There’s a good overview today of the available social media monitoring tools on ReadWriteWeb:

If it’s all about “joining the conversation,” one of the biggest challenges for organizations jumping into social media is finding and prioritizing all the conversations available.

The question “Which social media monitoring tool is best?” is interesting.  More interesting questions include “Who should be using these tools?” and “What are the best practices for using these tools?”

Our work with start-up technology companies over the years has suggested to us that these kinds of companies simply won’t invest the time and discipline to put social media monitoring tools to their best use: important conversations will be missed, and opportunities for constructive participation will be lost.  Moreover, these companies likely will not have a thoroughly considered social media engagement model.

Thus, we think, these tools are for PR agencies to use on behalf of their clients, as an integrated part of an overall outbound communications strategy.  And, if that’s the case, these tools need to provide far richer operations, administration, and management capabilities: the tools need to reflect the realities of professional PR workflow, including timekeeping, responsibility tracking, and reporting.

Via The Future of Social Media Monitoring, Marshall Kirkpatrick

The NYT has an interesting article this morning about celebrities and others who hire assistants to tweet for them.

[S]omeone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.

Ghost tweeting is not currently a part of Prequent’s EQ service, and I’m not sure I endorse the idea, even for companies.  (Comments I’ve read on the article often distinguished between individuals and companies, arguing that it is somehow more acceptable for companies to hire third-party tweeters.)

Via http://tinyurl.com/cged6h

Critical thinker George Rebane has an insightful post about the fact that the Stimulus Package “isn’t denominated in real money.”  He goes on to propose, in lieu of a more-radical return to asset-backed currency, a business practice to simulate the same:

I propose that we start writing into our contracts, loan agreements, purchase agreements, etc. that the accounts will be cleared in dollar amounts based on the spot price of, say, gold (or another suitable commodity) on the date the account is due.

This is the second time in a week that smart people I know have been discussing alternative currencies….

via Rebane’s Ruminations

The New York Times announced today the release of an article search API that will make the paper’s 2.8 million articles written since 1981 searchable across 35 fields in each article.  Looking forward to using the great tools that will leverage this API…

via http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/announcing-the-article-search-api/

The New York Times has a very cool animated Twitter cloud that shows what folks around the nation were tweeting during the Super Bowl:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/02/sports/20090202_superbowl_twitter.html

Very nice article by Ravit Lichtenberg on ReadWriteWeb.

Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself.

via 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009 – ReadWriteWeb.

Technologies that enable collaboration — in every corner of the enterprise — have made frequent appearances in pundits’ “Top Ten” lists for 2009.  Here’s another example, from industry analysts EMA:

The politics of collaboration will reach well beyond finger pointing to higher levels of automated diagnostics, process automation and shared access to information that will in turn reduce IT operational costs.

via 12 Hot IT Management Trends to Watch For 2009

Amber Naslund, Director of Community for Radian6, has started lots of discussion with her post on the “Social Media Stalemate”:

Why do companies trust their employees to answer a phone, but not to blog or get on Twitter? … Once again, we’re at this place of what I’m affectionately calling the Social Media Stalemate.

Addressing this challenge is critically important for companies of all kinds — if we believe that conversations are markets, then it’s obvious that companies can’t ignore their markets.

Prescription for reluctant companies?  Go slowly.  Listen first.  Engage without selling.

via The Social Media Stalemate | Altitude Branding.

Once again, industry watchers are predicting a confluence of technologies in the Prequent, Inc. wheelhouse.

SOA will start to link itself more and more with cloud computing.

via Predictions for 2009 – Governing the Infrastructure..

Prequent, Inc. recently moved its email hosting to Google Apps, in part to benefit from GMail’s IMAP setup and easy iPhone integration.  Resultingly, we’ve inherited all of GMail’s benefits (great spam filtering) and curses (threaded conversations).  Even threading proponents concede that the threading “feature” is widely disparaged:

That said, I realize my opinion isn’t the most popular. Yahoo and AOL Mail are more popular than Gmail and each employs the “old” display style, suggesting that users prefer that over Gmail’s style.

via What Gmail does better than its competitors | Webware – CNET.