Blogs:Below are some of the blogs which Stephen Cobb writes and reads. |
Pods: |
Cobb's Blogs |
Blogs of InterestRay Everett-Church Privacy Clue Blog |
What's all this about blogs?
From humble beginnings the webblog has grown to become the world's most widely used publishing platform. No longer the fourm of choice for brief commentary--that role now belongs to Twitter and Facebook--blogs are now closer to article or pamphlet publishing machines. Today's blog posts are typically longer, more polished, proof-read, designed to last a bit longer than tweets or status updates.
A blog is probably the easiest way to create content on the Internet. People and organizations that have had a presence on the Internet for a long time, such as Cobb Associates, were accustomed to adding new content to their web sites by creating new web pages or editing old ones. The skills required to do this are not particularly hard to master, but the process looks quite ungainly when compared to the ease with which a blog entry can be created.
Blogs as attack tool: While they can be very effective for spreading the word about your company, product, or cause, blogs are also a risk factor. As a largely unregulated and undisciplined medium, blogs can not only spread bad news and false rumors, but also share secret. What measures does your organization have in place to stop employees from publishing unapproved content to blogs? Without policies and controls in place, an employee can dump just about anything to a blog: text, images, audio, video, etc. Unless you are screening your outbound traffic for sensitive or proprietary data an employee can send your secrets to a server somewhere way beyond your control, either for the world to view for free--or ransomed back to you if the blog is password protected--maybe even offered for sale to the highest bidder.
Beyond blogs:
For a while it seemed like blogs were "it" for digital publishing. Now we see that many forms of digital media can thrive in parallel, from tweets to ebooks. For example, this page provides a link to download Stephen Cobb's privacy e-book. And this page offers several white papers for downloading, emailing, reading on a Kindle, Nook, iPad or smartphone.
Stephen Cobb