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iLink, a social network analytics technology from SRI International has recently been integrated into three online communities used by the military: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. The iLink technology improves the way the military community members share critical information across several different interest areas - from battlefield problem solving to supporting military families. Here, we take a look at the technology the military is using and how it can impact the future of social networking.

Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Yesterday, news broke out in Scotland about how the internet was to blame for Scotland's failing exam pass rates. According to the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC), Wikipedia, among other sources, was cited as the reason as to why the students were failing. Is this a case of the internet making us stupid? Or do students just need to learn how to use the new research tools of the web a little more appropriately?

iBreadCrumbs is a new web browser add-on designed specifically for students, researchers, professionals, or anyone who is doing research on the web. By clicking a toolbar button in your browser, you can use iBreadCrumbs as a clickstream recorder, recording the web sites you visit while researching a particular topic. Your saved research can then be shared with others through the iBreadCrumbs social network so others can continue where you left off.

Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say "wow" and reminds you that there's so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images won't show up in search engines' image searches or on Flickr (save one exception), but instead can only be accessed via the links below.

Marketing consultant and web connoisseur Noah Brier has launched a simple but fascinating project called BrandTags.net. The idea is that visitors are shown a logo, we respond with a word or very short phrase that we associate with the corresponding brand and then we're given the option to view all the "tags" given a brand in a big tag cloud.

It's a simple but elegant and interesting experiment. The tag cloud for Walmart, for example, shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger! We've embedded the site below in an iframe if you want to try it out yourself.

FirstRain is a web research tool-suite that markets itself to buy-side professionals in hedge funds. It costs $10k per year per user and is today announcing a distribution deal with CapitalIQ, an upstart Bloomberg competitor. That price is less than a Bloomberg box, but it's still a substantial chunk of change. What kind of emerging research tools are available for financial players at that kind of price-point?

FirstRain offers features that many of us who do business on the web would love to have, wether we buy and sell financial abstractions or not. What's offered is qualitative analysis of search results through more intelligent filtering than is available in any other tool I know of. The feature set feels oddly within reach, too, if only we had a small army of algorithm developers at our disposal. Check out the screenshots below.

Diigo is a social bookmarking and research tool that offers so many features it's overwhelming. I've been excited about it before, only to find that after a short period of time, I stop using it - in favor of something simpler. I have been really excited about it, in fact, but even the highlights of today's new version leave me with tempered enthusiasm.

The highlight of the new version is recommendations. The new Diigo offers a number of social networking type features that in-and-of themselves aren't worth a lot to me, but if they can do some number crunching and recommend people and content that I may want to subscribe to - that's gold.

George Bush signed a $555 billion omnibus spending bill yesterday that included a huge victory for advocates of open science on the internet. All research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency with a $29 billion research budget, will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.