IBM ShortCuts Podcast - podcasts for IT-management from IBM.

An interesting IBM company - it has a lot of initiatives and internal projects, which is quite possible to devote half of my life only by studying the results of work and research of various departments. It’s rarely true that something comes out and loudly declares itself - most of the developments integrate with current products and services so that after a while, try to isolate as a separate part. But in this case we are talking about a separate product, or rather, a service that IBM promotes for IT management and other people who are more likely to be responsible for management and prospects, analytics, and not directly the development itself (it is understood that the developers are “geeks” , Ie, and so aware of all-all the most newfangled stuff).



The project is executed in the theme of modern Web2.0 directions and is a service of podcasts that IBM decided to rename to ShortCuts - that is, very brief issues devoted to the analysis of some narrow specific topic or issue. They are really short - the average length is about 5 minutes, although there is a longer one — for example, a podcast about the Lotusphere 2007 conference took almost 8 minutes. But unlike typical podcasts for half an hour or an hour of pure time, they are still short. After all, the very audience that they are meant for does not have so much idle time to listen to watch shows. But to find about 5 minutes in order to have a cup of coffee to find out the answers to the burning questions for today's Internet sphere, such as “what is microblogging”, or “how to structure a wiki”. Of course, it didn’t do without the hidden topic “What is this Web 2.0”, the discussion of which fit exactly in 5 minutes and 2 seconds. And you say - do not understand :)

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In my opinion, the project is very successful, and its positioning is just perfect. In reality, busy people, who are managers of all levels, have neither the time nor the opportunity to re-read tons of articles written mostly technically very seriously, developers for developers (and often for IT maniacs) - for them all is a dense forest and weak perceived concepts. But you can't just dismiss it because the trend across the entire Internet is and does not disappear anywhere. So you need all the same to understand it and saddle it. And here is just what you need - serious specialists quite qualitatively (in all terms of this word, from choosing and constructing phrases to technical quality of the record) convey to everyone who is busy and hurry to get to the “party of life” exactly what everyone is saying , but no one knows exactly and is afraid to ask ... At the same time, you can train your English - after all, all the shortcasts are in English. So far there are only 32 podcasts in the collection (although how to find others, except those that are placed on the first page of the service, I never Found, but oddly enough, the link and the archive leads nowhere), but releases follow regularly, and the RSS feed of updates will not let you miss the topic that interests you. Each issue is accompanied by both streaming and download files, as well as (a very nice and useful feature) transcription in PDF format. Of course, you can comment on the issues and ask your questions - it’s quite possible to hear a comprehensive answer one morning from experts of the blue giant.

It is strongly recommended to anyone who wants to learn about the most interesting trends in the IT world, or simply to get a brief, clear answer to global “Internet-to-be” questions. The original is published in the personal blog of the author - abrdev.com

Several links:

• The official website of the IBM ShortCuts Podcast
• Web 2.0 release (Cut # 26: What is Web 2.0?)
• RSS feed updates