I have to say that Tag Clouds have got to be one of the neatest developments to have emerged from Web 2.0.

Today I used a Creative Commons site TagCrowds to create a Tag Cloud of just inaugurated New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s State of the State Address.

I’m actually a huge fan of Spitzer and see potentially great things to come from his administration if he tackles the problems of New York the way he tackled the problems of Wall Street and corrupt companies. I remember years ago before he was known at all I heard him give the keynote speech before an audience of investment house professionals and I was shocked to hear him lecture the group on their ethics–who was this person I wondered–what chutzpah he has as an invited speaker to go after his audience–and then came the lawsuits…

I’m going to be experimenting and thinking a bit about the use of TagClouds for business researchers–if you have tried anything or have thoughts on it–please speak up.

Also–Happy New Year!

Every month I do a “Best of the Business Web” free email newsletter that describes what I feel are the five best business research oriented sites I’ve come across during the month.

This month I visited one of the best free market intelligence sites I’ve seen in a long time. It’s called Metrics 2.0, and it is just packed with timely, substantive hard market research data culled from top notch authoritative news, trade, and research sources. You can find everything from market data on pharmaceutical sales, to trends in consumer generated media usage, the latest PC shipment data and a whole lot more. You can either browse the site by category, or conduct a keyword search. There is also an option to subscribe via RSS.

The site is a bit mysterious as there is no information on its founder or who is behind it, but I’m in the process of tracking that information down for the next Best Business Web edition. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Metrics 2.0 yourself!

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A bit of breaking news for the library and research communities:

Cambridge Information Group Announces Agreement to Acquire ProQuest Information and Learning–read all about it in the press release here

Cambridge Information Group owns Bowker, but ProQuest will become part of CSA, which performs abstracting and indexing in natural sciences, social sciences, arts & humanities and technology.

Martin Kahn, the former chairman of OneSource Information Services, Inc will be CEO and Matt Dunie, who is now the president of CSA, will serve as president of the new company, which will maintain its current two locations.

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If you haven’t yet, be sure to read through this past Sunday’s cover story from the NY Times Magazine, called “Open Source Spying: could wikis and blogs prevent a terrorist attack?” It’s a very thoughtful, well written, and clear report on the attempt to introduce social networking technologies like these to the intelligence community as a way to identify meaningful patterns and keep up with rapidly emerging threats. It’s interesting too to be reading interviews with top NSA and CIA officials along with familiar names like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger.

The article has implications for business research and knowledge management as well: if you’re already well versed in social software and wisdom of crowd approaches to identifying useful knowledge, you won’t necessarily learn anything new technically here. However, the article does raise some very intriguing challenges regarding organizational issues:

1. how to bridge the inherent tension between the desire for open information and sharing and the desire of an institution (here the intelligence communities) to keep information private;
2. how to build a critical mass so that people contribute to blogs and wikis so they prosper; and
3. how to make sure that employees are rewarded and given proper recognition for contributing to blogs and wikis.

Any business considering introducing internal blogs and wikis as a form of knowledge management and information collection/analysis mechanism will need to address these same concerns, pointed out so well here in this piece by Times’ writer Clive Thompson.

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