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NPR also plans to overhaul its Web site and expand the tools for sharing its programs elsewhere over the next few months. And it is working to increase the flexibility of its popular "podcasts," audio downloads that have tripled in usage over the past two years.These digital initiatives are aimed at capturing and retaining audiences _ particularly younger people who aren't habitual radio listeners but who represent the future for fundraising at NPR's member stations.

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.

Big-screen TV shoppers facing a mystifying array of models and technical jargon now can bring along a friend while shopping at CircuitCity.com. New social networking tools and ratings resources on the site enable visitors to chat with others and review magazine articles rating TVs and other electronics gear.A social media platform from Pluck Corp. also enables visitors to connect online with company product specialists for advice on tricky purchases, such as high-definition TVs, digital cameras and personal computers.

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

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.

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?"