Don’t you love that headline? It’s from an otherwise straight piece of reporting on the IDG News Service picked up by multiple IDG publications, CIO.com in this case. (Truth in advertising: I worked for 10 years for the IDC division of IDG.)

I met a priest once who had just “given the Pope (the late John Paul II) a PowerPoint.” Or it might have been back when Harvard Graphics was still around. Either way, I was impressed: The pope gets PowerPoints just like any other CEO! So I visualized this IDG reporter phoning up Benedict to get his take on YouTube: "How fast was the upload, your holiness?"

Or at least I saw the reporter BlackBerrying IMs back and forth with the Pope. Interviewing via e-mail is becoming more and more common. So watch for that in articles you read. E-mail is obviously not as good as actually asking someone questions. Especially when the someone answering the e-mail is often not the person to whom the quote is attributed.

After which, my mind really wandered. I’m sure it was helped along by the blogoblather during U.S. Presidential Inaugration week about Obama waiting breathlessly to read Scott McNealy’s white paper on open source. The headlines of the articles and blog posts I wish I could write were:

• Mandela Used Word; Now Prefers ODF
• Dalia Lama Uses Google Maps Because MapQuest Moves Tibet to Europe to Placate Chinese Government (look carefully at url)
• Chuck Yeager Invented Own Game Because He Could Not Fly More than a Minute on Microsoft Flight Simulator without Crashing (and I don’t mean the PC)

Of course, I could explain how Sarah Palin really only bought $10,000 in clothing and that it was all really from Lands' End, but she forgot to check off “no overnight delivery.” Or that Al Gore really did invent the Internet before he invented global warming. Or how Intuit TurboTax, not Treasury-Secretary-designee Geithner, screwed up Geithner’s tax returns.

In the 1980s while at Data General I did research how Colonel Oliver North used IBM software called Profs that was competitive to our Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) to run the Iran-Contra arrangement from the White House. He got caught, and my idea was to run an ad that said he wouldn't have been foudn out if he had used CEO. My bosses decided not to run the ad. Oh well, I guess that was my one shot at hard news, as opposed to IT and enterprise software news.

Back to some real work. Congratulations to IT Business Edge on their new site design.