John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, had an interesting take in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the other day on technology and social community, something I have written about  here a few times in the past. Recalling a weekly summer Sunday concert series which a street car company launched in the late 19th century to spur business on an extension of its line, he noted that 6,000 Milwaukee residents would turn out to listen to a local band. This was, he adds, in the era before widespread use of such technology as air conditioning or TV.

The park brought people together as they escaped the heat of their homes for the breeze of a lakeside park.

Think the iPhone gained market share fast? Gurda quotes Robert Putnam ,author of "Bowling Alone," on television's rise from 10 percent market penetration in the US in 1950 to 90 percent in 1959. "Practically overnight, viewing became far and away the nation's leading leisure-time 'activity.' "

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Today, Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, and Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, combined forces (pun intended) to release VMForce, the first enterprise cloud for Java developers. Specifically, the VMForce vision is an enterprise-grade Java development platform which will speed development time-to-market fivefold and reduce development costs by 50%. According to today's webcast, Java is the #1 enterprise application development language, authored by over six million developers.

There are multiple implications from today's webcast, both internally and externally, for Salesforce.com and VMWare. In fact, the list that I started to compile during the call is already at four entries. I'll save three in my blog quiver, as I want to focus on the social-enterprise transition that is occurring - and that has now been solidified by today's announcement.

 

Today I'm bringing you myrrh, job seekers. In January the U.S. Department of Labor challenged the nation to submit its favorite job-search tools. Voting ended on January 15, and the DOL is now reviewing the entries. In the meantime, they're sharing the submissions on its Website, http://dolchallenge.ideascale.com/ . Before you click, you should know there are 634 tools on the currently unfiltered list. You're welcome to sift through the list-that's why they're posted-or, alternatively, you can check out the following resources I hand-picked from the list.

 

By now everyone knows you should be careful about what you put on your Facebook page.  Current employers, potential employers, college admission officers, lenders ... anyone can learn facts about you by checking your Facebook page that perhaps you wouldn't have shared with them otherwise.  But it's easy to forget that, if you haven't adjusted the privacy settings properly, Facebook can be out there for all the world to see...especially when you're on vacation.

An article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal described what happened to one Canadian woman who lost her insurance coverage thanks to her Facebook page. The woman was on sick leave for depression, according to the article, and suddenly stopped receiving benefit checks earlier this fall.  When she inquired with her insurance company, her agent told her that pictures she had posted to her Facebook page - of her at a party, on vacation, even at a Chippendale's strip show - proved that she was well enough to work.

  Have you seen John Chambers recently? How can you avoid the guy - he's in the tech publications, business publications and the New York Times.

In the Journal, he talks about Internet 2.0 and small councils that can act fast using video and collaboration. In either Fast Company or Wired he talked at greater length about how these things work. In the NY Times on Sunday in the Corner Office which is, incidentally, pretty consistently worth reading, he says"

"I'm a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that's the style of the past. That was great when you were a single product, when the market was moving slower and one executive or an executive team could run the whole company.