Best of the blogs: With quite a bit of progress to report, Martin Heller circles back around to the fine art of spam fighting. Eradicated? Not entirely, but closer than before. “There is still a small stream of spams to an old mheller.com email address getting through the SpamJadoo grey-listing, virus-checking, and Bayesian filtering, as well as my email server’s virus-checking and Bayesian filtering, but it is being caught by the final spam content filter at Gmail.” It wasn’t all that easy, though. Columnist’s corner: Engineers and product managers are often at odds. The problem, David Margulius explains, is that all too frequently engineers are relegated to a status similar to below-deck workers on a ship. “Ever feel like that in your job in IT? Or worse, does your staff ever feel like that?” Don’t manage IT like the Titanic. “If you’re an IT manager with a large organization, think about how you can engage everyone on your team so that they don’t feel stuck in the engine room.” Notes from the field: The U.S. State Department has a new blog known as Dipnote. “No, I am not making that up,” Cringely jokes in Rally round the blog, boys. The moniker, short for diplomatic note, is “not the only thing dippy about it,” either. The news beat: Microsoft gears up for the Office Communications Server onslaught later this month where hardware, infrastructure and software partners will be on hand as the software giant shows off its unified communications platform. Salesforce.com works toward a data-sharing service that would enable customers to swap sales leads and other information, thus tapping into the data it hosts in common formats for thousands of clients. And a hacked U.S. Department of Homeland Security server turns into a spam cannon. Security