Collective Intelligence: Cogenz, ConnectBeam, Stikkit, Diigo

Harnessing the benefits of social bookmarks in a corporate setting seems like the next big thing. And if you've ever just wanted to write directly onto a Web page, the two best options are here at UTR.

Stikkit kind of cheated. Instead of talking about its little yellow notes that think, the presentation veered off to a lovely new e-mail assistant named Sandy. Simply cc her on your e-mail, telling her what you want--contacts, tasks, events, and so on--and she'll respond right back with your information. Cool for individuals ... not so cool if you can't cc people outside your company with confidential internal information.

We've seen Diigo before, but now it has a few tweaks to simplify it. Diigo is meant as a collaborative research tool to let you highlight and bookmark specific portions of text you find on the Web. Diigo now also lets groups discuss highlighted text and and publish it onto a blog.

The next two companies are more enterprise 2.0. In this case, the IT department has to install them onto the corporate server.

Cogenzdescribed itself as Del.icio.us for business, and Connectbeamlikened itself to Del.icio.us and LinkedIn for business. Both say they're trying to harness the collective wisdom of employees for better productivity, through tag clouds, individual profiles, and groups. Connectbeam adds social search for any business, on top of existing enterprise search engines.