Volvo IT has a policy against using its network to post racist and other defamatory information against individuals. But it is considerably less visible and not nearly as thorough as other corporate policies for posting information to the Internet, on blogs and social networks. The Volvo IT policy is an Adobe PDF file that details pretty clearly what is deemed inappropriate. Sponsor Earlier this week, Wikipedia banned editing from machines inside the Volvo IT Department for racist remarks left on the pages of two well-known Pakistani Cricket players. From Volvo IT’s policy: “It is not allowed to use e-mail for sending or any other way of transmission for sending or receiving any information which is racist, obscene, offensive, threatening; or which includes harm to minors, hoaxes, malicious code, unwanted advertising, material intended to disturb other’s equipment, or which is sent in a way that includes breach of any person’s rights, copyright, privacy or other rights. It is not allowed to impersonate other users, to distribute pornographic material, to upload, download or distribute child pornography or illegal software. It is not allowed to send or facilitate unsolicited commercial email or bulk emails or to mail bomb, i.e. to intentionally try to impede another person’s use of e-mail services.” Besides this, Volvo IT and the Volvo Group have not developed a detailed policy on best practices for using the Internet. There is no visible information for how employees use the Internet, best practices for blogging and how to conduct oneself on social networks. There is actually little on both sites to show any use of social technologies for its purposes. In contrast, we looked at policies from larg organizations that do have policies. We believe more detailed policies provide the opportunity to better educate employees and can prevent incidents like what happened at Volvo IT. Here are some policies that we found worth highlighting. Interestingly, microblogging has not filtered into these policies in much of any way. Cisco Systems Cisco is considered one of the most advanced users of social technologies. It is increasingly focused on enterprise collaboration technologies. Its policy on posting to the Internet is clearly written by the legal team. And it covers the bases. “Your Internet posting should reflect your personal point of view, not necessarily the point of view of Cisco. Because you are legally responsible for your postings, you may be subject to liability if your posts are found defamatory, harassing, or in violation of any other applicable law. You may also be liable if you make postings which include confidential or copyrighted information (music, videos, text, etc.) belonging to third parties. All of the above mentioned postings are prohibited under this policy. When posting your point of view, you should neither claim nor imply you are speaking on Cisco’s behalf, unless you are authorized in writing by your manager to do so.” IBM IMB provides a thorough guide to posting, embracing the concept of posting online but also being cognoscente that an employee’s personal and professional life are now so intertwined. To help matters, IBM created a video for employees about practices to follow.

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The Volvo IT Rants and The Importance of a Corporate Internet Policy

Developer Toby Padilla was one of the first to defend music content resolver Playdar when it was released to developers. Since then Padilla has contributed more than just his morale support. The former VP of Desktop and Client Software at Last.fm has since built Playgrub – a bookmarklet that scrapes supported sites for music metadata in order to create playlists. Sponsor View Full Screen Padilla’s Playgrub is one of the missing pieces in the Playdar puzzle. In early November we wrote about Playdar – a project created by former Last.fm founder Richard Jones and XSPF music playlist format creator

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Playgrub: Music Playlists for the Playdar Content Resolver

Email advertising is an effective means of communication, but only when you use it well. You have to be really careful with this type of advertising, though, because much of the email that people get is junk mail, and yours might accidentally get tossed into that group. Make sure that you take the time to plan accordingly, so that you avoid the spam folder or trash can.

Email advertising is only one marketing tool that is available, and it’s not as popular as it used to be. With the access of anyone being able to send out spam messages to any email address that they can get their hands on, many businesses are turning to other marketing tools to help them.

However, this type of marketing can still be useful if you use it properly. You need to make sure that you take the time to check out various email marketing campaigns and choose the one that works best for your needs. Make sure that you use catchy titles and headlines that people will see so that your messages don’t go unnoticed.

When you choose to work with a professional marketing company, you will be better able to get the results that you need for your business. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling or what type of company you have, because marketing services are available to anyone who wants to market their business or website.

Email advertising allows you to contact your customers on a personal level and talk to them about what they want to know. You can tell them about information, special deals or tips that you have, or anything else that you want. This is a great vehicle for advertising so long as you use it well.

When you use email advertising, you need to take full advantage of it. You need to make sure that you have a clear message, a very direct purpose, and a friendly approach. People don’t want a sales pitch. They want someone they can trust to tell them what they want to know.

Marketing is the key to increasing your visibility and website traffic. The only way that you are going to be successful with your website is to get it out there where people can see it. ‘If you build it, they will come’ does not work online. There are far too many websites out there to make yours visible with mere creation. You need marketing.

To learn more about email advertising or to find your business marketing solutions, visit www.Majon.com today.

After eating the best meal of your life, it’s hard to forget the experience. It’s not unusual for individuals to spend a decade in search of the perfect New York-style pizza in California or the best ramen in London. At this level of obsession, you simply can’t be satiated by reading menus or scouring the blurry restaurant pictures and user-generated diatribes of regular review sites. Whether you’ve got a fixation on fresh lobster ragoût or a hankering for hickory smoked ham, Foodspotting lets hungry users peruse through what can only be described as food porn. Sponsor Founded by Adaptive Path UI designer Alexa Andrzejewski and Get Satisfaction engineer Ted Grubb, Foodspotting lets users upload photos of their favorite dishes along with a restaurant address. In Posterous -style fashion, you can also email your finds to food@foodspotting.com . From here you can rate dishes and users, add additional details, earn reputation points and follow places, dishes and community members. The difference between Foodspotting and Yelp is that every review is a positive one. Instead of showcasing restaurant rants, Foodspotting offers a visual menu of customer favorites. ReadWriteWeb got an early look at the duo’s upcoming iPhone application. Set for release in early 2010, foodies will be awarded points for their uploads as well as the particular foods they’ve tried. In Foursquare , users become the “Mayor” of a particular establishment, but in Foodspotting users become the “Champion” of their favorite dishes. And because so many towns are famous for a particular dish, you’re likely to see stiff competition for the “Champion” of Maine lobster or Chicago hot dogs. Users will also compete to collect dishes through scavenger hunts and a food passport system. In the future, as we begin to record more dishes, the system will amass our flavor profiles. These profiles will later form the basis for a dish-related recommendation system. While the mobile application will not hit the market for at least a month, Foodspotting is well on its way to offering salivating diners a chance to discover nearby favorites on a per-dish basis. To register for the site’s early alpha visit foodspotting.com/ilovefood . Discuss

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Foodspotting: Foursquare meets Food Porn

Twitter’s Japanese partner, Digital Garage , will soon introduce a micropayment system that will give Twitter users the option to charge for access to their tweets. According to Media magazine , users will be able hide access to images, external URLs and text behind a paywall and other users would only be able to see this content if they either paid for a monthly subscription or through a pay-per-tweet option. Twitter itself will take a 30% cut. Sponsor Kenichi Sugi, the COO of Digital Garage Mobile, announced this new business model at mobidec2009 earlier this week. The paid accounts will go live in January 2010. Twitter’s Japanese subsidiary has always been somewhat different from Twitter’s main site. Twitter Japan already offers advertising options, for example. Japan is also the only market where Twitter offers its own mobile application and mobile video service . Don’t Pay for Twitter – Pay for Accessing Tweets According to today’s reports, which still lack a lot of detail, Twitter users will have a number of options to pay for these account. According to Media magazine’s Anita Davis , users can pay monthly subscriptions with their credit cards and the pay-per-tweet options could be “charged to credit card, convenience store top-up cards or carrier billing for Twitter-on-mobile users.” Overall, this looks like an interesting business model for the Japanese market. Instead of charging its users directly for the use of Twitter, this option gives content producers the option to charge for their work. This new payment system will also give news organizations the option to experiment with delivering paid news, for examples.. Would You Pay To Access Premium Tweets? In the rest of the world, however, Twitter is more likely to make money through charging for premium accounts that add new features (analytics, verified accounts, etc.). Image credit: itmedia.co.jp Discuss

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Twitter Japan Will Allow Users to Charge for Access to Their Tweets

A new website aims to publicize the details surrounding the much-maligned iPhone application review process – Apple’s secretive procedures that have been under heavy scrutiny this year, especially since the FCC’s involvement regarding Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application. Notable iPhone developers have publically called out the company for this “broken” process and some have even announced their retirement from creating iPhone apps, including Facebook app developer, Joe Hewitt , based on philosophical differences with the perceived tyranny of the Apple gatekeepers. Sponsor On the recently launched site, App Rejections , iPhone developer turned blogger Adam Martin, has begun to document individual app rejections in an effort to help the development community understand what they can and cannot expect from the company’s stringent, and sometimes seemingly arbitrary, vetting process for new apps. According to the site’s About page , Martin writes that “it’s now gone from ‘easy’ to ‘tricky’ to avoid getting your app rejected by Apple.” And since Apple has refused to document or discuss the matter of application rejections, he was inspired to create this website as a place to collect all the known application rejections. The App Rejections site itself is in the format of a basic blog. There aren’t catchy headlines, images, or accompanying snarky commentary in the individual posts as you would find elsewhere in the tech blogosphere – especially on TechCrunch where documenting high-profile app rejections has become somewhat of a pet project of blogger MJ Siegler. At the most, Adam may inject a few opinions of his own as to how certain things could be improved, but he clearly isn’t on any sort of vendetta against the company. Instead, each post details point-blank exactly why a particular application was rejected, examining information about the APIs used or rules broken in each case. The site also documents when formerly rejected apps finally make it through to the App Store in posts titled “approved” or “overturned,” the latter referring to apps whose developers started some sort of appeal process. Although the site is brand-new, with only two pages of posts so far, it could easily become an invaluable resource for iPhone developers confused by Apple’s murky review process which can sometimes lead to apps sitting in limbo for months on end before any word from Apple is had. Developers looking to have their personal experience documented on the site are advised to contact Martin via his company’s Twitter account, @redglassesapps . Discuss

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New Website Publicizes iPhone App Rejections

Dell has just released a customized version of Chromium OS, the open source code behind Google’s new operating system called Chrome, in a build designed specifically for Dell Mini computers. According to a blog post on the Dell Community site , several company employees were inspired create this custom version after seeing Engadget’s video showing Chrome OS running on a Vostro A860 netbook. After tinkering around with the code, they were able to create their own version of Chromium OS, complete with functional Wi-Fi drivers, and have made the build available for download as a USB key image file from the Direct2Dell blog . Sponsor About Google Chrome After last week’s sneak peek at Google’s upcoming operating system dubbed Google Chrome OS, tech enthusiasts everywhere have been playing with the open source code which Google released to the community on the day of the press conference. This code, called Chromium OS, lets anyone take the basic building blocks of Google’s operating system and customize it for their own purposes. Going the open source route isn’t just an example of Google’s desire to “not be evil,” but protects the company from anti-trust, anti-competitive claims surrounding the new project – a project which is basically an OS that runs only one web browser: Google Chrome . In fact, Google’s browser is the operating system in its entirety. No desktop applications will be supported on this web-based, Wi-Fi only machine. As Google’s VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, said during the press event, if any other browser maker wants to build their own version of the OS using their own browser, they can. Since the launch of the Chromium OS source code, there have been a number of articles explaining how to run the operating system in a virtual machine on your own computer as well as how to boot the operating system from a USB flash drive . But up until now, these efforts have been steered by enthusiastic technology users and not those associated with any large computer manufacturer such as Dell. And while the Dell Chromium build isn’t exactly an “official” company product, it’s noteworthy for the fact that it was designed by company employees, posted publicly on a Dell website, and is customized to run specifically on Dell Mini computers. Dell’s Chromium OS Build According to the Dell blog post , the USB key image file (available here: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto ) only works on Dell Mini 10v computers . Most importantly, the build makes the built-in Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter on these machines functional, a feature needed when running a web-based OS. After all, what good is a cloud operating system if you have to be tethered to an ethernet cable? The blog post includes instructions on how to copy the USB image file to a USB flash drive, but unfortunately the directions are aimed only at those who have access to another Linux machine. We’re not sure why Windows and Mac users couldn’t just modify the instructions found on this website to make their own Dell Chromium OS USB keys by substituting the Dell build for the one hosted on that site. In addition, if you’re interested in trying out the Dell version of Chromium OS, there are a couple of things you should know: You’ll need a hefty USB key drive – 8 GB minimum. It may take 5-10 minutes for the Chromium OS network connection manager to “see” the Wi-Fi access points. Some issues with the connection manager are still present. If it gets hung, reboot and try again. And by the way, there’s no “reboot” – you have to press the power button on the Mini laptop. The Dell build is unsupported and minimally tested – use at your own risk. If you’re still feeling brave, the download is available here . Discuss

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Dell Releases Customized Version of Chrome OS