A friend asked me to fill out a survey about psychotherapy and dealing with career issues for a dissertation. I filled it out myself, and I’m passing along a link in hopes that other people can help out as well. The survey takes maybe 15 minutes to complete.

Countries like China and Venezuela are offering foreign aid to other countries with no strings attached in hopes of buying influence. Moisés Naím describes the practice in a New York Times op-ed:

In recent years, wealthy nondemocratic regimes have begun to undermine development policy through their own activist aid programs. Call it rogue aid. It is development assistance that is nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens.

China is actively backing such deals throughout Africa; its financing of roads, electrical plants, ports and the like boomed from $700 million in 2003 to nearly $3 billion for each of the past two years. Indeed, it is a worldwide strategy. Beijing has agreed to expand Indonesia’s electrical grid in a matter of months. Too bad the deal calls for building several plants that use a highly polluting, coal-based Chinese technology. No international agency would have signed off on such an environmentally unfriendly deal.

Slate once again lists the 60 largest philanthropic gifts of the previous year. I always link to the list because what rich moguls really yearn for is recognition from a blog, especially those who donated by way of bequest.

By way of Rebecca Blood, I found Reid Scott’s post about the political blogosphere, concerning the two bloggers working for John Edwards’ Presidential campaign who came under fire and eventually resigned because of controversial remarks they had made prior to working for the campaign.

It’s like the phenomenon of someone who was “fired for their blog.” No, they were fired for saying or doing something they shouldn’t have. It just happened to be in their blog. But a blog is not a buffer from the real world. Your words there count just as if you’d said them to someone’s face, with the difference that they are archived for a very very long time.

I think this is really the bottom line, and it’s true regardless of your field of endeavor. Political bloggers are in the spotlight now, but unless you are anonymous, what you blog about will affect your career. If you write ugly things about Microsoft, you probably shouldn’t expect to later be hired by Microsoft, or people who like Microsoft, or people who dislike people who write ugly things. Yes, your blog can raise your level of visibility and present you with new opportunities, but it can also foreclose opportunities that might otherwise have been available.

Here’s the kicker, though. This isn’t an altogether bad thing. The way I see it is that if someone doesn’t want to work with me because of the things I write on my blog, it’s better to find out before it becomes a problem. That may be impractical in the lean times when you have to take whatever washes over the transom, but in times when you can choose the situation you want to be in, it’s better to be in a setting where you can succeed.

This certainly comes into play when I’m involved with hiring people. I can find out more about anyone from their blog archives than I can by interviewing them. In interviews, people usually tell the interviewer what they think they want to hear. In other contexts, they are usually less circumspect. When I find I may work with someone, I look for blog posts, messages to mailing lists, comments on blogs, Usenet rants from a decade ago, and anything else I can find. There’s more to anyone than their persona on the Internet, but more information is almost always better than less.

And now you know why I am very conservative about blogging about what I do at work or who I work with. I know that this will all go down on my permanent record.

Is there a real Pamela Jones? SCO can’t seem to track her down so that she can be served with a subpoena. As far as I’m concerned, SCO’s problems are its meritless legal claims, not Groklaw’s comprehensive coverage of their shenanigans.

Wow. The enterprisey folks are coming to accept the inevitable, I guess. Dave Johnson has the details.

James Governor made a great observation in his del.icio.us feed about how we’re getting spun on Iran. Take a look at this Newsweek photo gallery, Modern Life in Iran. It consists of black and white shots of old women in hijabs, anti-American slogans, and people who look like they face a dreary existence. Our cold-eyed enemies living in despair. Then take a look at the Flickr shots from iranpx. Iranians at picnics. Snowy days in Tehran. Iranians on the ski slopes.

I imagine more people can accept the idea of bombs raining down on the city in the first set of photos than the city in the second set. Exposing these kinds of disconnects is one way that Web 2.0 could really change the world. Yes, Iran has a rotten government that is opposed to the United States and oppresses its own people, but can we really invade a country full of Flickr users and bloggers?

Believe it or not, Salon magazine has turned a quarterly profit. I thought for sure that their day pass strategy would be the end of them, but I’m happy to be wrong.

Gnucitizen explains how to do so and why you’d want to.

Lots of good stuff about making money by giving stuff away:

O’Reilly publishes books that get really widely pirated on the internet, because, they publish techie books, right? If there’s a form that’s well-suited to being published digitally, this is it. You get it digitally, and then you can scan it and search it and so on. And you can find just the right bit at the moment that you need that technical advice. And the people who are in a position to nick it electronically are already pre-qualified. That’s the audience, right? They’re all geeks. So O’Reilly says, “We monitor the trafficking in infringing copies of our work, and what we find is that the works that are most profitable are also the most pirated.” So that means — for most of our works — they’re not even popular enough for anyone to want to steal them. And for the works that are really popular, we’re already making tons and tons of money off of those works. So a little bit of piracy at the edge is just a form of progressive taxation on them.