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Quamut is the latest brand to capitalize on what company executives said is a growing disinclination among Web users for amateur how-to advice. Whether that distaste can support a departure from Barnes & Noble’s core business is a question investors will be considering.

Quamut differentiates itself from the long list of how-to sites like eHow, HowStuffWorks.com and, to a lesser degree, About.com (which is owned by The New York Times Company), with a somewhat novel twist: selling downloadable documents of its otherwise free conten

This is far from the first online publishing initiative for Barnes & Noble, Mr. Weiss said. Among other efforts, the company in 2001 bought SparkNotes, an online study guide series, and helped oversee the expansion of that business into a wide range of topics. It also began printing and selling the guides in its stores

The control of costs had been its greatest strength. But it was now the greatest weakness. The company had spent so many years trying to reduce expenses that this imperative was hardwired into its practices, processes, and organizational design. When executives tried to shift gears, to expand into new markets and introduce new products, those old ways of doing business also had to change.

Meanwhile, consumers were growing increasingly sophisticated. They wanted more information about Amberville’s products. So did institutional customers, such as schools and restaurant chains. Some Amberville marketers saw the opportunity to build Web sites and use other online channels to connect directly with consumers. But these efforts faltered amid the sheer complexity of multiple product categories. And their failure led many people in the company to conclude that even the business units that were closest to Amberville customers had lost their market focus and speed.

The two poles of the debate are apparent in the world of microblogging, where people use the Web or their cellphones to blast short updates on their activities to a group of virtual followers. Twitter, a start-up company in San Francisco that has become a household name, is the leading microblogging outfit. At least three million people have tried its free service, according to TwitDir, a directory service. But Twitter has absolutely no revenue — not even ads.

Twitter has drawn much attention in the tech world since the service began in 2006. When a user is logged in through the Web or a cellphone, it asks one simple question, “What are you doing?” Users answer in 140 characters or less. While some of these “tweets” have the profundity of haiku, most are mundane, like “Sure is pretty out tonight” or “My eyes itch. I am very aggravated.”

Yammer tweaks the question, asking, “What are you working on?” The goal, said its chief executive, David Sacks, is to make offices more productive. People on Yammer update colleagues on company events or ask work-related questions without clogging e-mail boxes with mass mailings.

As usual, IBM is absolutely right in its observations, but eons late to the dance in Internet 2.0 terms. At this point, IBM is telling us that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around. And IBM will never catch up. I've said this before. All IBM will ever do is bolt collaboration tools onto their preexisting application suites--a clunky approach for which absolutely no one will have patience. What surprises me about Swisher and Perez is that they seem to buy into the idea that enterprise users will wait for the grumpy IT departments. Swisher writes: Still security and scaling issues remain paramount and startups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM and Microsoft. Puleease! Big copycats like IBM and Microsoft have been pouring out the same old blather about security and scaling while line-of-business chiefs are turning to their young hires and saying, "hey, how much is of those open source wiki things going to run me, and how fast can we set it up?"

The Wall Street Journal is hoping to gain readers by renovating its Web site to include certain features from social networking sites. In it’s first major revision since 2002, WSJ.com’s new “Journal Community” will allow paid subscribers to create their own profile page with their interests, hobbies and photos.

The site will also be changed so that nonpaying visitors can navigate and identify free, ad-supported content.

Members of the Journal community will be able to comment on stories, create discussion groups and ask for business advice.

Crowdsourcing is a concept that encourages organizations to access ideas and expertise from an untapped knowledge base that often includes customers. The survey was conducted among MENG members in December of 2007 in order to gauge the opinions and experiences of its members regarding this topic. The majority of the members who responded to the survey were Chief Marketing Officers and VPs of Marketing.

Of particular interest is the way that these marketing executives view the effectiveness of crowdsourcing relative to internal R&D staffs for new product and service development. Sixty-two percent of executives surveyed rated crowdsourcing and consumer collaboration as an effective or highly effective approach to new product and service development, while only 11 percent more rated an internal R&D staff this way. This is a stunning development in the way executives consider approaching R&D. Additionally, 63 percent rated employee ideas and contributions as effective or highly effective, while 60 percent did the same for sourcing ideas from functional experts accessible from business and knowledge networks. Rated lowest was the use of traditional consulting and professional services firms (54 percent).

This blurring of business and consumer focused applications is called “consumerization” by technology research firms such as Gartner and executives at companies such as Microsoft. Consumerization posits that consumer technologies — including social networking tools, user generated content and wikis (web-based software that allows people to create content collaboratively) — are being increasingly adopted by corporate America

Experts at Wharton agree that consumer technology has been going corporate in recent years. Underlying this emerging trend are young and tech-savvy workers — called “digital natives”

conundrum to the traditional corporate technology department. Previously, companies dictated what software and hardware were used for work purposes. Today, choosing technology is becoming increasingly democratic as workers get more of a say

We don't officially sanction social networking on the job, but we don't really care as long as people are getting their jobs done -- 71 votes, 34.8% My organization bans it, blocking access to IM and sites such as Facebook -- 51 votes, 25% Social media is integral to our business model -- 32 votes, 15.7% We encourage our staff to use social nets to build their professional networks -- 31 votes, 15.2% We discourage it. It's too much of a time waster and a legal risk -- 19 votes, 9.3