Brainstorming, despite the popularity of the term, is one of the most challenging collaborative activities to carry out. While most people think they know how to brainstorm, very few really understand how to consistently make a session work. Ken Thompson and Robin Good share some of the secrets gleaned from "The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm"

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Standards initiative for blog aggregation and applications

One of the problems with blogs is that posts can have any, or no, structure. So, for example, my blog post about a DVD review might include the running time and the certificate. Your DVD reviews might instead offer a star rating and a genre classification. This inconsistency makes the work of automatic aggregation into a DVD review site very difficult. Likewise its very challenging to do intelligent filtering (e.g notify me of all reviews of Jim Carey's films in the non-comedy genre) .

Computer criminals are redirecting internet users to bogus web-sites through a scam known as "DNS cache poisoning". The antidote is a free piece of software called BIND9.

UK Small companies more open to virtual working practices than big ones

According to Online Recruitment, “Big businesses are left behind as smaller firms pioneer the remote office”, May 31.

A survey of attitudes to teleworking in UK business, carried out by Mitel, finds somewhat surprisingly that small businesses (72%) are much more open to remote and flexible working practices than their larger counterparts (44%).

One might think that the larger companies more advanced IT and communications infrastructures might make them more amenable to teleworking?

However perhaps mindset may be more important than technology with the bigger companies preference for ‘command and control’ and “if you can’t see it you can manage it” holding them back in new working practices compared with a more ‘self-managed team’ approach popular with small entrepreneurial companies.