Research from the University of Illinois business administratrion department found that Internet users on Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Digg click on items that are highly ranked and most-viewed by other users.

Mu Xia, professor of business administration and co-author of the study had this to say in a news release:

“This is a new way to communicate,” he said. “It basically opens up a new horizon for letting people know what other people think.”

A copy of the study is available here. —Hurley Goodall

Nicholas Carr, a notorious writer in the technology world for his brazen views about the future of the IT industry, writes about an IBM white paper describing Project Kittyhawk.

The white paper, uncovered by The Register, a Britain-based technology Web site, describes the project as an earnest attempt to build a “global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.”

IBM essentially wants to be able to use Blue Gene supercomputing technology to build a uniform, universal, and global infrastructure capable of housing the entire Internet, as opposed to the disparate clusters of computers companies rely on now.

That could hold up Mr. Carr’s thesis in his book, The Big Switch, that information technology will eventually become a public utility. That’s all speculation, however — it still leaves the question of who’s manning the cord after the “Monolothic...

An article in the Post-Tribune, in Gary, Ind., brings up an interesting point about tech employment, one that was broached recently by a Wired Campus reader, concerning the division of technological skills:

“Academics divide engineers into two groups: ‘transactional’ engineers, who perform tasks by rote, applying the knowledge they’ve learned to a set of repetitive tasks, and ‘dynamic’ engineers, who use their judgment, creativity, and knowledge to find new solutions to problems.”

“The first type [says Larry Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers] is not hard to find, while the second type is rare and in high demand.”

The article goes on to describe how enrollment growth in engineering programs at Purdue University—mostly from foreign students—and prospects for more tech jobs in the region.

Coders or programmers, transactional or dynamic...

Monday, we asked the question “How do you deal with large file-transfers?” Here are some of the solutions you came up with:

Horde.org: Horde is an open-source PHP framework. From it, the creators have come up with a Web-based e-mail platform, reportedly with an “attach as link” option which stores files on a Web server, rather than an e-mail server.

Xythos: In conjunction with Blackboard, Xythos has a file-sharing option.

PaKnPost: A Web-based utility in which you’re provided with a retrieval link upon uploading a file. Anyone can then get access to the file, and there’s an option for password protection.

Proginet’s CyberFusion Integration: Similar to Accellion, CFI handles e-mail attachments without using the e-mail server,...

Evidently, the government has had a broadband strategy for the last four years, a report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration says.

The report was released yesterday, almost as if to rebut Tuesday’s Educause event which lambasted the lack of government policy on broadband by lauding the efforts of the Bush Administration to proliferate broadband through deregulation.

“Networked Nation: Broadband in American, 2007” highlights the growth in the availability of broadband with large percentages (i.e., fiber-optic lines growing a whopping 789 percent from 2003 to 2006, or the number of “broadband lines” growing 1,100 percent from 2000 to 2006).

However, as Ars Technica points out, the report fails to broach the subject of lagging U.S. broadband rankings.

The general picture given in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration report is that...

Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of tech blog TechCrunch, reports that Stanford has become prime hunting grounds for programming talent, with Google and Facebook as the principal headhunters.

Not only that, but according to Arrington’s unnamed sources, the high-profile companies are shelling out top-dollar for fresh, shiny computer science grads—he says that Facebook could be offering as much as $92,000 to new recruits with graduation months away.

Responses to the post about tech-company recruiting are a mixed-bag. One Stanford student reports getting two job offers at $95,000 and $98,000. Another says computer science graduate students are being offered $80,000 to $100,000 salaries. Some aren’t seeing any offers at all.

It’s possible that some of these reports of exorbitant salaries sans experience aren’t true, given the anonymous nature of blog responses. But if they are, one ...

Educause, the nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of technology in higher education, kicked off the fourth annual State of the Net conference with the presentation of a white paper arguing for federal policy to ensure universal access to high-speed broadband and the improvement of network infrastructure to that end.

State of the Net is a Washington D.C. conference arranged by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. The Committee has over 200 member organizations, including Educause. The goal of the conference is to help bring debate over technology policy to the fore on Capitol Hill.

The paper, “A Blueprint for Big Broadband,” pins responsibility for the proliferation of broadband connections on the federal government. It proposes eight steps to achieve the goal of wiring every household and institution with a high-capacity broadband connection,...

Slashdot reports on a new Web site from Stanford computer scientists that shows off their new 3-D modeling algorithm.

The algorithm, available online, takes 2-D photos and creates 3-D models.

According to an article from the Stanford Report, “The applications of extracting 3-D models from 2-D images, the researchers say, could range from enhanced pictures for online real-estate sites to quickly creating environments for video games and improving the vision and dexterity of mobile robots as they navigate through the spatial world.” —Hurley Goodall

Sending and receiving attachments in e-mail can be a nightmare, especially when dealing with hefty files. Pepperdine University’s chief information officer found a solution to this problem in Accellion — a company that touts itself as a more effective alternative to in-house File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers run in IT departments.

The clincher, says Timothy M. Chester, the university’s chief information officer, was the price tag. “They essentially changed their licensing model,” he says. “It didn’t require us to buy an additional license for each student.”

Chester says Accellion was the only company at which the school took a serious look, conducting a trial run.

But with the original licensing model, the school would have had to buy over 10,000 additional licenses, on top of the 1,500 for faculty and staff.

“It was cost prohibitive,” he says.

Chester also says that...

What’s the value of virtual worlds in education? Alfred H. Essa, deputy chief information officer of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, writes in his blog that one answer can be found in a YouTube video.

In it, an unnamed MIT researcher demonstrates the Assist program, which allows users to design moving, mechanical systems by simply drawing on a screen.

Mr. Essa writes:

“All human creativity, including science, art, and literature, are imaginative activities. The ability to imagine different possibilities and interact with them is one of the virtues of virtual worlds.”

He seems to imply that virtual worlds with known object-creation systems such as Second Life and Dryad are particularly useful in education because they allow a user to explore physical concepts in a virtual space.—Hurley Goodall