Are you thinking of deploying something like Facebook as a business tool in your enterprise? Many companies are: Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will surge over the next five years to reach $4.6 billion globally, predicts Forrester Research.
Twitter--the messaging service that lets you send instant, short updates to people around the world--is fast becoming a mainstream communication tool. Hundreds of brands and thousands of companies use it to connect with customers and co-workers, and new micro-messaging services are springing up every week to meet specific corporate needs.
This tool shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman's rank correlation. The middle column shows the results of these comparisons, with the strongest correlations listed first. High numbers (close to 1.0) mean that the rankings "line up" closely, which may indicate a relationship between the search query and the ranking metric. For example, mittens tends to be searched by users who are in northerly states (high latitude) and states with a lot of frost. Low numbers (close to -1.0) indicate a negative relationship -- that is, the rankings are close to being opposites, as in "yoga" and "VotedForBush".
Calais is a web service that uses natural language processing (NLP) technology to semantically tag text that is input to the service. The tags are delivered to the user who can then incorporate them into other applications - for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs, you name it.
"Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture."
(mobile) microblogging offers great possibilities for advertising (includes a good example) [--> but we will need business intelligence and data mining technology to take the advance]
WorkLight is a secure and scalable server software product that creates a bridge between the traditional IT environment and numerous consumer-oriented Web 2.0 services and technologies. On the one hand, WorkLight connects to enterprise applications, data sources and security infrastructure. On the other hand, it interacts with a wide set of familiar Web 2.0 services and protocols, such as RSS, Ajax-based gadgets and widgets, personalized homepages, instant messaging, mobile devices such as iPhones and Blackberry, and tagging and bookmarking services.
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