Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action
Highlighting their utility, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb gives several examples of how real-time web is helping companies and services. “The real-time web isn’t just about immediacy, it also offers things like presence information, syncing, efficiency and responsiveness.”

Make social media a business tool, not a distraction
In the Miami Herald, Cindy Krischer Goodman present tactics by different people on maximizing social media while minimizing wasted time. “Niala Boodhoo, who co-writes the Poked blog for MiamiHerald.com, offers another approach for those who intend to take a peek at Twitter and end up spending hours clicking on links or forwarding tweets. She suggests monitoring how much time you spends on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter with a Mozilla Firefox plug-in called Leechblock. “It’s the perfect way to police yourself,” she says. You can specify which sites you want to block, you can set a time limit for a site or block access for a set period of time (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday).”

Done: Reduce Task Friction to Get to Task Completion
Leo Babauta gives advice on keeping task simple in order to finish them faster on Zen Habits. “Small is better when it comes to getting to completion. It’s easier, which is less friction. It’s less intimidating. But more than that, small tasks and projects are victories. You can quickly get to completion and feel great about it. And that compels you to keep going.”

Coming Soon: Internet Apps that Heal Themselves
In ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez features a European research called the SELFMAN project – an effort to make web apps that are self-configuring, self-tuning, self-healing, and self-protecting. “Already the team has had promising results. For example, Scalaris, an open-source scalable transactional storage for Web 2.0 services won first prize in the IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge 2008. Peer-to-peer video streaming application PeerTV uses SELFMAN to quickly test an evaluate new P2P components. There’s also a demo of a distributed Wikipedia that can handle more queries than the current version and a graphics program that lets multiple users collaborate on a design. Van Roy believes that SELFMAN represents the first step towards an internet filled with “unbreakable” applications. “Right now we’re just scratching the surface,” he says.”

10 Ways to Get Your Staff to Love – And Respect – You
Humor, empathy, honesty and leadership – these are the qualities that makes for a well-respected boss, says Jim Taggart on Brazen Careerist. “Encourage a learning culture within your team. Show leadership by starting with yourself. Lifelong learning is not a 9 to 5 proposition; it’s about how you absorb new experiences at work and through community service, training courses, assignments, reading, travel, etc. It’s a reciprocal process: employers provide opportunities to learn and grow, but employees also need to engage in activities outside of work.”

“Network neutrality” or “network neutering”?
An editorial by Nate Anderson of Ars Technica that answers the accusations of net neutrality opponents. “Net neutrality actually encourages the sort of innovation that we want in our networks—higher speeds, open access to innovative new applications and uses—the FiOS model. And everyone can profit from it, including the ISPs. Removing even the threat of such action encourages not innovation but modest speeds, high prices, and discriminatory throttling of user connections.”

How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team
On Harvard Businness, Amy Gallo cites a study that says being proactive is the best way to counter employee negativity, including some case studies on how to deal with it. “Roderick Kramer, William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that it is the role of the leader to understand the underlying cause of the pessimism before acting. Some people are dispositional pessimists whose knee-jerk reaction is to see the negative in everything, while others may be expressing a pessimistic point of viewbased upon informed logic,” Kramer says.”

A Little Privacy, Please
Scientific American’ Chip Walter features computer scientist Latanya of Sweeney Carnegie Mellon University, director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy. “Several years ago Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, famously quipped, “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” Sweeney couldn’t disagree more. “Privacy is definitely not dead,” she counters; those who believe it is “haven’t actually thought the problem through, or they aren’t willing to accept the solution.”

A Week in the Clouds Without a Notebook
Frequent business traveler Steve Rubel blogs about his teleworking experiment using only a smartphone and cloud-based apps. “The reason is simple: all of these devices are pocketable. A laptop isn’t. I don’t want to carry a laptop because it’s mental baggage. I don’t want to be thinking about where it is. Smartphones and USB keys are like appendages. I always know where they are. Plus, I know that one day soon we won’t need to carry laptops on business trips because these phones – which are really pocket computers – will be able to do it all, including hook up to hotel TVs. I am trying to experience this future now.”