For many small and medium sized businesses (SMB) and value-added resellers (VAR), the cost and technical complexity of maintaining an in-house network, complete with security and workable databases, are factors that are driving an outsourcing trend for more cost-effective management.

If it’s true that the backbone of any small business is its employees, then I believe it’s fair to say that the muscle of many small businesses would have to be their computers.

When you start studying for your CCNA and CCNP exams, many books will present you with a huge list of keystroke shortcuts for use on Cisco routers.

Apple has launched a video podcast (iTunes link) that demonstrates how to use the new iLife suite to make one.

Having a great cell phone with a nice screen changes your life. And your usage habits.

The kids at Red Hat need to be checked out for Mono because it looks like they’ve accepted their software infrastructure into the Fedora project. This deal is significant because Mono does business with enemies of Red Hat including Novell and Microsoft.

Squash rails on Memeorandum and the closed blogosphere. Squash’s theory? New people can’t get discovered because of sites like mine and Memeorandums.

Everything looked good for Friendster, with the features and social networking tools it provided the online community; one day, MySpace came along, and Friendster suddenly became wallflower number one at the junior high dance.

Not “really” on fire, but lots of great info on Jim Boykin’s blog lately.

Via Steve Rubel, news of egoSurf, a tool that searches Google and other engines against your name and blog or website, and calculates your ego ranking.

UC-Berkeley’s newest shared computer project, Stardust@home, lets astronomy fans help track down grains of dust traveling from stars spanning the galaxy.

Here’s a potential ticking time bomb. To the Microsoft Office team, you have what could be a sizable PR problem on your hands.

Cory Doctorow, in Boing Boing, points out that when it comes to correcting the record it’s easier to correct Wikipedia than it is to correct the Register.

The latest news out of the center of global culture and doggie-do in the streets claimed the in-development Quaero search engine aims to challenge Google for search superiority.

Recently I fielded a question about making dynamic urls more search engine friendly.

Here’s another RSS reader I saw in my server logs – it’s called Blogofy.

An extranet is an extension of your company’s internal network that allows outside users to provide and access information in a secure environment.

A terabyte, in short, is a lot-a whole lot. This is probably why dtSearch Corp. is proud of their new product line of enterprise and developer text retrieval software. If a product line could brag, it would say, “I can fetch terabytes, with an “s,” of documents across a desktop, network, Internet or Intranet.”

Takeover talk began swirling about metasearch engine Mamma.com, with InfoSpace rumored as the potential bling-bearing suitor for Mamma’s heart.

First on the Web, now at Barnes & Noble, Yahoo! announced today the release of three books designed to help job seekers improve their chances of placement and career success. The series is authored by Yahoo! HotJobs in-house career experts Dan Finnigan and Marc Karasu and published by Sterling Publishing.

Participants who ordered a Developer Transition Kit to help change their applications from PowerPC to the Intel platform can exchange the DTK for a new Intel-based iMac.

It’s a tune all managers can sing. And the lyrics go like this: successful business, non-profit, government agency and association managers start their winning ways by doing something positive about the behaviors of the very outside audiences that MOST affect their operations.