Fav5

This one is coming a little early, because I'm heading out to California in the morning. I'm attending a program committee meeting at Stanford University over the weekend. This is my first trip out there, so I'm pretty excited. I'll be touring the Googleplex and the Internet Archive on Monday.

1. Abilene Christian University, one of our sister schools, has decided to give all incoming freshmen next year an iPod. Is this a gimmick or the future of secondary education? Let's hope the move helps boost their enrollment and shrink their $3 million dollar budget deficit.


2. Google Sites has just launched as part of Google Apps. Essentially it allows you to create a web page or website via wiki tools that anyone in your group or organization can modify. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.


3. Matt Cutts always has some interesting items to read: Subscribed links, how search engines should deal with NOINDEX, and Blogger Play.
   


4. Good news for those of us that work in IT: salaries are expected to grow in 2008. Will more money start getting freshmen to major in CS?


5. Java or .NET? According to the Tiobe Programming Community Index, Java is still ranked number 1. But in a recent survey by Info-Tech of 1,900 companies, 12% of enterprises focus exclusively on .NET , and 49% center primarily on .NET. This compares to 3% and 20% of companies that are focused exclusively or primarily on Java.