PCMag]
Take a stroll down memory lane!