Yesterday afternoon, just before President Obama's first State of the Union address, the websites of the House of Representatives and those of multiple congressional members were defaced with anti-Obama messages. Among the defaced sites were those of Charles Gonzalez (20th District of Texas), Spencer Bachus (Alabama's 8th District) and Joe Wilson (South Carolina's 2nd District). These sites are currently down for maintenance.

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Here is the messages that greeted visitors to house.gov yesterday afternoon:

FUCK OBAMA!! Red Eye CREW !!!!! O RESTO E HACKER !!! by m4V3RiCk ; HADES ; T4ph0d4 -- FROM BRASIL

All the affected sites used the Joomla content management system, but it's important to note that not every Joomla site hosted on the House's servers was affected by this attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, all of these sites are managed by GovTrends, a private vendor.

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According to Praetorian Prefect [...]

Thu Jan 28, 2010 12:40 pm

We've talked now and then about college programs that are making strides to provide students with entrepreneurial training, but the Harvard Business School (HBS) has so far not come up in our discussions. This might seem odd that one of the top businesses schools in the nation doesn't gather much attention from things like The Princeton Review's ranking of entrepreneurial programs, but one HBS grad may have an answer to that puzzle.

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Stu Wall, co-founder of the startup Postabon with an MBA from Harvard, recently wrote about some of the reasons that he thinks cause MBAs to make mistakes when trying to form a startup. The biggest obstacle in their way is that through their years of education, MBA students are taught to meticulously plan their businesses, but nothing can substitute from actually getting your hands dirty.

"With three months and ~$10K, we created a bare-minimum website and iPhone app that allowed us to iterate daily based on consumer feedback. No amount of time in Baker Library would have substituted," writes Wall. "Building a product will allow you to identify a viable strategy, iterate, and prove your team can win. Research, formatting and nicely worded emails are a prerequisite but by no means a differentiator."

Does this mean that no startup ever got funded without a working/> [...]

Fri Apr 02, 2010 09:30 am

Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla.

Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. The impact of the integration has the potential to be significant, as Drupal in particular is one of the most widely-used content management systems in use on the Web today, powering sites from WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov to TheOnion.com and websites for celebrities and musicians like Britney Spears and Eric Clapton. Joomla is used by such institutions as Harvard, MTV and Citibank.

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Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect's social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose.

In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site's entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs.

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Mon Jan 11, 2010 21:55 pm

Nurph, which just launched its public beta, combines a URL shortener and chat rooms. You simply create a shortened link by going to Nurph.com and share it with your friends. That link will then take your friends over to the URL you shortened, which now features a Nurph chat room that pops up on the bottom right side of your browser window. Nurph is the successor of Nurphy.com, which will shut down at the end of April.

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Twitter Integration: Leaving A Digital Trail

As Nurph's co-founder Neil Cauldwell noted when we talked to him and his fellow co-founder Paul Horsfall earlier this week, adding the Twitter feature was a request from some of Nurph's early beta testers. One interesting way to look at this feature is as a way of broadcasting your digital location. Whenever you enter a room - or "channel," as the Nurph team calls it - a message is pushed out to all of your Twitter friends who can then join you on this site.

One nice feature of the service is that whenever somebody posts a link to the chat room, clicking on that link will simply open up a new Nurph channel and won't take you out of the Nurph experience. From within the chat room, you can also share your link on Twitter, Facebook and by email.

Like all good URL shorteners, Nurph also offers a boookmarklet that will w/> [...]

Fri Apr 02, 2010 10:35 am