Computerworld’s Novell story is getting a ton of hits this morning. Novell is practising what it preaches by using itself as an example of how to live without Microsoft Office:

Around 90 per cent all of the company’s 350 Asia-Pacific staff, half of whom are based in Australia, have started using OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite.

Update: According to Colin Charles, the story behind the story is that Novell is forcing OpenOffice down users’ throats.

Brian Stelter, an 18 year old student and cable news fanatic, is making waves after a scoop detailing news of CNN’s new broadband channel. The NYT has covered his rise to fame, quoting an exec from MSNBC who gets “more scoop from Cablenewser.com about the industry and even MSNBC and than I get from the water cooler at the office.”

It’s a classic tale about what happens when you combine personal passion with news, and cheap blog software.

via Steve Rubel.

Since returning to Australia I’ve realised just how many US-based companies think about the “world market” as an afterthought. So it seems either ignorance or red-tape is holding up what amounts to lost market opportunity.

For example, I am one of the fortunate few in Australia who can buy a song from iTunes because I have maintained a US bank account and while online can pretend I’m still living there (shhhh). But Apple in its infinite wisdom will otherwise not let Australians buy songs via iTunes. No doubt there are record company issues at work here too.

Then last week, I read about Movielink over at Chris Shipley’s blog. This company has offered paid movie downloads since 2002, and yet it still doesn’t cater for non-US customers.

Oh, and the same applies to Netflix which is yet to extend its DVD rental business to Australia. Surely there is a local partner out there that can fulfill orders here in a similar fashion to Interflora’s business?

In the meantime, at least I can count on Amazon.com and eBay to satisfy some of my online shopping needs.

Nick Carr proved to be the draw card we’d hoped for yesterday at CIO Agenda 04, drawing a very healthy crowd.

For anyone like myself who’s already familiar with his arguments, his keynote didn’t offer too many surprises. But I suspect many people were reassured to hear he doesn’t believe that IT innovation per se is finished.

Quite simply, Carr is an advocate for more conservative IT spending. Companies cannot rely on IT for competitive advantage if they want customized, low-cost, mass-produced products, he argues. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t find a niche and exploit that opportunity using technology. Just look at the business being generated by low cost airlines, for example.

Anyway, I enjoyed seeing the CIOs challenge him on issues such as IT spending, security, and the false notion that CIOs will ever completely do themselves out of a job. He didn’t get away without a fight, of sorts.

It was also interesting to hear Carr speak after CIO President Linda Kennedy detailed the results of the publication’s most recent CIO survey. CIOs report one of their top priorities is convincing CEOs that IT delivers a competitive advantage. No thanks to our mate Nick!

Meanwhile, here’s something reassuring for us in the events business. CIOs I spoke with over lunch were actively interested in hearing from our sponsors, particularly if a vendor’s keynote didn’t address all of their issues. I saw business cards being exchanged, and the promise of one-on-one meetings. This is a great sign of health in the local IT economy.

Mr IT Doesn’t Matter himself is in town. I’m heading down to CIO Agenda tomorrow at Sydney’s Darling Harbour to listen to him and the other speakers on offer.

Attention blog and RSS/ATOM skeptics. It’s ok, you can start showing interest in the technology now. Bill Gates is making headlines after his speech on “seamless computing.” Mary Jo Foley writes:

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”

What are possibly Gates’ first public comments on blogs are made more interesting given the audience: CEOs from the largest companies in America. If Gates is talking, the audience is listening. And no doubt we can expect the products to follow (after a few slipped deadlines ;).

With all the wonderful talk of converged devices, you can understand how frustrated I’ve been with my company notebook’s inability to use installed components. You see, it came with both infrared and bluetooth. The bluetooth seems to work fine, but Dell in their infinite wisdom did not activate the infrared hardware when the machine was built. And it’s taken one of our IT guys (btw all his normal work) months to figure out how to activate it.

Turns out that you need to enter the bios settings. So after less than 5 mins work today, my mobile phone is now synched up to my calendar, address book, and other bits & pieces. Ahh, the joy!

Journalists and other editorial staff at The Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Sun are about to get sacked in an $8 million redundancy plan. Yahoo report here.

This is a bit cheeky of me, but it’s an interesting coincidence that the McNair Ingenuity survey results released last week showed that when it comes to IT advertising (one of the largest ad industry sectors), vendors are increasingly favouring IT trade publishers over newspapers. (IT Marketer’s report, prepared by yours truly, is here.)

All that said, I don’t take any pleasure in seeing other journalists get laid off. I’ve seen enough of that in Silicon Valley over the last three years.

My first EIC at InfoWorld, Michael Vizard, used to argue that a market is greater than two and less than 10. By that definition, RSS advertising looks to have become a real IT marketplace with eWeek now in the game pioneered by InfoWorld. As Steve Rubel observes, eWeek is running its RSS ads as a separate entry. So you’ll be scanning headlines in your newsreader and stumble across a clearly identified advertising headline that, if clicked, takes you off to the full text and/or associated vendor links.

Matt McAlister at InfoWorld argues in a comment on Steve’s post that readers don’t like dedicated ads in their RSS feeds, and would rather have them embedded within individual entries.

Now that we have two US IT publishers experimenting with the model, we’ll start to get a sense of who’s right based on repeat business and blogger feedback. My hunch is they are both right.

The famous “Baghdad blogger” Salam Pax turned up for a chat on ABC’s Enough Rope with Andrew Denton last night. After a great conversation about life in Baghdad before and during the US-led invasion, Denton and Pax are due to continue the conversation at 11:30am Australian EST - just under an hour away.

Two comments on the interview last night.

1. Salam didn’t realise how dangerous his blogging could be until the BBC reported on a “blogger called Salam in Baghdad.” Salam’s dad apparently wasn’t impressed after learning about his son’s efforts from the TV before his son, and claimed he was risking the safety of the family. Salam’s comment was that blogging the war was something he “just had to do.”

2. Andrew Denton kept talking about Salam’s blog as an “online web diary.” Seems he wasn’t comfortable with the term “weblog.” Surely the term has been floating around the media for long enough that the average non-IT viewer would understand? Sheesh.

Update: Here’s the Salam Pax interview transcript.