President-elect Obama has been urged by security advisors and government lawyers to abandon his Blackberry and email use when he starts his new job. Considering how he skillfully used web technologies in his campaign and the plans he has to grow his country’s technology infrastructure, it’s hard to imagine him taking a step back in time and bowing to the presure to go off-line.

Out in the blogosphere there are many opinions about this topic from political and technology perspecitves. New technologies have always been subject to fear, uncertainty and doubt (known as  FUD) and this might just be another example of it in action. Hopefully Obama will hang on to his Blackberry and the connected culture that goes with it. It makes more sense to have his experts come up with a solution which will let him stay connected with the world and still satisfy the security and legal FUDers. That’s called moving forward and change for the better.

Are you a FUDer? Are you faced with FUDers where you work? When it comes to new technology and new ways of doing business, do you find yourself constantly pushing a boulder up a hill just to get your point across? Don’t give up. It wasn’t that long ago that personal computers and email and the internet were the targets of FUDers. Now desktop and moblie computing is everywhere and web 2.0 technologies such as social media and social networks are on the FUDers target list. We should often question what we hear and see with a healthy skepticism but instead of dismissing new or different ideas based on FUD we should look for the opportunities they may bring us.

Dean