Are you you're companies/teams newshound?
At Microsoft we have a ton of internal mail aliases. Most of these are for general business purposes like being able to send a mail to a particular team of individuals, but in both the Tablet group and the Mobility group there are two aliases that we use all the time for “fun” stuff or things that aren’t necessarily business related. For example there was a whole thread a couple of days ago on better commuting across the lake which was started by the absurd Aquacar that’s been in all the gadget blogs over the last couple of months. And then there’s the plead for help or recommendations on one topic or another, but generally people use it to “post” interesting news articles or things they’ve heard. So in some ways it’s a lot like a blogging.
For years I’ve been one of the people who scour the net for interesting articles on new gadgets or reviews that are mostly related to the business objectives or are absurd take offs. So for example I sent around this article about a surfboard tablet and this one about laptops getting stolen from a security conference. A probably sent out about 10 or 15 interesting things that either landed in my inbox over the course of the evening or from some of the sites I frequent, but my real question to all of you out there is…. Is this something that you find yourselves doing as well? Are you the one in your team/company who sends around all the cool but only somewhat related news items for others to read? And all of this is on top of everything else to do – in that you’re not hired to be the ones to post all the stuff to begin with -- at Microsoft we have a library staff that collects up articles on a daily basis to send around too, but often they miss some of the more obscure or off the beaten path or just plain silly ones.
