Meet the man who could be your company's de facto customer service representative - a man you have never met and certainly isn't on your payroll. Thor Muller is founder and CEO of Satisfaction Unlimited, which runs an online community where customers air complaints about companies like Comcast, Apple, United Airlines, Whole Foods, Washington Mutual, Snapfish and Expedia to fellow customers and to the Internet at large.
Google has quietly begun limited testing of several new social features created for its iGoogle personalized start page. The updates include chat, activity streaming and a new interface for the gadgets offered on the start page.
The Eclipse Foundation is set to make available tomorrow its annual coordinated release of open source projects, which this year includes some 18 million lines of code and updates to 23 different projects.
Visa Tuesday unveiled the Visa Business Network, an application built on Facebook to help businesses network and drive new business -- while generating US$2 million in advertising revenue for Facebook.
Google on Friday launched a new tool that measures and compares public Web site traffic across geographies and related Web sites and searches. The new Google Trend for Websites tool was quickly browbeaten by some early reviewers because it doesn't allow traffic on many of the company's own properties, including Google.com, YouTube, Blogger and Picasa, to be measured.
A political blogger is using a technique known as " Google bombing" to enlist the aid of fellow partisan bloggers to boost the search engine rankings of nine news stories that reflect poorly on US Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Fueled by increased viewing of online political videos and the use of social networks to gather campaign data and online donations for candidates, use of the Internet in this year's election cycle is shattering records, according to <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_2008_election.pdf">a study</a> released this week.
On Tuesday, Wendy Harman, senior specialist for interactive media at the American Red Cross, was working to set up a Facebook page to solicit donations for the organization, which has been working to help the victims in the states ravaged by recent floods and tornadoes.
It's becoming increasingly dangerous to post blogs in some parts of the world. Various governments continue to step up efforts to crack down on bloggers who expose public corruption and human right violations, according to a research study released earlier this month.
Less than a month after Google launched Google Health, a site where consumers can store medical data online, it nabbed the first insurer to participate in the effort.
Conventional wisdom says that the new Generation Y work force is demanding access to Enterprise 2.0 tools like wikis, social networks and other collaboration tools at work while stodgy, baby boomer executives stifle those requests. In fact, said a panel of executives whose organizations already widely use Web 2.0 tools, the biggest challenge is convincing end users of all ages to use the new technology.
At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft's Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.
Microsoft and a slew of other companies will roll out new tools this week designed to help companies meld internal data with social networks, mashups or other tools like iGoogle that originated in the Web 2.0 world.
The agenda from last year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference was vendor and analyst-heavy as few end-user companies were yet widely using the Web 2.0 technologies that were born and nurtured by the consumer market.
In an ironic digital twist, the US federal government - the driving force behind the creation of the Internet - has not been able to fully embrace the second incarnation of the Internet, according to a study released late last month.