Tim O'Reilly writes:

A true Web 2.0 application is one that gets better the more people use it. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a link on the web. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a search. It gets smarter every time someone clicks on an ad. And it immediately acts on that information to improve the experience for everyone else.

It's for this reason that I argue that the real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence.

The world of Web 2.0 *can* be one in which we share our knowledge and insights, filter the news for each other, find out obscure facts, and make each other smarter and more responsive. We can instrument the world so it becomes something like a giant, responsive organism.

Tom Evslin writes:

If you’re the one who makes strategic decisions, you’re betting the company every day whether you choose to acknowledge that you’re putting the chips down or not. Doing nothing is a bet on the status quo. Usually that’s the wrong bet in the long term but it’s an easy one to sell in the short term since you don’t appear to be making a bet at all.
...
If you’re a CEO – no matter what size your company – ask yourself each morning when you brush your teeth what you’re betting your company on. If the answer is “nothing”, it means you’re betting on the status quo without even making that decision explicitly. Very bad idea. Not why you get the big bucks.

WSJ profiles SKS Microfinance:

Vikram Akula runs a company that doles out loans of $100 or less to desperately poor villagers so they can buy a water buffalo or a bicycle. But he's hardly a typical do-gooder.

Mr. Akula, the 37-year-old founder of SKS Microfinance Pvt. Ltd., is at the forefront of the latest trend in "microlending," or making tiny loans that help entrepreneurs lift themselves up from the lowest rungs of poverty. Long the province of charitable institutions, microlending is starting to attract the attention of big business. Intrigued by India's red-hot economy and potential market of more than a billion consumers, financial giants such as Citigroup Inc., ABN Amro Holding NV and HSBC Holdings PLC have already provided millions of dollars for SKS to lend out. SKS, in turn, says it has notched up healthy profits for the past three years.

The New York Times writes how the tide has turned for Dell:

The growth market, for one, is no longer in the United States, but in China, India and Eastern Europe, where it is harder to reach a mass market online. Retail sales of desktop PC's now outpace laptops, which consumers are more likely to want to test the heft of before they buy.

More than anything else, Dell's competitors have changed. In particular, Hewlett-Packard is no longer the bloated and slow-moving company it was six years ago. Mark V. Hurd, Hewlett's chief executive hired in early 2005, has cut costs and focused his company on profitability while speeding its growth in printing and corporate data centers as well as personal computers, which in 2002 lost the company $400 million. Last year, it made $660 million selling PC's.

Wap Review writes: "So what's new with the mobile version of Spaces? A major change is that if you have a photo album on your Space it now also appears in the mobile version. Also new is keyword searching of all of Spaces. Search, which was added to mobile at the same time that the full web version got it, is helpful in finding blogs and items that match your interests and is also the easiest way to jump from one Spaces blog to another. The appearance of blog posts has been improved - more of the formatting is carried over to the mobile version."

The past four years have seen significant change in blogging and the future will see more. The number of people blogging continues to grow rapidly. Technorati tracks nearly 40 million sites. It is estimated that China alone will have 60 million bloggers in a few years. Podcasting is taking off in a big way, as is blogging from the mobile. Sites like MySpace and Facebook have integrated blogging into social networks and self-expression pages. In India, blogging is still small in its use and impact, but will grow in the coming years.

I see blogging evolving in three different directions in the future building on the themes that we have seen in the recent past: