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Oracle is launching a worldwide, cloud computing tour. It's a 50-stop show for developers and system administrators.

But is the tour really about cloud computing? It seems more like virtualization with a touch of focus on how to leverage public cloud environments from providers like Amazon Web Services.

Google Buzz is headed for the enterprise. According to the Google Enterprise blog, Google Buzz will become a part of Google Apps within the next few months.

Google Buzz applies as much to the enterprise as it does to the consumer market. The real-time application creates an extension for communication that adds a threaded context to a conversation, a critical component for an enterprise application.

We all know that young folks use the social Web for personal purposes, from keeping tabs on family members to sharing party pics with friends. And yes, as we reported more than a year ago, they even use the social Web - gasp! - while at their places of employment. But they're also using more tech for work-related tasks, including interacting with customers and vendors and forming or strengthening new and existing partnerships.

According to a 5,595-person, 13-country survey from tech consultancy Accenture, since this generation has grown up with daily doses of technology in one form or another, "They don't see bright lines between work
and personal, virtual and physical, sanctioned and prohibited. It's not, 'Would you approve this, boss?' but, 'Whatever gets the job done.'"

While end users are eager to try out Google Buzz for themselves, many of the Web's largest social properties have expressed a certain amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the search giant's move into the social space.

A Facebook rep said that the company is interested to see how Google's latest product will make the Web more social and more open, but the Facebook team has their concerns about whether Buzz's friendship model is really all that functional. After a little bit of messing around with the new product today, we can understand their point of view.

In the last few months several startups have asked me how to approach corporate blogging. Judging by the frequency of requests, Gartner was right in suggesting that corporate blogging is rising up the "slope of enlightenment" and about 2 years away from widespread mainstream adoption. The road to enlightenment has been a long one. In the past ten years we've learned that company blogs should not be press releases, sales pitches or plagiarized quotes from Dale Carnegie. You reach enlightenment when you learn to respect your readers. If you want someone to bookmark or retweet your posts, then give them a useful resource. Below are a few approaches you can take to increase the dialogue and comments on your blog.

This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they're starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.

While the rest of the world was caught up with Google Buzz, Apple was quietly granted a patent for a virtual reality App Store. The store patent encompasses details such as seasonal and time-based lighting, color schemes and a basic storefront representation. A few bloggers have already criticized the patent as a relic from SecondLife past, the store may have more use when we consider it in the context of the XBox Live marketplace.

Entrepreneurship in Europe has a problem. A lot of their talent is "crossing the pond" to increase their chances of finding early-stage funding. A lot of venture firms in Europe tend to play the safer hands that they are dealt, investing in proven companies rather than new startups looking for seed funding. Though organizations like Seedcamp are doing what they can to reverse this trend, incubators in the U.S. like TechStars are still seeing an increase of international applications, many likely from Europe.

We are in our third week here at ReadWriteCloud. One of the weekly features we do is a poll about an issue related to cloud computing or virtualization.

Last week we asked if you plan to invest in virtualization. This week we are asking: Is a private cloud just a glorified data center? You'll see the poll in the right sidebar of the main ReadWriteCloud page.

We had a pretty small sample to work with last week but the results show that virtualization is living up to its promise as one of the most important IT investments being made in the enterprise.