Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

I was saddened to hear that Brad Penrith had been fired from his duties as head wrestling coach at the University of Northern Iowa. When Don Briggs was fired after the 1996-1997 season, Penrith was my #1 pick. Fortunately for UNI, we got Mark Manning and Penrith came as an assistant. Manning is a class act, and Nebraska was wise to hire him away. I liked Penrith from day one and was happy to see him take over the job. I liked his humor, how he treated his athletes, and how he treated me. Under Penrith, UNI wrestling had a number of highly successful wrestlers, although team results against top-caliber competition were generally lacking. I was especially proud of UNI wrestling's academic successes, a sign Penrith was recruiting high-quality kids both on and off the mat. UNI did not wrestle well this year, but I understood that Penrith, in year one of a three-year contract, was redshirting some talent and bringing in a good class of recruits in the hopes of having a much stronger te...

When your engineers have 20% of their time to use on projects of their choosing, you get a lot of interesting product ideas. If nothing else, Google is amazingly unshy about pushing these products and services to their users, even if some start out somewhat incomplete and poorly integrated. Enter Google's newest offering, Google Buzz. Unlike some previous Google attempts at social media, this one is going to work in a big way. First, Google integrated Buzz right into Gmail, the reason most of us have Google accounts in the first place. There are plenty of seats at the Google Labs table, but not many projects get to sit at the front with Gmail. Second, your contact list pre-establishes a social network. Third, if you use Google Profile, you already had established information about yourself and the content you create. Fourth, if you create content with Blogger or Reader, your Buzz account is pre-primed with content. Who else could have done this? Nobody. (Even though Buzz is more ...