Have you been unfriended?

Some time ago a friend changed his LinkedIn connection type on me: I went from a "colleague" to a "friend".  I felt good, as this was sort of a promotion.  I had thought about making some similar changes to my LinkedIn contacts myself, but felt that it was sort of odd to change my position about how I envison my contacts to be "related" to me.  I concluded that I'd better leave good enough alone. Then, recently one of my MBA students complained that he simply had too many contact showing up in his instant messenger software.  He would have to "decommission" some of his friends.  So, we have introduced a new social phenomenon driven by our social networking technology: the unfriending of our friends. 

Clearly, this unfriending business has reached new heights, as this week the New Oxford American Dictionary released its Word of The Year.  This year's winner: unfriend. 

Now you know it -- get ready to be unfriended.

Google Public Data

The title says it all.  Google added public data into their search about 8 months ago.  Now, this feature is becoming a real asset to those of us who often are hunting down economic indicators and other public data.  As of last week, 17 indicators from the World Bank are included in this search.  So, if you are looking for CO2 emission data, or life expectancy, your search got easier.  Searching for "gdp of finland" will yield a nice graph of GDP development for Finland over recent year (49 to be exact in this case).  For a more complete story on this issue, see the official Google blog here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-bank-public-data-now-in-search.html