• ThinkPad laptop catches fire at airport (Engadget). Speculation that the battery is at fault. If it is, and it’s made by Sony as with the Dell battery issue and Apple’s battery recall, then Sony will have a major product confidence and reputation problem on their hands. Read the original story from an eyewitness.
• “The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies – developers, media, analysts and shareholders,” [Sun CEO Jonathan] Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. “When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my blog, they almost universally say yes.” From a newswire report, via Debbie Weil.
• Still on CEO blogging: Debbie Weil will be leading a discussion on the IAOC blog next week about CEOs and blogging – should they or shouldn’t they?
• 10,000 Dutch dissertations go online (Expatica). Now everyone can have access to new and often ground-breaking research being carried out in The Netherlands. Over 2,500 doctoral dissertations, many by young scientists, are completed here every year. Now there’s access to them all online.
• How Odeo Screwed Up (GigaOM). Frank talk from Odeo founder Evan Williams who lists the top five screw-ups Odeo made. GigaOM: “We can’t say we came out of the presentations convinced Odeo is set to conquer the universe, but Williams’ honesty and humility are admirable. The best part is, his advice has a chance of making an impact while it’s still relevant to today’s startups.”
• As measurements grow, organization charts become relics. BusinessWeek Blogspotting: In many organizations, people have two different paths of communication. Formal ones obey the org chart. But the informal stuff, which is usually more powerful, follows channels of its own. Often these evolve into entirely different networks.
• World’s poorest countries increasingly wired, UN agency reports. eGov Monitor: According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), “teledensity” has more than doubled in the majority of least developed countries since 2000 with some of them boosting connectivity by as much as 20 times, thanks to rapid growth in the deployment of mobile technologies.

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