If you’ve been following what’s been going on in the world of technology, politics, and international travel over the last few years you’ll know that, if you want to enter the US, border patrol agents are allowed to search your laptop, mobile phone, or MP3 player without limitation and without telling you why. Meanwhile, if you want to enter the UK and you have some encrypted stuff on your hard drive, the UK government can demand that you hand over your encryption keys or face jail time.

In light of all this, both CNET and the EFF have come up with ways in which you can keep your data both safe and private when crossing the border. Before reading that, though, check out Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan’s article on Five Things to Know About U.S. Border Laptop Searches.

Then read these:

• For a quick overview of how to secure your data, read CNET’s Chris Soghoian’s article Keep Your Data Safe at the Border.
• For a much more in-depth discussion, read CNET’s Declan McCullagh’s Security Guide to Customs-Proofing Your Laptop.
• And, for a more legal perspective, read EFF’s Jennifer Granick’s article on Protecting Yourself From Suspicionless Searches While Travelling.

Most important of all: be careful. Your really don’t want to suffer Maher Arar’s fate.

Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media has a couple of really good models on what it takes to have a successful intranet. Specifically:

• The Nexus of Intranet Success Model
• Intranet Project Methodology

You can read more about them in his article Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success. Great stuff — and very close to home as well because, at MBS, we’re in the middle of rolling out our new intranet portal. In fact, the first phase of our project is in the Implementation and Marketing stages of Ward’s project methodology model. Exciting times, indeed.

In the wake of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, Amy Webb from mydigimedia has updated the Who Owns What list to version 2.1 (available for download as a PDF). It includes the important recent acquisitions by Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL, News Corporation, and IAC and makes an interesting read. [Via Download Squad].

Neat-o-Rama published a fascinating post on the evolution of various technology company’s logos. The timing of this post is fun since we started discussing brands in my Consumer Behaviour class last night and my Brand Management course starts one week from today.

By now, everyone’s heard of Microsoft’s $44.6bn bid for Yahoo! and everyone’s talked about it as well, though Yahoo! isn’t saying much for the time being.

Here, in my opinion, are some of the most interesting articles currently published on this topic:

• To start us off, there’s Long Zheng’s side-by-side comparison of the services that each firm offers: Microsoft + Yahoo = Big Mess?
• And then there’s The Kelsey Group’s Peter Krasilovsky’s article, MS & Yahoo!, that discusses the proposed acquisition from a number of angles
• Louise Story from the New York Times argues that this deal will be good for the industry: Deal That May Create More, Not Less, Competition
• But Robery X. Cringley (writing in InfoWorld) thinks it’s going to be one big mess: MicroYahoo: A Marriage Made in Heck 
• As does Scott Rosenberg:  Microsoft Plus Yahoo? The sum is less than the parts
• Paul Kedrosky, on the other hand, thinks that Yahoo! should take the deal since it makes a lot of business sense: Yahoo: Finally Catches a Bid. Deal is Done. — even though he argues it won’t make too much of a difference to either of them
• Finally, skipping a lot (and I mean a lot) of other articles on this topic, the last one — and I’ve been saving the best for last — is Paul Thurrott’s analysis of the offer: Microsoft + Yahoo? An Analysis of Microsoft’s Blockbuster Offer for Yahoo

In fact, if you’re only going to read one article on this topic, read Thurrott’s. Though it would be good if you checked out the comparison table in Zheng’s article as well.

Finally, in light of all this merger talk, check out Josh Lowensohn’s article on Dot-com pioneers — where are they now?. It makes and interesting read.

Eight Black’s Simon Chen wrote a really good article today on what a Content Management System (CMS) should be. He argues that, for a company considering a CMS solution for its website, “buying into a stand alone CMS is just not logical.” Instead, open source CMS’ like WordPress are the way to go.

I agree. In fact, in my last job in Pakistan, I spent a couple of years trying to convince firms working in that country’s development sector (both government and NGOs) of exactly that. I didn’t use WordPress, but I did use, among others, applications like Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, phpBB, Alfresco, Moodle, MediaWiki, as well as countless plug-ins, add-ons, components, and modules. Each CMS has its own strengths and weaknesses, of course, and some are designed for specific things (you can’t do much else with the message board system, phpBB, for example) but all of them do their job quite well. [Good article on how to choose an open source CMS]

And, though over the last year I’ve worked mostly with commercial systems like Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), I really do think that open source systems are a great way to go for most small companies and, increasingly, for medium-sized companies as well. It’s only large firms that need much more than just a CMS solution that truly benefit from all the other features that systems like iD and MOSS bring with them. In fact, I’d almost feel silly using something like MOSS in a small company environment. That’s like having a 40-seater bus as the company car for a firm that employs 15 people.

Anyway, my point is that Chen makes a good point, though it is worth it to look at much more than just WordPress.

Well, whaddya know? Amazon has reached a deal to acquire Audible. Amazon now sells books, e-books, and audio books. Awesome. [CNET, Last100]

Though I’ve know about this for a while now, I’ve only recently tried out the 2007 Microsoft Office Test Drive and I am very, very impressed — both with the way the test drive is set up and with the 2007 Office suite. If you get the chance (and if you have a high-speed Internet connection), check it out.

Saul Hansell wrote a good, “hold your horses, there”-type article in the New York Times on the apparent all-out war between Netflix and Apple’s online movie rental offerings. In the article he explains that, while both are technically in the online movie rental business, they actually cater to different markets: Netflix concentrates on having a large collection of older movies as an add-on to its DVD rental business while Apple is going after the latest releases and is positioning itself as an alternative to DVD rentals. And, though there is an overlap, for the time being both companies should be happy in their own niches.

Of course, there’s also the issue that Netflix’s service doesn’t work on the Mac while iTune’s service works on any OS as well as on Apple’s portable media devices (Apple TV, iPod, etc.). Again, that’s not too much of an issue since they are catering to different markets. People who rent DVDs are probably not the type who’d want to watch a movie on their tiny iPod screens. Of course, Netflix is still missing out on the small proportion of users who own only a Mac, but I guess adding a Mac-compatible offering of an already add-on service isn’t all that high in its list of priorities.

So a couple of fun things have happened in the online media landscape over the last few days.

First, in anticipation of the announcement that everyone was expecting from Steve Jobs during his Macworld keynote address, Netflix ditched its online movie viewing quota. Steve O’Hear from Last100 explains what that means:

As of today, all subscribers except those on the most basic two DVDs per-month plan will be given unlimited access to the 6,000+ movies available as part of Netflix’s Internet streaming option, dubbed “Watch Instantly”. Previously, subscribers were offered a limited number of Internet viewing hours based on which DVD rental plan they were on.

This is really cool, especially since Netflix has a subscription model and doesn’t charge on a per-movie basis.

Second, as expected, Steve Jobs announced Apple’s entry into the online movie downloads space during his keynote address yesterday. To see how this stacks up against Netflix’s model, O’Hear compared the two based on (1) content, (2) pricing, and (3) convenience.

Each offering has its pros and cons: Neither has the upper hand in content, Netflix has better pricing (subscription model), while Apple has greater convenience (great hardware-software coupling and the ability to watch the downloaded movie on multiple devices). Of course, both are still limited by telecommunications infrastructure (especially Apple’s movies-in-HD offering for Apple TV) and the reluctance of movie studios to fully embrace the online rental concept. And though the market for online movie rentals is still small, it is growing (thanks, in part, to the writer’s strike).

So, at this time, it’s not clear how things will go. What I do know is that 2008 should be a fun year in online movie rentals.