Visible Path is a web-based software product which aims to help sales people get introductions from people they know – sort of MySpace meets Salesforce.com. It works by analysing emails etc to work out who knows whom and then charting the relationships in software tools. Well worth taking a look at the short (two minute) demo.

Clive Thompson has written an excellent piece in the New York Times on Google’s move into China and the associated issues around censorship there. Long, but well worth a read.

Worldchanging.com reports on GreenScanner, a public free web-based database of consumer opinions, good and bad, of grocery products which you can access just by entering in the UPC code.

“It’s designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices, meaning that when you’re standing in the grocery aisle fretting over whether to buy something, you can whip out your blackberry and find out on the spot. You can also add your own ratings and commentary after you’ve tried something,” says the site.

For those that doubt the thesis of Thomas Friedman’s excellent book, The World is Flat, Indian outsourcer Infosys has just posted its full year figures for 2005, reporting continued strong growth. One side effect is that it will hire 25,000(!) people in 2006, says Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani.

The Miami Herald editor Tom Fiedler delivered an edict to newsroom staff this week that from now on all staff will be expected to write equally for on and offline media. The memo is worth a read.

MIT’s Advertising Lab points out the rapid rise of advertising on user-generated media, which it says is slated to reach $50M in 2006.

Jeff Jarvis blogs in BuzzMachine about a deal which will see Reuters include blog content in times of large, general interest events such as elections.

Microsoft has launched a competitor to Google Scholar – Windows Live Academic. “We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export”, says the intro on the site.

Yahoo! has added satellite imagery to its map service, joining MSN and Google. Yahoo! is still the only one to offer live traffic information, though.