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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

And for more commercial sites and social networking platforms, delivery of professional content, editing of user generated content and responding to the needs of the users generally involves the employment of staff for those roles. Further, the ongoing bug fixing and continuing development of functional components that improve the accessibility and accuracy of information presented is an ongoing cost - and a large one.

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).

A Picture Hunt Instead of looking for objects, you can have teams take pictures. Give one member of each group a camera (if you are hosting a party for kids, have one adult in each group carry a camera). Then send them out to find certain landmarks in the neighborhood. Have them take pictures of each item on the list.

Hunting for Information Rather than having teams look for objects, you can ask them to collect information. Teams can find dates on certain buildings, count the number of houses on a certain block, gather facts from historic landmarks, etc. To do this, map out a route that the teams will take. This is an inexpensive way for teams to collect information, learn and have fun at the same time.

Hunting for Sound Rather than looking for objects, have teams carry a tape recorder. Give them a list of different sounds to listen to. When they find the sound, they record it. Certain sounds might include the ringing of a bell, the ticking of a clock, a radio station jingle, etc. Set a certain time frame and see how many sounds teams can find in the allotted time.

Let’s define social networking for those not familiar with it. “Social networking” is a technology-based means of communication utilizing the power and variety of the Internet to provide an infinite variety of tools and offerings

People can leverage these sites to create a sense of presence that even traditional marketing experts can appreciate: brand awareness, lead generation, information sharing and so on. And the real keys to success are the same as in traditional marketing: frequency, relevancy and cross-marketing, to name a few.

Critics claim that social networking is merely a gimmick. In reality, while it is true that social networking alone will not likely produce substantial leads in the absence of other critical methodologies, it IS true that combined with other methods, and when used regularly, social networking can, and has, produced excellent results.

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.

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

As one anxious CEO told his staff at a meeting last Thursday: “The future of the way people consume information, the way people socialise and connect, is going to change a lot more in the next ten years even than in the last ten. How you find information, how you consume it, how you share it and connect with your friends... dramatic changes.” That agitated CEO, by the way, was Steve Ballmer, of Microsoft, which to date has thrown a $10 billion investment at its internet operations without turning a profit. True, his firm's own record on monopolistic abuse of power is pretty colourful, and its cash pile of an estimated $40 billion hardly makes it a minnow.

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?"

Learning to talk out rather than act out our emotions is what separates human beings from the animal kingdom. It is a gift of the prefrontal cortex, that thinking part of our brain that was added, late in our evolution, to our "animal" or "reptilian" brain. The cortex allows us to think, hope and dream....to feel our most primitive feelings and translate them into words, music, poetry or plays. It's part of our power of reasoning.

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.

Silverpop's new Share-to-Social feature allows marketers to quickly turn emails into socially-enabled viral messages. With a click, marketers can place links within an email allowing recipients to easily post the message to their profile page on Facebook or MySpace, where friends can see the message, make comments and even post the email on their own profile pages.

One of our emails was posted on 50 different social network profile pages. That kind of customer endorsement turns our email 'push' marketing into a powerful 'pull' campaign."

And Silverpop's enhanced reporting capabilities enable marketers to identify which of their email messages have gone viral, allowing them to track message activity at a granular level and target future messages based on that information.