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Commercial BloggingAuthor(s): Jaideep SinghSource: Foreign Policy, No. 142 (May - Jun., 2004), p. 92Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147587 .

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[ WEB SITES THAT SHAPE THE WORLD

Commercial Blogging

W eb logs ("blogs"), once the sole domain of self- indulgent diarists and wannabe journalists,

are fast taking on serious corporate and military applications.

Rhode Island-based Trac- tion Software produces "enterprise blogging" soft- ware for corporate and gov- ernment clients. Using Trac- tion's software, a group of engineers developing, say, a new fighter jet can use news- paper-like, searchable blogs con- taining project information and col- leagues' updates. (To see a sample enterprise blog, go to www.tractionsoftware.com.) The technol-

ogy eliminates the thousands of faxes and e-mail mes- sages a development team might otherwise exchange.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) (www.onr.navy.mil) is exploring whether blogs can help the Pentagon adopt new technologies more quickly. ONR is testing Traction's software on a pilot project to devel-

op night-vision technology. On a single blog, defense contractors and engineers can exchange test results, ask each other questions, and swap ideas.

Last year, the Western States Information Network (WSIN), a U.S. federal program that connects law enforcement data and criminal information across five states, adopted blogs as its preferred information medium. "It was frustrating to lose important e-mails or to not

have access to them when we traveled," says WSIN Assistant Director Karen Aumond. "Now we have all of our information in a single, searchable place on the Web."-Jaideep Singh

Remittance Wars

Last December, Internet portal Yahoo! and bank- ing giant HSBC launched a Web site that allows

people working in the United States to send money to family and friends living abroad directly from their computer. At paydirect.yahoo.com, users either send friends and relatives an automatic teller machine card with money on it, or they earmark cash to be picked up at one of 60,000 "MoneyGram" loca- tions in more than 155 countries.

Currently, only a small fraction of overseas money transfers are sent via the Internet. Nonetheless, Yahoo! believes it will soon become dominant in the $50 bil- lion United States remittance market, which is pre- dicted to grow by 25 percent this year. (Yahoo! declined to comment on PayDirect's performance.)

Competitors welcome the new blood. "Yahoo!'s a great company, but it's a media property, and remit- tance is a very different market," says Kevin Hartz, CEO of Xoom.com, Yahoo!'s main online money- transfer rival. A spokesman for remittance giant West- ern Union was more direct, saying, "We welcome the competition."-Justin Peters

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India's image as an outsourcing utopia replete with cheap, skilled workers is under attack. London's Evening Standard reports that, in two recent incidents, staff at outsourced call cen- ters in India accepted bribes from Indian organized crime outfits and, in exchange, helped them hack into the computer systems of British banks for which they provided services. Financial and credit card details were stolen at least once. Such episodes show that "there are some things that you really should not send over- seas," according to Britain's National Outsourcing Association. "For organized criminals, this is a godsend." FP invites readers to suggest incidents in which a government, corpo- ration, or any organization is involved in a unique technological abuse at caughtinthenet@ceip.org.

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