Mashable lists 35 companies that are actively pursuing connections with customers via social media.

InformationWeek reports on Wachovia's push to introduce social software into the enterprise.

Beyond connecting employees around the world, Wachovia's collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. "Business in general has a real challenge engaging Generation Y," said Fields. "They're coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies," he said, adding that many young workers' engagement levels "fall off the table" after about a year on the job. "They are leaving Fortune 100 companies," he said.

The company started by piloting wikis that represented "non-threatening use cases," and are expanding out from there. They will be building their set of tools based on Sharepoint services.

As younger knowledge workers enter the workplace and see the cumbersome legacy tools, or lack of tools, provided by some enterprises, they will clamor for the services they already use on the Internet and bitch about the inadequacy of what they have. I know I did when I worked in a large corporation.

Starting around 2000, with IM and then moving on the wikis, and social bookmarking, I got our group to bypass IT to install AIM and Usemod, and built our own social bookmarking tools. We learned to get things done better, faster, and smarter. I never asked for permission. I just did my job the best way I could.

There's no reason young information workers should need to ask for these tools now. You'd better just have them or we'll look outside to get them. But if you want to address issues such as security, it's better to heed the rumble from the grassroots.

The realization within the really large corporations like Wachovia to accept the new paradigm of doing business openly within the enterprise is a sign that the idea has taken root, and we shouldn't need to describe or document the need any longer. The tools are mature enough for IT consider in terms of security and journaling functionalities. Enterprise social software is slowly following in the wake of acceptance of the Cluetrain, and the paradigm of open markets and transparent communications with businesses. The timing is right and the tools are tested.

If I have any say in the matter, I won't ever work for another large company again. It took a lot of effort in evangelizing, socializing, and implementing tools for more efficient communications and documentation processes. But should I ever find myself back in a large corporation some day in the future, I'd wager that some form of the social software I use today will be present in those companies.

Social Cyborg, Kevin Lim has a great video profile on Seesmic. Kevin blogs at theory.isthereason.

Web 2.0 makes inroads in the scientific community as the Hershey Center for Applied Research, in Hershey, PA develops a social network to improve interactions between industry, academia, government, venture capitalists, the work force and IP attorneys. The social networking software is said to provide a "LinkedIn look" that will enable scientists to connect with each other, and provide content areas such as wikis.

KnowledgeMesh is designed to create and improve interactions between industry, academia, government, venture capitalists, the work force and IP attorneys. Secondarily, Butcher said, she hopes the tool will position the center for growth.

...

A social network can help bridge the gap between researchers and the resources they seek. Moreover, the social tools will let outsiders collaborate with scientists they wouldn't ordinarily be familiar with.

KnowledgeMesh includes profiles, wikis and other tools that were created by Intelmarx, a social software provider that caters to nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions.

This week I'll be starting another new stage in my career, as I take on the role of Director of User Experience at Traction Software, Inc, marking my return to the subjects you've read me blogging about in the past: design of information retrieval and content management systems, knowledge management, and social networking and social software for the enterprise.

It's with great pleasure that I return to work on the application I used as a client, and to the team that I contributed some interface design work to over a year ago as a consultant. You'll be reading me return to blogging about the topics I mentioned above, but this time from the design and product development end of the conversation. Previously I wrote mainly about grassroots needs for social software and km and how blog/wiki tools meet these needs. In addition, I expect to show details of the application and its use for various forms of personal and enterprise knowledge management. I've used this tool in the past on a range of needs, including serving as a tracking system for usability testing issues, documenting project information (wiki style), and simply for logging my own projects and todo lists (personal km style wiki).

There will be more to come. I look forward to sharing with you.

Apparently Chris Pirillo wants to do something with Drupal that will make using Drupal as a producer/publisher easier. He describes (with his usual zeal) why Drupal makes sense for people wanting to build communities. They're talking about making an installer profile and some modules. Adam Kalsey is in on it and his first module, activitystream is up. I installed it on Konigi, but ran into some installation errors. Will have to try again later.

I think this will all be good for Drupal, since it comes down to contributing to the community in order to make the experience friendlier for community-minded publishers. I'm definitely going to be paying attention. More about this project can be found at assembla.com/wiki/show/drupalcpp.

A recent blog entry from Danah Boyd is making the rounds. In it, she writes about class trends she's observing in her ethnographic research of teens and social networking platforms. Nothing surprising really. A comparison of the demographic audience would yield the obvious. Since Facebook started out as a college social networking site and later included professional networks, the skew will be toward higher educated and higher economic classes. To quote Boyd:

Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

...

What I lay out in this essay is rather disconcerting. Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made.

Certainly makes for an interesting discussion of the shifting attitudes towards the community you keep as your socio-economic position changes. I would argue that there might be some interesting discussion about how this shift in attitudes correlates with advertising and marketing issues as well.

An interesting hypothetical issue to play with (to me anyway) would be to think of how you would choose to market a particular product advertisement between Facebook or MySpace audiences. We have some real world analogies we can make and assumptions to break about who spends more. Having more dollars doesn't naturally mean spending more as a consumer. It depends on the product being hawked and the match to consumer. If, for instance, you look at the market share of portable gaming devices to the share of home computers, the numbers indicate that higher income and more education is not the best indicator of spending with regard to these markets. As I recall from reading "Got Game," the Nintendo Game Boy has greater market penetration than the personal computer in their respective markets precisely because of the low price point and the economic audience they appeal to. You've got more people in lower economic positions going after those low cost consumer purchases in quantity, who historically haven't been able to spend the dollars for a home computer.

There's so much gray in this analysis that I can't make any real conclusion about Boyd's observations yet. Observations that have mostly to do with demographic differences don't yield much value to me yet until I find her correlations in these trends with something more than where teens choose to maintain their social network.

I had an interesting conversation with a family member this weekend. This person is in an older category range--to 65 year olds nearing retirement. He happens to watch a few reality shows, one of which is "Dancing with the Stars", and we got onto the topic of judging on all of the shows with the "American Idol" format of judging.

From what we could gather, there seems to be 3 formats of judging:

• The public call in and online vote method--used on American Idol
• The expert judge method--used on Project Runway
• The split judge/public vote method--used on Dancing with the Stars
• The peer system where winners vote off another player--used on Survivor

The pure judge only option is not without controversy, as many who watched the 2nd season of Project Runway will attest to. Quality is a subjective thing to measure. The judges + call in vote system seems to be the one that tries to prevent the popularity of a public vote from being a way to game the system, and ensures that actual quality of performance has something to do with the outcome.

There might be others that I'm not aware of. These seem to be the most popular. Let me know if you are aware of others used on these reality shows.

Compare these with the systems used on social software sites.

• For ratings, there's the purely quantitative rating system--used on Netflix
• For comments there's the karma moderation system--used on slashdot and digg to promote or bury posts and comments

What are the methods and typical algorithms for both ratings and comments that prevent gaming these systems?

InfoWorld has announced the 2007 Technology of the Year Awards for the applications they rated best and most innovative in each of 8 classes of information technology. Traction Software, who I began doing user experience consulting for last spring, won in the Data Management category for Best Enterprise Wiki.

Last year, Traction released version 3.7 of Traction TeamPage and Communicator, which introduced several very exciting new content management and theming enhancements and continued to focus on usability improvements. If you're in the market for an application that does enterprise collaboration tool the way you want to, you'll want to check out the Traction 3.7 feature set.

Congrats to all the recipients of the IW Technology of the Year Awards.