For Nicholas Tang, the deluge of work-related e-mail messages became overwhelming.
"It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes more than a thousand," said Tang, director of operations at Community Connect, a company in New York that operates AsianAvenue.com and other online communities with an ethnic focus.
For several years Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log.
Web logs, or blogs as they are known, are a type of frequently updated online journal, often featuring excerpts from news articles and links to other blogs.
So far, Web logs are best known as a medium for communicating with the general public -- like the blog by the noted journalist Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), which is devoted to culture and politics, and sites such as the Veg Blog (www.vegblog.org), which is about all things vegetarian.
In the corporate context, some chief executives, for better or worse, have adopted blogs as a way to share their personal wisdom with the wider world. But a growing number of businesses, government organizations and educational institutions are using Web logs to manage and improve the flow of information among their employees.
These blogs, not accessible to the public, typically allow many people to contribute entries that can be read by others in the organization. It may be too soon to tell whether the corporate blog will emerge as a genuinely useful tool for business communications or simply another way for bores and blowhards to blather. But a growing circle of adopters, like Tang, swear by their blogs.
At Community Connect, Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks such as fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, which is viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages.
"When I want to know something I check the Web log," Tang said. "It saves me the trouble of e-mailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update."
Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke to each candidate posted their comments on a password-protected Web log.
"One person wrote that a candidate was `quiet,"' Tang recalled. "There was a whole discussion about this. `What does that mean? Is it a bad thing? There was more back and forth with the interview process. It helped everyone to get on the same page more quickly."
Because of their informal nature, blogs can lead to digressions. Shirley Palma, a Community Connect administrator, said that after meeting one job candidate, a woman posted this message on the interview blog: "I think he's so cute! I want to take him home!" Palma noted that "it was in a motherly way; she didn't mean anything by it."
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS