Businesses are using collective intelligence to speed up company growth, improve efficiency, enhance products and services, and strengthen the employee environment, according to new research from IBM.

Here are three of the developing topics that combine social with learning - and should be worth integrating in your business during this year.

The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.

We live in a connected society, where devices and data are being pulled together to profoundly change business, our personal lives, society and even nations. In this introduction to this PublicTechnology.net Agenda, I want to try to outline, in non-technical terms, some of the benefits to the sector (and ultimately the taxpayer) of extracting and linking data.

We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective. Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.

2011 was the year of information. It seeped into our consciousness over the year, this idea that the volume of information now available in the world truly was overwhelming. 2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It's not that we won't use the Internet, it's not that Google will disappear - of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement amongst connected people. It's also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

Gamification is the latest buzzword on the street. It ranked a keynote panel session at Enterprise 2.0 in November and it was one of two main topics discussed at the recent Institute for Social, Search and Mobile Marketing (ISSMM) K1 Executive Roundtable.  

Any aspect of your daily life - most importantly your projects, business, or career - can be helped by critical thinking. You just need to practice it constantly. What's Critical Thinking? Your brain thinks diversely. It can be affected by various factors too, plus the problem of relationships, for example, exactly what the heart says usually overwhelms exactly what the mind suggests.

Critical thinking clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions.

Over the past five years we've been told repeatedly that business needs more collaboration.  Over the past 18 months we've rediscovered the value of competition. Gamification is the ungainly name for its re-emergence in the social sphere. What does it mean for how we view marketing and HR strategy?

With the unprecedented levels of published information, it is very difficult for Internet users to stay up to date on what matters to them. This situation is especially dramatic for information professionals that must remain aware of new happenings in order to stay ahead of the curve. Content curation is the process of picking the most relevant and valuable content for a specific audience. There is an important human component to content discovery and curation because only users can fully understand the context of the information they are working with. Technology can support content curation by computing large volumes of information on behalf of the user by helping to discover new pieces of Web information.

Reading is changing. And arguably, even more than e-readers, tablets, or "readers' tablets," smartphones are changing it.

Visualized content is popping up all over the web lately, and it's no surprise. Visual content is pleasing to the eye, stimulating, entertaining, and much more interesting than plain old text. Haven't you noticed how much more frequently infographics seem to be making their way onto blogs and websites lately? There's a very reasonable explanation: people love visual content.

Here are the five social media trends I think marketers need to be aware of in the next year as we grow and change along with technology and consumer demand.

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it's often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

Some of the key findings from the 2011 State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies are: As of the date of this article, there are 1010 tools in the Sweet Tools listing, the first it has passed 1000 total tools A total of 158 new tools have been added to the listing in the last six months, an increase of 17% 75 tools have been abandoned or retired, the most removed at any period over the past five years A further 6%, or 55 tools, have been updated since the last listing Though open source has always been an important component of the listing, it now constitutes more than 80% of all listings; with dual licenses, open source availability is about 83%. Online systems contribute another 9% Key application areas for growth have been in SPARQL, ontology-related areas and linked data Java continues to dominate as the most important language.

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?