Marshall Simmonds is a long-time colleague who, as vice president of enterprise search, oversees the SEO work to make the New York Times more search engine friendly. The NYT acquired Marshall as part of the Times’ About.com purchase last year.

Prior to Marshall’s arrival at the Times, the company’s web sites, which also include the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, had good traffic, but this was largely due to the strength of the brands. Little effort was expended on making search-friendly content, or making sure that search engines could easily crawl and index the sites.

“When I joined the company, Google was not crawling the Times,” said Marshall (more…)

Want to take advantage of all of that unused storage that Google gives you when you start a Gmail account? Well, now you can.

Third-party developers have created “Gspace,” an interesting tool that is designed to be a snap to install and use - and take advantage of all of your unused storage in your Google Gmail account (or accounts.)

Gspace is an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser - - free for download. Once installed, it allows the user to combine multiple Gmail accounts into one console and then - - in what resembles FTP - - upload and download files into unused Gmail storage. (The company says the tool can be used on systems running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.)

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The word ‘ruse’ is defined by the Merriam Wester dictionary as “a wily subterfuge,” and it’s an apt description for a stunt Microsoft recently pulled as part of its efforts to battle the persistent market negativity around Windows Vista.

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Engineers at web search giant Google say their company’s computers recently hit an eye-popping milestone: the measurement of 1 trillion pages that Google measured on the web.

“We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark,” wrote Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers for Google’s Web Search Infrastructure Team.

“Over the last eight years,

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The 30 skills every IT person should have

An IT manager’s guide on how to be better at what you do, no matter how experienced you are

On MSN a few days ago, I noticed an article called “75 Skills every man should master.” It included some skills I have and some I don’t. For Example, I can tie a knot and hammer a nail, its often hard for me to recite a poem from memory - and bow ties still confuses me.

It was an interesting read and made me realize I could be more well-rounded than I am. To be honest, we all could be.

So in the spirit of personal growth, I developed a list of skills every IT person should have.

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IT managers will have significant new challenges on their hands as client capabilities—and form factors—evolve.Look around your organization. What does your end-user desktop environment look like? Windows-based PCs? Docked laptops? Some combination thereof? Look around your organization five years from now, and the desktop landscape will appear very different.

1. It will be virtualized

Virtualization has saved money, time and space in the data center, and desktops will increasingly reap (more…)

Banning workers from using the internet for personal use could actually be hitting productivity because staff need a break to help reduce stress, according to a new report.

A study of 1,700 employees by computer games firm PopCap Games showed that people felt refreshed if they had an “ebreak” during the working day.

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For years, I’ve felt that Microsoft was always a small Chihuahua biting at the heels of Google. Sure, the company may be huge and it owns the software market, but it’s a mere wannabe in the online space. And then, as Microsoft started making inroads with Yahoo, I wondered if its status as the also-ran in the industry would change. It didn’t. But in an ironic twist of fate, it might after all.

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