Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. If you use MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking systems, you will appreciate this diagram of your social network.


2. Kevin Newcomb at Search Engine Watch has compiled a list of the most significant search-related events of 2007. Any of my students looking for a seminar topic for the spring... here's a great place to start!
   


3. According to a recent article in InfoWorld, Java is the next Cobol... used in many businesses internally but outdated by newer web programming languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX, and Microsoft .Net.


4. Perl 5.10 has just been released. It's the first major upgrade to the language in 5 years. Some new items: smart match operator, switch statement, more powerful regexs, state variables, and more.


5. And finally, be careful next time you hit reply-all on that email. It's been estimated that interruptions at work and information overload in general cost the US economy $650 billion in 2006.