Bookmarks – 18.09.2008

The increase in searches for social networking sites is directly affecting the number of searches for pornography, which are decreasing. “My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites,” he says.

Crowd wisdom has this sort of philosophical feel that “cloud computing” does. It’s a catch all term that broadly describes the bulk of what’s produced in the Web 2.0/social media world. I think the best thing that can be done to solve the problem is for a more thorough understanding of crowd wisdom to be kept in mind by those who design these systems in the first place (that is, if they are designing these systems to be anything more than white-noise generators).

The efforts being made by Powerset and Microsoft are 1) to expand on the Live Search results with Freebase Answers, 2) parse semantic queries for Wikipedia results, 3) involve Powerset’s Factz “to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.”

There was a time when managing finances from your computer meant you had to use desktop software. Today, that's no longer the case. There are now a number of applications that let you do your banking in the cloud, a trend we've dubbed "banking 2.0."

Technorati owned the blog search and blog “authority” idea. Authority was a really simple idea, and people love to have a ranking for how popular their blog may be. Then, Technorati stopped doing anything. There is little confidence that all of the links from other blogs are not spam related. There have not been any obvious developments from Technorati either. Even the blog only talks about improving the search indexing.

There's nothing really new in the report – we've known for a while now that social media is being used to create new forms of influence in the commercial and social worlds. But there's good lessons here for brands and organizations that are still figuring out how to reach consumers in the Web age.

Die spezifischen Vorteile des Webs zu nutzen, hilft, um im Netz erfolgreich Geld zu verdienen. Das kann auch bedeuten, nicht Jeden abzukassieren, der das eigene Produkt nutzt.

Unfortunately, SemantiFind is one of those tools that's good in theory, but not so good in practice.

Cognition Technologies, a Semantic Web company that specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP) search, is today announcing the release of what it claims is "the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language." We interviewed Cognition CEO Scott Janus to find out what this means.

A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year. It's the latest in a string of reports this year – from Awareness, Forrester and others – which provide data about the growth of web 2.0 in the enterprise. It'll be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester.

In this post we highlight seven social media consultants that consistently bring tangible value to the table. These folks aren't full of hot air – they use their blogs to offer clear examples, links, tutorials and other resources you can put to use. If the goods you can see for free are so solid, that's all the more reason to investigate paying for these peoples' services. We hope this list will help you get smarter and maybe save a whole lot of money and anguish.

There continues to be a misunderstanding of the enormous transitions enterprise software and IT are going through. While Web 2.0 technologies have substantial holes related to security, standards, and IT buyin, even those simple metrics are yielding data about accelerating adoption. According to Awareness, Inc. surveys, business acceptance of social media applications doubled from 37 % in 2007 to 69% in 2008.

Dean Kamen has teamed up with Forum Nokia to encourage young mobile developers to create the next big application to benefit society.