Blogging

Blogging, as of late, has been a very popular method of communication. Perhaps ironically, I'm writing about blogging while I'm blogging, in a blog that hasn't been updated in quite some time. Nonetheless, blogs can be useful and offer a way for people to share their ideas with the world. Blogs can be very beneficial to business, but only if they're done right. There are many cases where a business can ruin its reputation by having a blog and mentioning something that someone might find offensive. Simple spelling and grammatical errors can also have negative impacts on how people view the company. The debate on whether a company should be blogging is something that should probably be examines on a case-by-case basis, though I think it's something that should be very cautiously approached.

Collective Intelligence - Google

According to Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks. Google harnesses Collective Intelligence through its PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) algorithm. As the name implies, it utilizes a special system that ranks sets of hyperlinked documents based on their relevance. Basically, the greater number of links to a specific website, the higher that website gets ranked by Google. Using this algorithm, Google is able to gather information from all over the Web, thereby harnessing Collective Intelligence.

E-Commerce

Bestbuy.com is well known as being a Business-2-Consumer (B2C) company. It purchases goods from other companies (HP, Dell, Sony, etc.) and sells them to consumers through its many retail channels. However, BestBuy also has a form of Business-to-Business (B2B) called Best Buy For Business (http://www.bestbuybusiness.com) whereby they market products to small businesses. The viability of this business model is pretty evident through BestBuy's success. Leveraging both the B2C and B2B models allows Best Buy to capture more of the market.

Green IT

The idea of Green IT, or Green Computing, seems to be a bit of a misnomer due to the obvious fact that computers need electricity to run. However, when looking at the goals of Green IT, it becomes a bit more clear: reduction in the use of harmful materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote recyclability. Regarding the first item, Apple has taken steps to elimination many of the harmful materials they once used in the production of their laptops (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/) in trying to go Green. As far as reducing the amount of harmful materials that go into making these products, we as consumers don't have too much control over; but the second two items we do. Maximizing energy efficiency during a product's lifetime means not leaving your computer on when you're not using it, and might imply that you continue using your computer until it dies (though, that's not feasible in many cases). Also, promoting recylability is something that we as consumers can do. Get in the habit of recycling any items that can be recycled (aluminum cans, glass bottles, cardboard, paper, etc). Even if your community doesn't offer a recycling service, take your items to the nearest recycling facility.

Online Dating Services

There are many online dating services, each with their own pros and cons (comparison here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_dating_websites). www.plentyoffish.com is a free online dating service with 11,000,000 registered users. According to Wikipedia, it's the #1 dating site in the UK and Canada. The difference between Plenty of Fish and other sites like Match.com or eHarmony.com is that the site is completely free. This, of course, has its downsides in that a lot of people on the site may not be very serious/genuine in posting. The advantage, of course, is that the database of people to choose from is huge. The site leverages collective intelligence by allowing anyone to register as a user, and then offers the ability to search for people based on very distinct characteristics.

Web 2.0

Today, more and more businesses are leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies. CNN.com's "Newspulse" and "Popular on Facebook" features are good examples of this. These features search the web, and Facebook for things that people are posting about. The advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been a very beneficial tool for companies. Now they can search these networking sites for keywords and see what people are saying about the company or its products. Google's instant search feature is also a great example of this type of thing. As you start searching, Google provides suggested queries based on previous search habits of other users. With all of the different APIs available to programmers (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.), implementing these new features has become easier and easier for businesses.

Pervasive Networking

Evidence of pervasive networking is seen everywhere. Most of these things we take for granted and don't really recognize because we're so accustomed to them.

A popular example of this would be internet-based companies eliminating brick-and-mortar stores. Netflix is a perfect example of this. They've provided a service that allows people to order movies from anywhere with an internet connection and have them delivered in just a few days. What's more, they've now provided instant streaming of many popular movies so there's no wait. Blockbuster couldn't compete and was forced into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy because of this.

Many of these types of examples exist, where traditional physical media is no longer necessary because it's all digital and available online. Perhaps in the past it made sense to go out and rent a movie, or purchase a CD, or buy a book, because the internet wasn't fast enough or you didn't have enough space on your hard drive to store it. With the internet becoming much faster and disk storage becoming very cheap, those times have changed.

Nowadays, you can do just about everything online, even ordering groceries (http://www.schwans.com/, http://personalcheftogo.com/). Is this pervasion convenience making us lazy?