12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers
On Mashable, David Spark shares stories of people who have successfully harnessed the power of social media. “Growing your social network. So many are obsessed with it. It’s fun to watch our numbers grow and to get all that attention. But for those of us that rely on it for business, we must be constructive, targeted, and effective about how we approach social networking. That’s because a well built social network becomes a fantastic channel for personal and business promotions.”

Anthropology: The Art of Building a Successful Social Site
Lidija Davis discusses the failings of search engines and other Q&A sites and how a startup solved them on ReadWriteWeb. “Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month – and growing. This is the story of Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. How? Easy, according to founder Joel Spolsky; all it takes is an understanding of anthropology and a lot of determination.”

Cloud Standards: Trickier than Nailing Jell-O to a Wall
IT World’s Kevin Fogarty explains the difficulties of setting cloud standards. From an industry insider he talks to:“We’re focused on three aspects of cloud management and interoperability… First is to build on the work we’ve done on the Open Virtualization Foundation [and the associated standard, the Open Virtualization Format] and what extensions we need to have to support the cloud environment. Second is resource management and interoperability between clouds that provide infrastructure as a service. Third is security as people move from their own environments into cloud environments federated trust, inter-cloud communications, protocols and APIs for secure interoperability.”

Bandwidth Fines Bad, But Not Net Neutrality Issue
Bennett Haselton tries to keep the arguments separate on two thorny issues on Slashdot. “An ISP that blocks (or slows access to) certain websites is defrauding its users UNLESS either (a) the ISP has made its users aware of the filtering, or (b) it’s overwhelmingly clear that the filtering protects the users or improves their experience (so more experienced users would assume it is taking place anyway)…’”Make its customers aware’ means just that — make its customers aware — and not bury something in the Terms of Service.”

How Big Data Impacts Analytics
Ben Lorica on O’Reilly Radar interviews Linkedin’s Chief Scientist. Ben sets it up: “DJ shares his observations on how analytics has changed in recent years, especially as Big Data increasingly becomes common. Companies are casting a wider net, and are hiring scientists from fields not traditionally known as fertile recruiting grounds for data intelligence teams. DJ also talks about his personal journey from mathematics to e-commerce and social networks.”

Why enterprises aren’t paperless yet
Jennifer Kavur of IT World features a company making strides in reducing its use of paper that nonetheless continues to use quite a bit of it. A comment from the article:“Boxes of files are disappearing from storage rooms and warehouses, but the piles of paper stacked on desks aren’t going away… Despite these advances in the records room, our day-to-day life will still include a lot of paper. It has a lot of advantages: it’s persistent, we can stack and move it, and we can scribble on it with a pencil. It will be every difficult for digital tools to replace it.”

The Shape of Things to Come, According to… You
An interesting guest post on ReadWriteWeb on the future of the Internet. “In many regards, this is really where the next Web begins: with those people and organizations’ wants and needs, dreams and aspirations. Think of it as ‘trickle-up’ technology. If Web 2.0 is about interface, social media, and interactivity, then the next Web is beginning to appear right before our eyes as real-time, intelligent (data, search, exchange), and ubiquitous (desktop and offline, anytime access).”

The Nebulous Cloud
Ranjit Nayak of TMCNet discuss the difficulties of defining the term “cloud computing,” and proposes a workaround to the problem. “The key is to identify Cloud Computing Services, and not get bogged down by the definition and jargon. Is this really a new paradigm in computing? Are these new technologies? There is definitely a change in the business model of selling computing resources. However, the underlying technology has only evolved over time. The reliability of IP networks and the improvement in virtualization technology has enabled delivery of business services over the Internet. In the simplest sense, any business services delivered online, that one can buy on a pay as you go basis can be classified as cloud computing services.”