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Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time.\n\nEven so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time. Even so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

If you're thinking of skipping the next expensive Microsoft Office upgrade, you can begin preparing today for the move to a free Office-like suite or Web service.

The DoNotPay artificial intelligence service, created by a 19-year-old student, is called the "world's first robot lawyer" and uses a step-by-step chat-like system that asks a series of questions to find out the details of the issued ticket and then highlight areas where you can appeal the fine.

"Thinking is hard - yet barely a waking moment passes when we're not labouring away at it. A few of us may be natural geniuses, able to work through the toughest tangles in an instant; others, blessed with reserves of willpower, stay the course in the dogged pursuit of truth. Then there's the rest of us. Not prodigies and a little bit lazy, but still aspiring to understand the world and our place in it. What can we do? In Intuition Pumps, Daniel Dennett, one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers, takes us on a profound, illuminating and highly entertaining philosophical journey. He reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with new discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. In his genial style, Dennett guides readers around the pitfalls in arguments, and reveals easier ways to better understand the world around us and our place in it. An enlightening and practical store of knowledge, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking will teach you to think truly independently and creatively."

"Webex offer a number of interesteing free events using webex technology - working linking into..."

" KRT elicitation questions, feel free to update"

" Creative Commons provide free tools that let anyone easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry."

Many books in the public domain may be freely accessed here.

Stephen Wolfram and his team have created an astonishingly powerful collection of information. As he puts it on the Wolfram blog, the dream is to make this "computable knowledge" available to immediately enhance any program that's connected to the service. Today's announcement is a big step forward to opening it up to far more developers, but it will need much more computer-readable results before it will really fulfill that promise. Do you agree, or am I misunderstanding the power of the API as it is right now? Are there existing applications beyond the handful that Wolfram highlight?

Knowledge Harvesting . Free magazine reprint (no need to register) The need for knowledge retention and harvesting is a global issue. All around the world, wise and knowledgeable people are retiring or leaving, and their knowledge, often crucial to the success of the organisation, is leaving with them. This knowledge need not be lost.

Public collaboration, network effects, crowdsourcing - call it what you will, the read/write web is based largely on projects where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts. Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff, but can businesses make effective use of this paradigm?

One of the hottest tools in the market right now: Tableau. You can download Tableau Public for free at: https://public.tableau.com/s/

"Chatbots and intelligent virtual agents: a framework for humans and machine..."