Just got a great question about the visual layout of the blog page.

To answer the questionof why we don’t increase the “flash” of the blog page that RobM asked about, the answer comes from Marketing Guru Seth Godin – we want you to focus on the signal contained in the blog posts, not the “noise” that would enter into the equation if we added a bunch of screen gadgets, flair or other eye (and attention) grabbing stuff.

We hope that you read the blog to get information about the state of information security, technology/privacy issues and the other topics we cover here.

So, RobM, that’s the long and short of it. We want your attention to be focused on the quality of the content we deliver and nothing else. If you want to know what the latest weather forecast is, what virus alerts or the like are going on – check out one of the many information security “portals” out there. They are very high on gadgets, heads up displays and all kinds of other stuff. They certainly have their purpose, but they just present too much “noise” to “signal” for the vision of the MSI team.

That said, to keep this blog post more on topic than marketing strategy – have you ever considered the threats that could stem from syndication into things like portals? Imagine the cookie theft that be performed by a rogue entry in a syndicated RSS feed or other mechanism that got wide distribution. I know this has seen a POC in the past and I have tested more than a few RSS clients that were vulnerable to embedded XSS attacks.

One scenario that the team has discussed is the injection of XSS or the like inside of corporate feeds on the intranet. This could be a quick, easy way to gain several forms of access to a variety of internal web apps in an enterprise. Would your internal feed mechanisms catch the attack? Would your internal users be exploitable? If your organization has moved forward with embracing RSS feeds and other syndication techniques – this might be something to add to your next assessment.