Stories by Heather Havenstein

Digg.com Thursday found itself facing the wrath of its notoriously vocal users once again as complaints poured in about a new system for posting comments.

Like his campaign apparatus, President Elect Barack Obama's transition team is embracing what some have called a Google-enabled government by loosening copyright licensing on its Change.gov Web site and by launching a feature that allows citizens to contribute to policy discussions.

The LinkedIn business social network this week rolled out an overhauled search platform that it says will let users more easily find who they are looking for on the site.

More than half of the working Millennials polled for an Accenture study said that were either unaware of their company's IT policies or are not willing to follow them.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and the makers of Motrin have all learned the hard way that online assaults from external users on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter can damage their brands.

Some IT leaders look to new offerings that analyze data from corporate blogs, social networks.

By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.

It's becoming increasingly dangerous to post blogs in some parts of the world. Various governments continue to step up efforts to crack down on bloggers who expose public corruption and human right violations, according to a research study released earlier this month.

Corporate IT departments' will become increasingly marginalised in the delivery of business intelligence (BI) as search and collaboration tools allow individuals and business units to build their own analytic applications, according to Gartner.

While some companies are still struggling to keep employees from watching online YouTube videos in the office, others are turning to video technology to improve internal training and collaboration, and to expand external marketing programs.

Much has been made of the stereotypical characteristics of the generations that followed the Baby Boomer era. The same can be said of the latest generation, but Gartner Inc. warns marketers to define them by their online actions rather than their birth dates. In a report released this week, Gartner said that traditional marketing methods won't work with this new group of consumers.

Most speakers at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week agreed that Web 2.0 tools will make their way into the enterprise, propelled by user demand for tools that can make them more productive.

In a keynote address at the first Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle earlier this month, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, said the explosion of data produced by businesses points to the need for business intelligence (BI) tools. Such tools can help executives interpret data and make decisions that align with overarching strategic goals, he said. In an interview with Computerworld at the show, Raikes talked about the company's PerformancePoint Server 2007, which is set to ship this summer, and about Microsoft's purchase of SoftArtisans's report-authoring tool.

Digg is a Web 2.0 company that lets users post news stories, which are then "dugg" (bumped up the list of popular stories) or buried based on the reactions of other readers. The company's Digg.com Web site has been on a steady growth path since February 2005, when a story about Paris Hilton's cell phone being hacked was "dugg," resulting in traffic doubling virtually overnight. Now, the "Digg this story" logo is included with countless online news stories, and having a story or blog post "dugg" has become an online status symbol. Digg.com celebrated its 1 millionth registered user in mid-April.

Larry Sanger's answer to Wikipedia is a new online encyclopedia called Citizendium, which was launched to the public on Tuesday. Sanger, Citizendium's editor-in-chief and cofounder of Wikipedia, recently spoke to IDG publication, Computerworld U.S., about the launch and why this time around he is tweaking the "ignore all the rules philosophy" he urged upon others when building Wikipedia.