ReadWriteWeb

Sometimes, it feels like terms we thought had some meaning really don't apply as much anymore.

Take the term "social media," as an example.

It's like every SEO marketer decided that "social media," was the ticket to a sweet consulting gig. Just look at Twitter. You find a lot of social media experts with tens of thousands of followers. Kind of feels like you are looking down a street filled with hucksters.

Almost three years ago, Lee and Sachi LeFever created their first video to explain RSS.

They called the video RSS in Plain English. They used paper cut outs to explain the XML format. It became an instant hit. Tens of thousands of people watched it. Today their company, Common Craft, make all sorts of custom videos. They've built a business around explaining concepts.

Their latest video explains cloud computing.

Hewlett-Packard will acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion to compete more effectively against Cisco Systems in the competitive computer networking market.

The deal, announced this afternoon, appears on the surface to help HP gain a position in China. This is where the action is in the computer networking market and a main reason for the acquisition. But below the surface is a story about 3Com's falling position in the Chinese market and the rise of Huawei Technologies, a player that everyone is watching, including Cisco, which considers the Chinese company its biggest rival.

Etelos is adopting OpenID and Single Sign On(SSO) for its partners that sell business applications. The service will provide a single point of user authentication for business applications distributed through Etelos marketplaces.

OpenID will primarily serve small business customers who use business applications from Etelos partners. OpenID will provide small businesses with an identity solution that gives them easier access to the applications they use. Etelos develops and operates private-labeled marketplaces for Web-based business applications such as Eventbrite and Box.net.

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

In their demo video, indicee refers to "accounting's ERP black box," a not so subtle remark about the challenges facing the average business user when trying to draw knowledge from a traditional enterprise technology such as ERP software.

indicee is one of a growing number of companies that has developed methods for providing a layer of usability to existing enterprise technologies to draw intelligence. indicee uses the power of the cloud to allow the business user to do their own data mining and subsequent collaboration.

A growing debate in Enterprise 2.0 circles focuses on what value new technologies have for people who do back office functions. Questions persist about how Enterprise 2.0 technologies are built into the processes of every day work and what upside they really have.

In that regard, it's interesting to note the partnership announced today between NetSuite and InsideView to bring in real-time information from across the social Web into such departments as accounts payable and human resources. The partnership will bring InsideView's insights from across social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Blog Search into NetSuite's CRM and ERP offerings which will help to create what it calls a'Social ERP' system.

Google has confirmed news today that bot herders used Google App Engine to feed commands to networks of infected computers. According to Arbor Networks, the bot herd was discovered over the weekend. After being notified of the attack, Google quickly shut down the infected app engine.

Also on Monday, the Koobface botnet was attacking Google Reader to send malicious links through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

The breach is another sign that black hatters are taking a much keener interest in the cloud infrastructure for making attacks. And even Google is at risk.

You have to give a company credit that takes a fun idea and turns it into a way to promote their product. It's even better when the product integrates real-time features and a clean user interface to provide an affordable service that has a certain personal touch.

Opscotch is a help center service with a number of features that gives the support person real-time information to help connect with their end customers.

In Google Docs, you can collaborate with other people when you are working online. Making edits to a document while offline can be an issue as the syncing capabilities get a bit tricky when you reconnect.

The DocVerse team knows the challenges of working on deeply collaborative technologies. The founders came from Microsoft where they worked on Sharepoint and SQL.