Best of the blogs: Want to offer more than money to those affected by the Hurricane Katrina disaster? Kevin Railsback felt the same way and found out how he can tap his technical know-how to help people find each other. The project is Katrina People Finder, and Railsback offers the full details, but in short IT folks contribute by tuning unstructured data sources for a structured database. Mario Apicella looks at some of the lessons learned from Katrina, and offers a simple ‘what if?’ exercise that could open some eyes in your company. Top Story: An injured Oliver Rist proclaims that he doesn’t much care about his blown-out back, at least now that football season has almost started. Oh yes, and the three Microsoft toys he’s gotten to play with don’t hurt either, he writes in September brings more goodies from Microsoft (and football). Perhaps that Freeze Dry functionality in Windows Vista is helping cool his pain. Columnists’ Corner: Mario Apicella, in Storage Insider, probes HP’s “more determined and assertive attitude” of late when it comes to storage, and wonders if it signifies the end of the Fiorina Era. He likens the new HP way to opening a bottle of champagne: now that the cork is off department managers can get a bit more oxygen. The news beat: IBM’s Lotus arm reaches out with refreshed versions of Notes and Domino that bring the old guard e-mail duo closer to IBM’s stated goal of blending them into its Java-based Workplace product. Perhaps hoping to cash in on any prospective converts, startup Zimbra released an open source alternative to Notes or Microsoft Exchange. Lest Zimbra be cast aside as just another stowaway on the open source raft, the company did attract Scott Dietzen, former CTO of BEA Systems. Technology Industry