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Jon Udell's latest on IT Conversations is an interview with a 17-year-old gamer and a USC prof who researches the social and economic impact of gaming.

I've overhead the kind of leadership they're talking about right here in my house.

In strolling through my referrer log I discovered a SocialRank site that aggregates news from elearning blogs: Learning Signal. Nice! I'm subscribed. Here's how the intriguing new SocialRank site works, from the MindValley Labs blog. Not sure if I'm mischaracterizing it, but it seem a little like a cross between Techmeme and Mahalo? No?

MindValley, parent and incubator of SocialRank, looks like an interesting company. It's located in Kuala Lumpur. Staff is on the young side. It's sad how an old fart like me can resonate with a stirring description of the character of a workforce and company mission, then totally know I'd never fit in when I see a group employee photo.

In a different section of my stats report -- keywords -- I see something that wasn't there last time I studied them. Are hackers or spammers making use of MS Live Search for some nefarious pursuit? I see more Live searches than Google searches recently, and the terms they tend to seek are "account" and "username." What's going on there?

I've been researching this idea to make an ad-supported free compliance course in sexual harassment. I wonder if there would be a tiny market for organizations who actually want to teach the right thing do -- not just teach supervisors what to do to avoid liability. Nah. But a feminist orientation might be a unique differentiator!

I might try it. Goodness knows in California, mandated training can take some wild twists. If you have to go to traffic school you can go to one taught by a comedian, or one that serves a 5-course dinner. At least that's how it was when I live in L.A. in the 80s.

I've also set up a new Moodle installation, my first experience with version 1.8. Three or four years on, having used CSS a lot more than I had when I first played around with Moodle, I'm finding the new CSS setup not nearly so confounding, and see how sensible it is for themes. I'm modifying Urs Hunkler's Chameleon theme.

I signed up for Google Apps for one of my personal domains this morning. I'm tapping my foot now while the CNAME record goes through and Google verifies I own the domain.

It occurred to me after hearing about Google's plans to build social networking on top of its existing properties that Apps already provides something like a closed-circuit network if you wanted to use it that way, a little like Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator .

I thought I might use this as my header.

Oops. Nope. Realized almost immediately that Google marks are not allowed, so I guess I'll have to take out that "M." Don't suppose they can trademark the use of different faces and primary colors within a word, though.

Later: You have to mess with MX records, then wait up to 48 hours for them to resolve, too. I'm not very adept at those sorts of things, always seem to get one little thing wrong and I never know which little thing. It's still very arcane, isn't it? I suppose that's the way the organizational mail server admins like to keep it.

When Dave mentioned finding more ways for the backchannel to participate in conferences, it reminded me of an abandoned experiment to use Moodle, the open source LMS, to encourage conference discussions to continue after the fact. It would be for both virtual attendees and people who were there, but want to continue on with an important topic or two after the conference has ended.

I may get back to the project, because:

1) I'm kind of a hermit myself and would like a way to get more involved in conferences I don't want to show up for or can't afford to attend.

2) It seems to me if you're attending a conference virtually, there isn't a huge need to participate in real time (though I do see the draw of the togetherness aspect, and the new cheap or free video streaming makes the real time participation more feasible than it's ever been). Attending later is a little like the timeshifting media.

3) Most important, in our online ADD-world, some key ideas tend to be forgotten too quickly. There's so much info to take in that you tend to move on to the next thing the next day or next hour. I'd like to see conference-goers choose one or more topics they think are worthy of exploring in more depth, then take them online.

It's a kind of a hybrid of conferences and online learning. I suppose for some industry-oriented conferences you could even make them formal enough to qualify for continuing ed credits. Why not?

Looks like the much anticipated launch of Google's wiki and presentation package slipped. It didn't get announced last week at Office 2.0, says Rafe Needleman on Webware.

Still, it seems like Google isn't actively trying to hide their run at MS Office the way they seemed to be doing a year ago.

Know what I'd do to pry the door ajar to the enterprise space? Make some breakthrough feature for the calendar, because of course sometimes you want reminders about work-work you have to do at home, but of course you don't want to use Outlook for it. I use web Outlook, and can access Outlook through Citrix and I still don't want to use it at home -- don't want to feel obliged to look at it except on whole work-at-home days. It doesn't help that web Outlook must be viewed in IE for it to look and work at all well.

Plus, IT managers might not feel as strongly about letting go of the calendar as they would about cutting loose from Outlook for mail.

BTW I had a work-at-home day last Friday and watched part of the panel Rafe moderated at the Office 2.0 conference. He did a nice job. Crack-me-up part: when he invited Sridhar Vembu, Zoho's CEO, to remark on a question, he'd say, "Sridhar?" And every single time it sounded to me like he was saying, "Sweetheart?" Lonely homeworkers have to find some sport, and need to talk back to somebody or something, so each time I'd say, "Yes darling?"

Check out today's post on 0xDECAFBAD.

This sort of thing warms my heart. I used to think I was born in the wrong century to thrive in a cottage industry culture, but if we burn down a bunch of 20th century effluvia, it's just the right time.

Les writes well for a programmer, doesn't he? And he reads OSC's Alvin Maker series! That shows some good taste, too.

Has LookSmart's Find Articles service been adding lots of older articles from print magazines to the online collection? I have a Google alert on my name, which usually doesn't tell me much I don't already know, but today it gave me search results on my name, which took me down memory lane to two articles I wrote in the early 90s.

As this proves, I don't have much of a "book" when it comes to mass market consumer magazines -- at least not that I ever got a byline for. When I worked in PR I did an awful lot of ghosting. Now if somebody starts putting lots of verticals online, I can throw away that heavy box of writing samples. Actually, I've been thinking about doing that anyway. What do I have to prove, and to whom do I have to prove it anymore?

These are pretty rough scans. It looks like they have copyedited OCR glitches, but nobody's read for sense to pull out sidebars from the features. It's just all text on a page, then all text on another page. You know, the same thing you get when you try to export text or HTML from Quark or PDF.

Oh, and the answer to the question posed 14 years ago, "Has telecommuting's time come?" No, and I don't think it's much further along than it was when Helen La Van and I conducted that survey, at least not when it comes to supervisors' and HR folks' attitudes. I think in most quarters it's still all about control and mistrust and surveillance and "What if everybody wanted to do this?"

James Cox tosses out a bunch of neat ideas about coffee shop work and co-working arrangements for solo folks.

I really like my regular 9-5 job, partly because I'm allowed quite a bit of flexibility -- and in return they get a lot more than 40 hours a week of work out of me. A fair deal, I believe. But, I still have the poet's soul and daydream about solo life once in a while. I've done it three different times -- once for 8 years when my kids were little, but I needed more structure. Even the couple of years when I had a great little office over a storefront, I'd indulge in naps and novels when I was there.

So, it wasn't just that I needed a place to go. I needed a place to go where there were other people. And as James says, even better if they are inspiring likeminded people.

Have you ever looked into the London coffeehouses. People did business at them for ages, but they must have faded in mid-19th century? Not sure. I'll try to find some links. Here's one for starters.

Almost from their inception, the London coffee-houses each began to develop its own specialised clientele, and each soon became identified as the meeting place for a particular occupation, interest group, or type of specialised activity. By and large, the type of clientele was determined by the area of London in which the coffee-house was located. Coffee-houses such as Lloyd's or Garraway's, located in the area around the Royal Exchange, were, for example, the gathering places for businessmen of the city, and those such as the St. James and Cocoa-Tree, located in Westminster, were frequented by politicians. Many of the coffee-houses near St. Paul's Cathedral were the haunts of clergymen and intellectuals who gathered to discuss theology and philosophy. Some coffee-houses became so identified with specific groups or interests that an early London newspaper, The Tatler, printed its stories under coffee-house headings.

J. Pelzer and L. Pelzer, "Coffee Houses of Augustan London," History Today, October 1982, pp. 40-47.

Lloyd's of London started out life in a coffeehouse!

I think you could even rent booths and services. It must have been a considerable step down from having a real office. Seems like Mr Sedley in Vanity Fair was embarrassed to conduct his business in one when his company got in trouble and he didn't have an office anymore.