Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.

But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn’s visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).

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Last Friday we started our look into the history of computer messaging and which applications and services we have used to communicate over computer networks through the decades.

So far we have covered the time period from 1960 to 1990, i.e. the era before the birth of the World Wide Web that we live in today. Now it’s time to continue our journey through the history of computer messaging, from 1990 until today.

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We have entered a new era when it’s easier than ever before to get your opinion out there. Writing a short message on Twitter takes almost no effort at all and it is immediately published on the Web. Services like Twitter have amplified the word-of-mouth effect several times over.

For an extreme example, just check out the talk on Twitter when Gmail is down.

There is a parallel here to blogging. What regular blogging once did for word of mouth was to make it possible for anyone to become a publisher (going from “one-to-one” to “one-to-many” communication). This has now been taken one step further since even those reluctant to maintain a blog won’t think twice about sending out a quick message on Twitter or any other micro-blogging service.

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We hear mostly about the social networking sites where English is the predominant language, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But what about those sites where the vast majority of users don’t speak or use English? We don’t hear about those very much.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. And many are doing extremely well. One of them is even big enough to rival Facebook in sheer user count.

The social networking sites we list below have reached an overwhelming popularity outside of the (native) English-speaking population, often being local hits in one or just a few countries and a specific language.

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If you suddenly find yourself without an Internet connection, there’s a good chance that somewhere a team of construction workers just uttered a collective “uh-oh” because their backhoe dug up a telecom cable. Oops.

It turns out that this problem is so common that it is costing millions upon millions of dollars in repairs every year. Backhoes, drilling and digging are serious cable killers.

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Here’s a little-known fact: Even when your hosting provider says it has provided 100% uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site hasn’t had any downtime.

Why is that? Because many hosting providers calculate their uptime in ways that aren’t intuitive from a customer perspective, ways that sometimes exclude certain downtime.

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Pingdom’s Twitter account has reached a nice little milestone: we now have more than 1,000 followers.

Sure, we don’t hold a candle to Ashton Kutcher and his 3.5 million followers, but it’s nice to see that more and more people are following the Pingdom team on Twitter. We really appreciate it.

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We humans are (mostly) a social breed. Ever since we have been able to connect computers together, we have enjoyed using our computers to communicate with each other. These days it’s hard to imagine a life without computer messaging such as email, IM and other applications that let us communicate cheaply and over great distances.

We decided to take a look at the history of computer messaging, the technologies and services that ultimately led us to where we are today.

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Lately there has been a lot of talk about RSS being dead, doomed, dying, a thing of the past, etc, etc, etc. (The latest wave seems to have been triggered by this article by Sam Diaz over at ZDNet.)

The arguments we’ve seen range from “these days I only use Twitter” to “I don’t use Google Reader anymore”. That last one seems to be a major gripe.

Come on, people.

RSS is a data syndication mechanism. RSS reader applications (such as the Google Reader) may or may not be losing some popularity, but that is an application issue and to go from there to saying that RSS itself is dead is just nonsense. That’s similar to saying that HTML is dead.

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It seems like every month there is some kind of news story about leaked emails. When emails never intended for the public eye are leaked, the consequences can be huge. People have lost their jobs, whole companies have been embarrassed, and in some cases the information revealed can even be dangerous.

Considering how easily emails can be leaked, it’s almost surprising we don’t hear about leaks more often. Here are a few famous examples of leaked emails and what their consequences were.

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