Best of the blogs: After first attacking the myriad problems with social media, Lena West is back and looking at the upsides. Shorter time to market, better SEO, visibility are just a few of the advantages. “In much the same way social media can be used to solicit feedback about planned products and services, it can be used to improve existing offerings as well,” West writes in this Social Media 360 post. “I know I missed a few, feel free to chime in…” Data management: Errors can be fun, or at least Sean McCown thinks so. Troubleshooting a LiteSpeed problem, McCown encountered a message saying “This is not a good self-extracting restore executable! – Bad Magic.” In McCown’s words, “ya just gotta love programmers.” Green IT: IBM has come up with a way to simultaneously reduce silicon waste and boost the solar-power industry, Ted Samson explains in this Sustainable IT post. Those little silicon discs too flawed for use in processors that were previously discarded are now being removed in a fashion more befitting to reusing them, thus extending the life of the silicon, and that leaves more material for the solar fray, where supplies have been tight. Gripe Line: Palm has a warranty period on some of its products that is so brief it’s virtually useless, Ed Foster finds. “The reader was assuming that the Palm PDA would have at least a one-year warranty, but instead he discovered the warranty is only for 90 days,” Foster reports in Palm’s sneakwrap warranty. That fact is in such an obscure corner of Palm’s site that Foster points out, “it is obvious Palm is trying to hide its warranty.” Software Development