Edward Cone

If you needed proof that the regulations put in place under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are no guarantee against financial chicanery and the madness of crowds, the wreckage of the U.S. housing industry and the resulting distress in credit markets around the world should provide a reality check. SOX targeted fraud and shady bookkeeping, but it […]

Steve Jobs finally gave some of his most avid customers what they were clamoring for when he announced in mid-October that Apple would make its iPhone and iPod Touch products accessible to third-party software developers. But some people want to run lots of applications on the mobile devices without waiting for the February release of […]

Jason Calacanis earned a nice payday by applying old-school standards to the new world of blogs, selling Weblogs Inc., his stable of professionally written sites (including the popular Engadget personal-tech blog) to AOL for $30 million in 2005. Now he wants to bring similar logic to the lucrative business of Web search with Mahalo (Ma-hahlow, […]

Social networking guru dana boyd stirred controversy this summer by writing about class divisions online. The Berkeley doctoral student noted that Facebook is used by kids more likely to go to college while MySpace is more popular among students expected to get a job or join the military after high school. These broad generalizations about […]

Social networking vendors aiming for the enterprise market—and there are dozens of them—create a variety of tools to express and explain relationships among employees, customers and suppliers. San Francisco-based Leverage Software uses its visually striking “People Map” (below) to show how people relate to each other and meet the business need at hand. The humanoid […]

J.P. Rangaswami, CIO at BT Services (the former British Telecom), is a pioneer of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. An early advocate of blogs and wikis while at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, he philosophizes frequently about the business uses of new Web tools at his blog, Confused of Calcutta. His approach to social […]

Informal Organizations The business value of social networking software lies less in creating relationships from whole cloth than in recognizing, analyzing and mobilizing existing relationships. “We all know there is a lot more to an organization than what you can see on an organizational chart,” says Zia Khan, a principal at consulting firm Katzenbach Partners. […]

Some companies discourage their employees from using social networks at work, fearing lost productivity and wasted time. But the nation’s fourth largest bank is getting ready to roll out one of its own. Wachovia plans to introduce its social networking service to its 110,000 workers by early 2008. Like the popular Facebook service, the network […]

No sooner had the Republican National Committee struck Internet gold than it traded the bling for lead. This was not a good sign for the GOP heading into the 2008 presidential campaign; getting the culture wrong is no way to win an election. Michael Turk, former Internet director of the RNC, describes hitting the mother […]

The nation’s fourth largest bank will roll out a social networking service for 110,000 employees over the next several months, giving workers a sophisticated knowledge-management platform that combines the user-friendly approach of the popular Facebook service with broad integration into Wachovia Corp.’s business applications. The vendor for the big project isn’t one of the many […]

David Weinberger is an Internet Age philosopher. His latest book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, May 2007), examines ways the Web is reforming our basic ideas about organizing and accessing information, concepts that have helped shape Western thought since the time of the ancient Greeks. Weinberger’s previous books […]