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eWeek has an interesting article regarding women working in IT, or rather, women not working in IT.  The article is, Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go?

A professor says he has only one girl in a computer science major class in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2000. What happened? eWEEK gets field experts to weigh in.

While women hold 51 percent of professional jobs in the United States, they make up only 26 percent of the IT work force, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Furthermore, fewer women worked in IT in 2008 than in 2000.

The article later discusses about the need to put more effort into convincing women that working with technology can be cool.  This argument and others the article makes for how to get more women involved in IT and computer science is a problem.  I don't know a single geek, whether male or female, that had to be convinced that technology is cool.

I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

Last week marked the official release of Magento 1.0, an open source ecommerce platform. Magento has been on my radar scope for some time thanks to those who have left comments about it here. Since, I likely will have need of a good shopping cart this year for a planned project, I've decided to put some focus on Magento. I will be removing Mambo from my top 30 "CMS Focus" list to make room for Magento. My apologies to Mambo fans.

A couple months ago, Technorati announced that users of Wordpress needed to upgrade to the latest available version (now at Version 2.5). This week, Technorati announced that blogs remaining vulnerable to identified security exploits may no longer be indexed by their service.

Because of this ongoing problem, we're discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven't been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) -- this has been reported by many WordPress users.

By not upgrading your software, the search engine services may block your site from being listed. I can't think of a greater incentive to update your content management software to the latest version than the threat of being delisted. This is a bold move by Technorati. I'm personally glad Technorati is taking a stand against sites hosting older versions of Wordpress with the known security holes. In my opinion, there really isn't a good reason you shouldn't be upgrading your Wordpress site to the latest version.

"Blogging as a business is business. It takes business training and skills to make money with your blog."

- Lorelle VanFossen, "Business School for Bloggers: How to Make Money With Your Blog", Blog Herald, April 7, 2008

The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!

LifeType (formerly known as pLog) dropped off my radar scope some time ago. I'm not sure why, but I think at the time I had the desire to concentrate more on full featured content management systems and less on just blogging applications. So, like catching up with old classmate, it's nice to see this Linux.com article focusing on LifeType: