Breaking news! Nearly four years after I became a freelancer, my professional activities take a bend. In fact, I am no longer a freelancer but head of b-spirit Sàrl, a formal company. Don’t rush to read the Business Names Index, you’ll have to wait a few more days to see the update.

From the outside, it may look like an ordinary change whereas in fact, it is a very important step forward. Actually, it was my objective since day 1, I was just waiting for the right time.

New support

To help me on various customer projects and to develop the activities of b-spirit, I have the pleasure to announce that Mathieu Favez just joined the company. The members of the Swiss Web 2.0 community probably know Mathieu already, the creator of Romanding, a Swiss Digg-like. His knowledge of the web 2.0 is a great asset and will help b-spirit to reach more ambitious objectives.

New model

Beyond the legal changes, the business model is wider and richer: we not only cover corporate blogging, we are now active in other areas such as business watch, knowledge management, social media and online strategy in general. In all these areas, b-spirit provides consulting, products and services.

New partner

Six Apart is now among our partners and b-spirit becomes “Movable Type Solution Provider”. I am very happy about this new partnership with Six Apart, a major provider in the world of blogs and social networks. You should find here more information about Movable Type very soon. We currently look at a few other interesting partnerships.

New web site

To promote all the changes above, the web site has been completely upgraded and updated thanks to Mathieu. Please take a tour, you can even leave video comments! As from now, we’ll dedicate more time to the blog, including articles, videos, links, analysis, etc.

New feeds

Those who were subscribed to the old feed (and those who would like to subscribe) must update their news readers as follows:

• Posts in French: http://feeds.feedburner.com/b-spirit_fr
• Posts in English: http://feeds.feedburner.com/b-spirit_en
• Posts in French + in English: http://feeds.feedburner.com/b-spirit

You can also subscribe to a combination of our posts + links on del.icio.us + our Twitter timeline sur via the home page.

Next

There are more new things to come (the b-spirit calendar is full). Stay tuned!

After its 17 billion dollar acquisition of Reuters, Thomson selected WordPress for their website and decided to put their day 1 announcement site on WordPress.com VIP.

“The newly formed Thomson Reuters Corp made its highly anticipated debut this past Thursday. Thomson Reuters is now the largest business focused media company in the world with 50,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $12.5 billion.

To communicate to various groups about the new combined entity, Thomson Reuters selected WordPress.com VIP to host this high-traffic and high-profile site.”

Via Ma.tt.

Radar Networks has launched its new service called Twine in beta invitation only. Twine is born a few months ago under the lead of Nova Spivack, the founder of the Radar Networks company and a semantic web evangelist.

But what is Twine? Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine alone, with friends, groups and communities, or even in your company.

• Organize: Twine is a central repository where you can keep information about your interests. As you add information to Twine, it is automatically tagged so that you and others can find it more easily. You are able to add items by bookmarking web content, posting by email and contributing directly in Twine.
• Share: Connect with individuals and groups, gather and share content, and engage in discussions around your interests. By connecting with other members of Twine you can share information with each other. Connecting with others lets Twine know what shared interests each user has so Twine can offer better recommendations. Twine is a service that helps you start and join interest networks called twines. Instead of using old-fashioned groupware, twines are a smarter way to collaborate and share knowledge with a collaborative team.
• Discover: Twine connects you with new people, content and products that match your interests, and helps other people discover you and your contributions. Items in Twine can be searched, filtered and sorted in order to help you find the exact item you are looking for. You can also explore Twine by looking at the activity of twines, people and items by their activity in Twine. As you use Twine, it learns about your interests and will recommend people, twines and items for you.

Powered by a semantic understanding engine, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about your interests and makes you recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it gets to know you and the more useful it becomes.

The Semantic Web creates a web of data that allows computers to find, extract, share, re-use information, and potentially even reason with it. Semantic data itself contains “meta-information” so that other services are able to make sense of it. For example, the Semantic Web uses markup not only to indicate how something should be rendered, but also to express content (e.g. the authorship, title, and date of an article). The Semantic Web is the next step in the evolution of the Internet. But making this technology meaningful and accessible to everyday users is where Twine comes in. And while users certainly don’t need to understand the Semantic Web in order to appreciate Twine, several technologies are hard at work behind the scenes of its simple user interface.

Collaborators at b-spirit have some available invitations to give…those interested in getting an invitation to test Twine in beta can leave a comment on this post. Obviously invitations will be managed as first requested first served…

Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways.

“Under [the] radically transparent ‘open notebook’ approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication… The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.”

Via Slashdot.

Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will surge over the next 5 years, growing 43% each year to reach $4.6 bln globally by 2013, according to Forrester Research. 56% of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008.

Via ZDNet and BBC.

Everybody heard about the partnership that Google and Salesforce.com announced about a week ago. Google’s set of online productivity applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc, are now fully integrated in Salesforce.com. Everything is free unless a company needs the premier edition including added security and management features for $5/user/month. By summer, Salesforce.com will be reselling the premier edition for $10/user/month including telephone support.

Not familiar with Google Apps or Salesforce? Don’t worry if you don’t yet understand how this all works. They asked Commoncraft to create and publish a new animation to make everything clear. Who’s better than Commoncraft to explain a web technology with a set of basic drawings, by using simple words and in less than three minutes? Beyond the Google-Salesforce deal, the animation turns out to be an excellent promotion of online collaboration tools and techniques in a corporate environment also known as “office 2.0″.

Watch the result below.

Via Webilus.

1. Define your objective
2. Set the expectation on Day 1
3. Choose the attendee list with purpose
4. Learn the group in advance
5. Find a good facilitator
6. Design the event
7. Invite colleagues, then train them on expectations
8. Social events rule the day
9. Create a method of follow-up

Read more at Community Guy…

“The hardest part of adapting your marketing thinking is that the predominant pattern in Web 2.0 is sharing control to create value. You see it in communities like Wikipedia or YouTube. You see it in business models like Open Source. You see it when the conversations around your brand happen without you. But there is no buy vs. build equation for deciding to share control. The decision to put intellectual property into the commons does not yet have tools to forecast return.

We think we have marketing down to a science. And we use the language of war — campaigns that divide targets for capture. Lead generation often comes with guarantees. The ROI of a campaign is supposedly known in advance.”

Read more on Ross Mayfield’s Weblog…

One thing that holds many small businesses back from business blogging is the fear that they will give away valuable proprietary knowledge and therefore harm their business.

The truth is, most of the time, sharing knowledge on a business blog does not harm business. In fact, the general information that you share on your blog is already probably already available online.

If your customers and potential customers don’t get the information from you, then where will they get it. Answer: probably from your competitor.

Read more at Business and Blogging…

One of the things that has been a little bothersome in the last year or two and has been the lack of understanding between the difference between two terms, collaborative and collective. The two terms are rather similar in definition (in some dictionaries they are nearly identical), but the differences between the two terms have a huge difference when it comes to value in social software. This difference and value is often overlooked or missed by those crafting these tools and services.

Read more at Personal InfoCloud…