A summary of the more interesting blog posts to come across my desk recently...

• Although this post is old news, I love this true story of some moron that forged a check for $360 billion dollars and then walked in to a bank insisting that they cash it.

• I found a few gems in this list of the top 100 blogs published by Technorati. The official Google blog found on this list was particularly interesting with their post on CADIE, some kind of strange artificial intelligence entity, which I didn't realize was an April fools joke until the next day!

• I am a huge fan of Amazon and do the vast majority of my shopping on this site. This ZDNet post does a great job comparing two Fortune Magazine cover stories separated by 10 years that took Amazon from "Amazon.Bomb" to the worlds best retailer. Great reading.

• Tech TechCrunch reports on some amazing stats showing that Salesforce.com supports 55,00 enterprise customers with over 1.5 million users on just a 1,000 servers. Since the servers a mirrored, it's really just 500 servers! Another post on a similar topic at ZDNet takes a look inside a Microsoft containerized data center where they pack 3,400 disk drives and 1700 processor cores into a 320 sq ft box.

• I stumbled across a fascinating web site called Twendz that does real time monitoring of twitter posts, identifying a topic and characterizing the sentiment about that topic as positive or negative. You can enter any subject in the search box and see how the world feels about it in real time. I tried entering "obama" and after about a minute I had 30% positive posts, 26% negative, and the rest neutral. A must try!

• Finally a couple of open source items. Despite the poor economy, open source vendor Red Hat is prospering as reported on internetnews.com. Of particular interest in this post was the companies "free to pay" effort with their Fedora distribution of Linux. I have been doing some investigation into open source test tools and found this post on Linux.com provided a great overview.

I'd enjoy reading any comments you have on these items!

Jim