News Of The Day 5/31/2011

DC resets, war is changing, Atari sells Cryptic – it's a lot of changes!

Demographics:
America's best-read cities. Little surprises me.

Geek Law:
Really, do the British have something against Twitter?

Politics:
The Pentagon will consider some cyber-attacks as acts of war. This matters because an act of war can mean a war/military response – and suddenly some small hacker groups and practitioners of asymmetrical warfare may find themselves facing a lot of force. I also suspect this is a bit of a warning to various groups. If you're in IT security, you need to know this.

Comics:
MUST READ: DC is essentially relaunching many series with #1, with some hints tying into the popular 52. This includes a major continuity reboot. There's a lot going on here – and a lot to watch. I suspect part of this is a larger, product-unifying deal.

Media:
Yes, you're not getting away from My Little Pony: Now it's mentioned at BNet which gives a decent summary of the phenomena. It actually appears this may NOT be radically misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Mobile:
Nokia issues a profit warning. No one is surprised.

Movies:
Geek acting god Hugo Weaving will play six characters in 'Cloud Atlas', which I've never heard of, but he's probably going to be a good draw.

Publishing:
Courney Milan discusses why she's self-publishing her next novel

Social Media:
Prepare for more buttons for social media from Google and Twitter. At what point does this become too much?

Technology:
The iCloud Announcement is coming. This sounds very big – and interestingly, might horn in on other people's territories if you think about it.

Video:
Hulu may be adding more ads. Hulu is still trying to figure things out it seems.

Video Games:
Wooga Raises $24 million for social games on Facebook and apparently because of their cool name. Someone's gonna be hiring.

Totally understandable: Nintendo drops DS Lite price.

MUST READ: Atari sells Cryptic to Perfect World. Going to be very curious to see where this goes – and also it keeps the California talent in the region.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: So with DC's relaunch, what do you think their full plan is?

Steven Savage

Progeeks, HR, and Stepping Up

HR has been an obsession of mine lately.  I've met some brilliant people in HR.  I've seen some hideous examples of HR (and my friends and family and readers tell me many more).  HR is a big area of interest of course, since a lot of people want to find some work, and HR is often the gateway.

Now I've met some great HR people.  As I've noted before, I like to let them know how great they are as probably few people are.  But I've also seen some pretty mediocre HR performance, and some that's just plain bad (seriously, getting a 'no thanks' letter six months after I started a new job?)  The good HR people will take care of themselves, but the ones that aren't so good . . . well, we have to deal with them.

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