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Today is my last day at BusinessWeek and this will be my last post on the Tech Beat. While I consider my next move, I'm starting up a new blog at least for now at swildstrom.wordpress.com. Nothing there yet but a welcome message, but stay tuned.

If you want to get in touch with me, I can be reached by email at steve@wildstrom.com. And you can always follow swildstrom's tweets on Twitter.

Welcome to the new SolarWinds corporate blog.  We've wanted to launch this for a long time, and are really happy to finally be in a position to offer our thoughts on a range of topics.  We'll focus primarily on the evolving IT systems management landscape, and along the way share our beliefs on why we are building a strong and sustainable software company to serve the IT pros in the industry.  There will be a range of bloggers from SolarWinds here, offering different points of view, and we hope you mix it up with us in the comments section.   So, without further ado… let's get it on.

This is the first
post of a new effort here at SolarWinds.  We are kicking off an Orion product team blog.  Why would we do
this?  The product team already monitors thwack, our community forum, and
responds to user comments and questions many times every day.  So, you
might ask, what else could we possibly have to say?  Lots, actually.

With thwack,
we're reacting to users, and we're committed to continuing that ongoing
conversation.  With this blog, our desire is provide a proactive channel
where we can talk to users about Orion.   In this blog, we're going
to assume that the reader owns and uses Orion and its modules.  That
assumption gives us the freedom to talk about nitty gritty details of the
product and its features.  Prospective customers are welcome to read and may
benefit from doing so, but our goal is to provide a service to existing
customers.  In fact, in a future release of Orion, we intend to make the
blog available right in the product in order to make the content as readily
accessible as possible for all customers.

What are we
trying to accomplish? 

1. First and foremost, we want to provide
   some content that might fall in the "tips and tricks" category.  We talk
   to and hear from so many customers who have done really interesting things with
   Orion, and we want share some of their creativity more widely.  We also
   talk to new customers who like Orion and suspect (correctly, more often than
   not) that they are only getting a fraction of the value of the product. The
   Orion family strives to be easy, yet powerful, which means that the "meat and
   potatoes" of the product can be accessed without much effort, but over time,
   ever more power reveals itself.    We want to accelerate that
   revelation process.  
2. The other thing we expect to do is talk
   about features-new and old-and the rationale behind them.  Product
   Management and Engineering work closely on the design of each feature,
   including end user feedback as much as possible.  In the end, we spend a
   lot of time on the features, and we care about the
   details.   And since you're the consumer of these features, we figure
   you all care about them, too, and will be interested as well.  We know our
   spouses aren't.  We've tried talking to them, and frankly, we're tired of
   the eye-rolling when we try to tell them excitedly about the new, cool thing we
   just released.   So, we'll tell you about the features instead. 
   We'll explain what we were trying to accomplish, why we made the design
   decisions we made, and all the inside dirt.

We encourage
comments and we'll respond.  It's just another channel for our ongoing
dialog about Orion.  Please add this blog to your RSS Reader or set up
email notifications if you're interested in this content. 

Google Voice, the phone management service the search giant launched the invite-only service earlier this year, has gotten some rave reviews, as well as its share of controversy. You can route calls to various of your phones--cell, work, home landline, whatever--to one number, as well as get voicemail and even view rough transcripts of voicemails.

But the big obstacle was the need to get a new number from Google Voice; you couldn't use an existing number, such as your cell phone's, to use the services. On Oct. 27, Google is announcing that you now will be able to use your existing cell phone number with some of Google Voice's services: online voicemail, automated text transcripts, and custom voicemail greetings.

Technically, your cell number isn't getting ported to Google Voice, but the upshot is that you won't have to ask friends and colleagues to call a new number. For me, at least, that was one reason I haven't yet dived into Google Voice. And you will still need to get a new Google Voice number to use all the services, such as call screening and recording.

Google's blog post, along with a video, provides more details:

On Oct. 20 Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker delivered her annual "Economy + Internet Trends" report. For techies, this is required reading, so I am posting an embed of the report on this blog.

Among the most important takeaways:
* The Tech Sector is a Growing Part of the Global Economy
* Ad Spending Should Grow in 2010
* Mobile Internet Usage Will be Bigger Than Most Think
* Apple Mobile Share Should Surprise on the Upside Near-Term
* Mobile Internet Outpaces Desktop Internet Adoption!
* Facebook is the Largest Share Gainer of Online Usage Over Past 3 Years

- Spencer Ante also publishes the Creative Capital blog. Click here to see more.

Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009

Today, blogs tracker Technorati released a new report on the state of blogging, and it appears that a respectable number of bloggers out there manage to eke out a living.

According to a survey of 2,828 bloggers nationwide, 13% of the respondents do blogging full time. Another 15% blog to supplement their income. Basically, 28% of the people who blog get paid for it -- which is a staggering number, if you think about it. Every fourth blogger out there is getting paid for promoting brands or driving new leads to their businesses. That -- at a time when most advertising- and marketing-dependent businesses, such as traditional media, suffer. Clearly, bloggers are doing something right.

There are lots of opinions of where the greatest vulnerabilities in computers and networks lie—just read the comments to any security-related post on this blog for an earful. Hard data, however, has generally been lacking. A new study assembled by the SANS Institute, and based on reports from 15,000 organizations surveyed by risk assessment companies Tipping Point and Qualys, ought to cure that.

The results, while not terribly surprising to anyone who has been following the vulnerability scene for the past couple of years, do suggest that many IT professionals should re-examine and probably change their priorities. The analysts found that the biggest risk facing most systems is unpatched vulnerabilities in applications and that applications, not operating systems, have become the primary target of attack.

Facebook today introduced a test of new ways for its members to set and adjust their privacy settings for any piece of content they post on the site. The changes follow the recent announcement of new settings for publishing content that allow you to choose to post items that everyone, not just your friends, can see. Many see both moves in part as Facebook's attempt to blunt the rapid rise of microblogging service Twitter.

The changes, which will be tested with 40,000 members in the U.S. in the next week and around the world the week after that, don't add a lot of new options so much as make them simpler to access and set. Facebook hopes the new system, which consolidates 40 different settings on six separate pages, will encourage people to become more comfortable with posting items as freely as they do on Twitter and other services.

The gist is this: You will be able to go to one page to set whom you want to see whatever you post or personal information in your Facebook profile: from just friends to people in a chosen network you're in to the whole world--which means people who aren't Facebook members too, unless you're a minor. And if you want, you can change those settings for each piece of content you post--such as a job complaint you want only close friends to see, not your company network. A "recommended" setting will make your basic info and content posts public--in other words more Twitterlike--but provide more privacy for other things like Wall posting from others and contact info.

You can get the details on the privacy enhancements at a slide show here (and embedded above), as well as on the Facebook blog, which you can also read after the jump here.

The upshot: While the new system is clearly simpler, and will be presented by default when people initially try to post content, I suspect it will still be too much for some people to bother with. The basic problem is that Facebook aims to offer many kinds of messaging, from intimate posts to friends to rants you want the world to read. That inherently involves people making choices, sometimes post-by-post, inevitably making the process more complex. (One blogger, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, thinks the new system is a looming disaster because too many people won't realize the implications of public sharing. I'm not so sure it will be worse than it is today, though.)

Twitter is popular partly because it's so simple: Posts are public, or they're not. It's to Facebook's credit that it's providing choices, and to its further credit that it's now trying to make those choices simpler. But it's no sure thing yet that the new system will keep Twitter from becoming the Internet's biggest community bulletin board.