The May/June 2007 edition of Messaging News has just gone online. I am tickled pink because I wrote the cover story!!!!

The cover story, Calendaring: Why Isn’t It Just Like Email? investigates the current lack of interoperability for scheduling meetings between users on different calendaring servers, and also profiles some of the people doing something about it … like Yori Nelkon from TimeBridge who is on the cover (above):

A shot in the dark from a blind-folded hunter has an extremely slim probability of doing anything but making noise. Yet for pretty much everyone involved in scheduling meetings today, we wear blindfolds and end up only making electronic noise. “Are you free at 10am on Tuesday to talk about the strategic review?” We write in email messages to the people we want to meet with, hoping against hope that it won’t take too long to get a meeting arranged. Unlike the ubiquity and open channels for communication we experience with email, calendaring is stuck in the dark ages. “In 1997 I wrote an article for InfoWorld on the poor state of calendaring interoperability,” recalls Scott Mace, currently a freelance author and blogger at Calendar Swamp. “When I reviewed the situation again in 2005, I was horrified to discover we hadn’t come very far. We still face the same problems today we did then.”

Yes, there are still problems, but progress has been made. In these pages we explore the current status of calendaring, including free/busy for meeting scheduling; the social cues inherent in setting up a meeting; the explosion of calendaring clients; and the need for mobile devices to become first class calendaring citizens.

There are also two associated side-bars which I wrote … It’s About More than Free/Busy profiling Nelken and research from TimeBridge (fascinating, fascinating stuff), and Calendaring Changes in Outlook 2007, based on a conversation with Marc Orchant, the author of The Unofficial Guide to Outlook 2007.

Finally, I also wrote the first feature article on Social Bookmarking, which starts on p.20 of the PDF:

The daily information tsunami facing managers and knowledge workers isn’t showing signs of abating. There’s new and different information to review, numbers to reconcile, and people to keep up-to-date. Managing this tsunami and retaining the relevant, while discarding the debris, is the personal and corporate information management challenge of our age. Classification is one strategy for doing so. It helps us to distinguish between different items, to organize what we know, and to analyze the relationships between multiple things.

A free download of the PDF is available (3.1MB, 48 pages).