KPMG started a three-part series on the corporate use of social networking and collaborative software tools. You can listen to their podcast and read the text of the podcast.

Generation Y (broadly, today’s 15-30 year olds) has adopted Web 2.0 tools - social networking, blogging, and wikis - with gusto. Will corporate adopters take them into the workplace, and will that change the way we work?

Can Web 2.0 technologies - largely applied only in a social sphere - be used to make business more efficient and effective? Evidence among the growing number of businesses converting to “Enterprise 2.0″ seems encouraging.

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Via Reply to All.

Sales 2.0 means integrating the power of Web 2.0 technologies with proven sales techniques to increase sales velocity and volume. The first Sales 2.0 Conference will demonstrate how combining next-generation Web technologies such as web conferencing, social networking, prospect databases, and web site monitoring services with innovative sales processes can dramatically accelerate the sales cycle.

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103 marketing professionals from around the globe, all of whom blog, have collaborated to create an e-book, profits of which will go towards helping the Variety children’s charity.

Initiated by Gavin Heaton from Sydney, they came up with the topic - “The Age of Conversation” - and charity after a three email exchange, and then invited other marketing professionals to commit to write essays about conversation.

Within seven days, 103 had committed.

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60 percent of European online consumers are taking part in Social Computing activities such as reading or writing blogs, listening to podcasts, setting up RSS feeds, reading and writing online customer reviews, or taking part in social networking sites, according to a new report by Forrester Research, Inc. However, the survey of more than 7,000 online consumers across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden found that consumers in those countries are adopting Social Computing at differing rates. The result is a unique Social Computing profile for each nation.

“To profit from a diverse social media scene, interactive marketers should use country profiles as guidelines to fix social media priorities. Interactive marketers devising their European Social Computing strategies can capitalize on these differences by concentrating specific Social Computing activities in those countries where consumers practice them the most.” Mary Beth Kemp, Forrester Research senior analyst

The report “Europeans Have Adopted Social Computing Differently” is currently available to Forrester clients and can also be purchased.

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Tthe space agency wants to partner with Web 2.0 companies like Twitter and save itself from turning into a dinosaur in the Internet age. Some executives at the struggling NASA believe that if the agency can adopt Web technologies like Twitter - a social network for broadcasting thoughts online or via text message - then kids and the general public will be more connected to space exploration and inspired to learn about science.

“How can NASA become hip? For me, it’s allowing other individuals (and companies) to participate in the program.” Robert Schingler, NASA CoLab Project Manager

CoLab, NASA’s Collaborative Space Exploration Laboratory, hosted a one-day tech event called the Participatory Exploration Summit, which brought together representatives from across the space agency, as well as from Twitter, Creative Commons and game companies like Virtual Heroes and Virtue Arts.

CoLab’s sole purpose is to foster partnerships between the space program and tech entrepreneurs, and then develop novel applications and make use of NASA resources. To that end, it plans to open offices in San Francisco, and it’s already plotted virtual space in the virtual world Second Life.

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