Unified Communications: Features

An unsavory connection from your past. An annoying link to your name that's dragging down your career. A spicy quote you tossed off to a reporter that you wish you could take back.

IT professionals have historically monitored network traffic patterns to better understand network usage, to expose security events, and to generally promote overall network health. Traffic analysis can likewise be applied to the Web to understand a wide range of behavior patterns ranging from social media networks to suggestion systems in e-commerce to even the current hot topic: the presidential race.

Google Trends provides some great insight into what people are thinking about, even if they don't always help us to understand what this insight means in terms of the candidates' positioning.

Blog mentions are, like search terms, something of a special case. They probably show the least conclusive representation of candidate support, because there is no way to assess whether such mentions reflect a preponderance of positive or negative evaluations of the candidates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that negative mentions of candidate A by blogs supporting candidate B, and vice-versa, are very common indeed.

The tale told by other Internet traffic trends, also rings true when taking domain registration into account. Using DomainTools to query for domains, we saw 2,357 domains for Obama and 1,431 domains for McCain.

When you take a close look at the traffic patterns within the Web 2.0-based community, the popularity gap between the two presidential candidates increases. Obama's favored by a 4-to-1 margin compared with the 2-to-1 margin when we looked at other Internet Web traffic trends.

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Whether they're in branch offices or home offices, workers are increasingly telecommuting instead of working in a traditional centralized office environment.

It's gotten pretty hard to miss the financial news lately: September was the worst month for stocks in years, and October looks to surpass it. Despite the US government's massive US$800-billion bailout, the US economy is still roiling, and Europe's is doing even worse.

As we get older, we realize what a surprisingly big part of our happiness simple fitness and health habits play. A growing number of sites help people to manage their diet, exercise, and health issues, and give them a way to rap with others doing the same. Following are the best health sites we know of.

The whole IT industry has high hopes for mobile advertising, but it's still in its infancy and has many hurdles to overcome before it can deliver on lofty promises of billion dollar revenues, according to analysts and ad agencies. Vendors are more upbeat.