Blogging For Dolloars

Slashdot | Blogging For Paychecks
When you hear about blogging, you’re most likely to hear about personal journals, self-expression and youngsters sharing their daily routines online. However, as Wall Street Journal notes, the word blogger can now frequently be seen in corporate job ads. Blogging jobs pay anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 and frequently require writing copy for corporate Web sites and ability to promote on the Internet. A search for blogger and blogging on one of the job meta search engines yields several hundred open positions.

Wherein the ‘blogger’ becomes yet another corporate flak. Corps are waking up to the fact that the tools for blogging are easy to use and provide a sort of instant ‘in’ that allows them access to a lot of eyeballs that other wise might be missed. Sooner or later Google will quit adding so much weight to blogs or get better at filtering amatuers from pros and the salaries will go down.

Lucane: Simple OS Groupware

NewsForge | Lucane: Simple open source groupware
Need groupware that doesn’t require tedious installation and configuration, and is ready for use in a matter of minutes? Lucane can be deployed in no time, and is so simple to use that you don’t need to spend hours learning it. Lucane has a modular architecture and includes an impressive range of pre-made modules, including a multi-user calendar, an email client, instant messaging, a white board, forums, notes, shared folders, and an RSS reader. Users can easily add and remove modules to customise their groupware environment, and developers can create additional modules and plug them in Lucane.

Unlike many other groupware applications, Lucane does not require the PHP/MySQL combination. It is written entirely in Java, and comes with all the necessary components. This means you can deploy Lucane on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X without installing additional software. Lucane relies on a database back end, and by default it uses the supplied and preconfigured HSQLDB engine. However, the application also supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server.