"It's like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites."

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I joined the new Content Wrangler Community with hopes of improving my social networking with other content management professionals. Scott Abel discusses his goals for the community on his blog.

The Content Wrangler Community is the new social network dedicated to people who value content as a business asset, worthy of being effectively managed. This is the place where technical communicators, medical and science writers, marketing pros, online community managers, document engineers, information architects, localization and translation pros, taxonomists, bloggers, documentation and training managers, and content creators of all types hang out. It’s much more than a blog. It’s a place to join your peers, to share, to collaborate, to contribute, to find the information you need.

Hopefully this community will take-off in a beneficial way as I've seen similar online communities not become any more than a "mailing list" of "friends" promoting their own agenda.

"Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones."

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As the Forrester Research analyst catalogues in a running tally, scores of vendors are now in the "white-label" social networking platform business.

Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook, such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.

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PC World recently released their list of the 15 biggest disappointments of 2007. Two of the items on that list didn't surprise me, but two other items were shocking to see on the list but in reflection absolutely true.

I wasn't surprised to see that both Apple's "Leopard" OS 10.5 (#8) and Microsoft's Windows Vista (#1) on the list. I've been talking about my disappointment on the state of the computer desktip for sometime now. I'm just glad to see others have noticed the problem so I don't look like Mr. Glum to everyone.

However, I was surprised to see two content management system related items that made the list.

"The dramatic rise of Facebook among professionals has called the question on "Enterprise 2.0" long before many people were ready or able to confront it. Some enterprises block Facebook.com on their networks. Others have embraced Facebook as their Intranet. Most others remain ignorant of the phenomenon, but probably not for long."

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"Most discussion these days of enterprise use of social networking looks at the internal perspective, e.g. how can enterprise organizations leverage the concepts of social networking to improve the ability of the organization to better collaborate. I think it’s also important that enterprises look outwardly at leveraging social networking for the benefit of their organization."

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"Social-networking sites will enlist 230 million active members by the end of the year and will keep attracting new users until at least 2009, according to an analyst report. But investors are still wary — and for good reason, as long-term growth is by no means certain."

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"Over at Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social-networking wars."

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I am a loyal reader of Andrew McAfee's articles which he posts on his Harvard Business School blog, The Impact of IT on Business and their Leaders.  Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard and spends a great deal of time on his blog discussing and defining Enterprise 2.0.

While we all talk a lot about about Web 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0, there is actually not enough formal research on the subject as many in the business and academic world would like.  The lack of concrete research and facts on Enterprise 2.0 can cause managers to be a little concerned that they're binging toys and not business tools to their worker's computer desktops.  There is enough distraction in the workplace and managers question why they would want to bring Facebook to the office?

Although a CIO, CEO, or office manager may understand what a blog and wiki does, they are not always sure what the real benefits of such applications are to their organization.  If your boss asked you why a company should formally support Web 2.0 applications, how would you answer the question?