Business Week reports on “serious business uses” for online virtual worlds like Second Life.

The OED says the English language has officially hit one billion words, reports Yahoo! News.

Some 84 million Americans now have broadband according to the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Internet Penetration and Impact

Great advice for coping with information overload from Creating Passionate Users which debunks the “myth of keeping up”.

Dan Bricklin reports on Dave Winer’s decision to stop tagging because he felt so guilty when he forgot to tag something. Dan calls for a system where all contributions are appreciated – like typing the track names on a CD database once in a while. “Instead of making you feel bad for “only” doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%,” he argues.

Dave Pollard writes in his blog How to Save the World about how to create a p2p service for finding and grading experts in fields of all kinds. He lists some simple design criteria. There are already some comments which point to other activities on the web tackling the same issue: FOAF, [which stands for “Friend of a Friend”] for instance, or Xpertweb.

I attended the first day of the PPA Conference on Tuesday – my first visit for a couple of years. I have attended in the past and have found the experience a mixed one: on the one hand I was gratfied to see that the competition was preoccupied with out-moded things of no consequence (if the conference agenda was any guide); on the other, I was bored stiff most of the time.

This year was a bit different. First, the event was co-located with the FIPP B2B Conference so there was a distinctly international flavour. Second, the topics aired were the right ones. Speaker after speaker put citizen journalism, social networking, folksonomies, mobile and so on, centre stage.

There was still a paucity of hard advice on how to achieve a state of Web 2.0 grace, but still…

Dan Gillmor writes in his Center for Citizen Media blog about how the “hat tip” – or acknowledgement of another’s work – which is common etiquette in blogging, has been cited by the Financial Times as worth of adoption by the main stream media (MSM)

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.