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A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn't counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.

The world's supply of hard disk drives has fallen dramatically after devastating floods in Thailand killed over 800 people, and brought parts of the country's economy to a standstill. But while flood waters recede slowly, they are still receding. The country's energy ministry today projected a spike in energy demand, as its industry will need more energy than normal to regain its healthy growth rate from before November.

Western Digital is already back in production in Bang Pa-In, once the summer palace of Thailand's kings. But until the country's industry is completely back on its feet, the price of hard drives worldwide may remain unseasonably high. Amazon price tracking data for a 2 TB WD Caviar SATA III drive that sold for as low as $134.99 last September, sells for $210.88 today after peaking at $269.99 around Black Friday.

If you are a fan of Myers-Briggs, the psychological testing that is commonly used by many employers, then you'll like this infographic that looks at the entire Googleplex and segments them into the 16 different categories. I was heartened to see that my type, ISTJ, is in the majority. Not surprising.

In my post over the weekend about how you don't need a diploma to code, I was thinking about the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming that was written by former Stanford CS prof Donald Knuth. Knuth tomorrow turns 74 and it is worth taking a look at various things that you can find online as a means of celebrating his rich and varied life.

Many of ReadWriteWeb’s readers are old hands at Twitter, but the service gets thousands of new users every day. That includes a lot of folks who suddenly need to use Twitter as part of their job. If you’re just being introduced to the joys of Twitter (or introducing it to another user), here’s a short and friendly primer on what you need to know about using the site.

After posting “10 Tips on Using Twitter Wisely” in December, I had a few notes from folks who said (basically) “thanks for the tips, but I didn’t know all the jargon.”

In September 2010, the U.S. Senate debated the latest draft of a bill for combatting online piracy. You may think you've heard of this bill, but there's a good chance you haven't. It was called COICA. It had a provision that seemed strange, as though it belonged to another era.

It called for the creation of some type of site or service that would publish a list of Web sites suspected of trafficking in illicit or counterfeit intellectual property. The hope was that someone might write a plug-in or a browser patch that would act the same way anti-porn filters work, by denying users access. The concept was denounced as a kind of blacklist.

A spokesperson for European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon from Brussels that the Commission has yet to come to a decision over whether to issue a Statement of Objections to Google, specifically with respect to an official investigation into whether the company weights search results - especially searches for commercial products - against certain sites, including online retailers.

The confirmation comes after a Bloomberg News report this morning appeared to indicate the EC had yet to reach a decision about an investigation concerning whether Google makes arbitrary choices with regard to which sites receive higher-ordered results in Google News. As Comm. Almunia's spokesperson tells RWW, his statement was actually in response to something else entirely: specifically, a question submitted by another commissioner into whether, over a two-year period, the Commission has obtained evidence showing Google actively demotes specific retailers.

If you are using a spreadsheet to track your data center equipment inventory, then take a moment and read this post. You might want to consider using something else that can actually track your assets. From where I sit, many IT managers grossly underestimate the efforts in this process.

Imagine your staff is ordering equipment for your data center and it's going right to the storeroom, not just without being deployed, but also without being inventoried. Then it sits there, depreciating in value and collecting dust. This is just one of the horror stories I've heard in the field. The company this happened to ultimately discovered that, in just a six week period, it had accumulated more than $700,000 in depreciation costs for assets that were not being used.

The segment of the media delivery industry that may yet take off for consumers consists of programming and services that are delivered to newer HDTVs "over-the-top" (OTT) - meaning, outside of the cable or satellite provider's pipeline. Naturally, the Internet is the delivery medium here. In prior years, analysts have wondered how (or whether) traditional programming from multi-service operators (MSOs) like Comcast would compete.

The answer we may get from CES 2012 is that it won't have to. Semiconductor maker Broadcom is set to demonstrate a new class of system-on-a-chip (SoC) components that could be integrated into set-top boxes (STBs). This new class, numbered BCM72xx, would deliver OTT services alongside cable channels, in a format that would enable MSOs to utilize Android as the operating system, and Sling Media as the streaming provider for wireless devices. It could be the formula behind the phrase, "Goodbye, TiVo."

A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks' need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks - by implication, Facebook - would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

"Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers' financial services strategies," reads Weiss' conclusions, "and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users."