This week almost 15 million people watched a wedding video, Apple removed Google Voice from the appstore which created an intense debate about the fairness of it, a publication about Gartner’s Hype Cycle and also there was something about collaboration between Yahoo and Microsoft, however that seems to have disappeared in all the noise about Apple.

Social collaboration tools

• Usage and Experience Doesn’t Equate to Social Expertise
• Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
• SAP’s Mark Yolton: Creating vibrant, engaging online communities
• Number of Social Networking Users Has Doubled Since 2007
• Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy
  Intel IT has deployed an enterprise-wide social computing platform that combines professional networking tools with social media such as wikis and blogs, and integrates with existing enterprise software. Read how Intel IT transformed collaboration across Intel while addressing top business challenges such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise more quickly, breaking down silos; attracting and retaining new employees; and capturing the tacit knowledge of mature employees.

A wedding (a great example of the viral effect of social media)

• YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising
• I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0 (the video all the buzz is about)
• Viral Wedding Video’s 10M Views Drive Chris Brown Buzz and Sales

Research

• Gartner Hype Cycle 2009: What’s Peaking, What’s Troughing?`
• June 2009 Mobile Metrics Report
• Teens Don’t Tweet; Twitter’s Growth Not Fueled By Youth
• Social Media Best Practices
  Marketers have become more than willing to start a conversation about their brands through social media. But that’s only the beginning of the marketing effort.In late 2008, MarketingSherpa surveyed social media marketers about the effectiveness of their practices. Large majorities rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.
• Who will own the screen? an analysis of the Active Idle Screen market 2009-2011

Web development

• Text Rotation with CSS
• Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip
• What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
• 33+ Online Resources to Learn CSS/li>

Apple AT&T and Google voice

• Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
• How long can Apple’s reputation stay untarnished?
• Google Pulls Apple from Search Results
  Mountain View, CA – In response to Apple pulling the Google Voice application from the iPhone App Store, Google has removed all search results leading to Apple.com from its index. Google is also redirecting searches for “iPhone” and “app store” to the IMDb.com page for Payback.
• iPhone-Google Voice Issues Underscore iPhone for Business Issues
• FCC eyes AT&T, Apple rejection of Google Voice apps (full text of letters)

Augmented reality

• “Preparing Us For AR”: the value of illustrating of future technologies
  When I wrote about Text In The World over on my personal blog a few weeks ago, our colleague Matt Jones left a comment:“preparing us for AR” (augmented reality)
  And this got me thinking about the ways that design and media can educate us about what future technologies might be like, or prepare us for large paradigm shifts. What sort of products really are “preparing” us for Augmented Reality?
• Augmented reality & face recognition & mobile

General

• Microsoft Backtracks on Browser-less Windows 7 E
• Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB
  Until recently, our server monitoring application, Server Density, was running using MySQL for the backend. Although we primarily provide it as a hosted service, it has been written to work as a standalone application for customers that wish to install on their own servers. This means each customer had their own MySQL database.
• The Semantic Web Considered Harmful?
  Today, there is tremendous activity and promises under the auspices of the Semantic Web covering the academic, research and industrial sectors. This includes numerous accounts of the benefits that this set of new technologies brings to these communities, and ultimately, the end user – underpinned by the RDF and OWL languages. These benefits include the rhetorical “semantics” and much vamped “reasoning” features.
• Collaborating With The Competition: How It Can Help You Succeed
• Designing “Read More” And “Continue Reading” Links
• Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma | OpenNet Initiative
  Examines the role of information technology, citizen journalists, and bloggers in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the abrupt shutdown of Internet connectivity by the Burmese government on September 29, 2007, following its violent crackdown on protesters there. Completely cutting international Internet links is rare. Nepal, which severed all international Internet connections when the King declared martial law in February 2005, is the only other state to take such drastic action. Although extreme, the measures taken by the Burmese government to limit citizens’ use of the Internet during this crisis are consistent with previous OpenNet Initiative (ONI) findings in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Tajikistan, where authorities controlled access to communication technologies as a way to limit social mobilization around key political events. What makes the Burmese junta stand out, however, is its apparent goal of also preventing information from reaching a wider international audience
• Business Integration of Social Media Marketing
• Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.
• Microsoft and Yahoo: Too Little, Too Late, Too Hyped
• Web2.0 is Dead – As a common phrase anyway
• Google Apps + OpenID = identity hub for SaaS

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious