These are all communities-in-a-box that I have evaluated, some more than others: 

Ringside Networks- http://wiki.ringsidenetworks.org/display/ringside/Home

The most flexible, customizable, and powerful solution. Requires coders and designers. Must be hosted. Opensource. Could work for big companies.

Ning- http://www.ning.com/

LBS - Location Based Services - is sparking debates by lots of
different groups. For those unfamiliar with the concept, if you have a
mobile device that is GPS enabled, there are applications that will
utilize that functionality in order to provide location specific
information. Familiar examples of this are navigation tools such as
Garmin and Tom Tom - they know where your car is and combine that with
map information to provide directions. This information can get mashed
up with data providers offering business information to inform you

With social networking and user generated content (UGC) flooding the web,
businesses are struggling to find ways to harness and direct this power. There
exists an extensive collection of blogs, books, news articles and podcasts that
offers advice about techniques to jump-start user adoption and gain stickiness,
but these tend to focus on execution and not on concept. The dialogue generally
advocates creating new communities, controlling messages within existing
communities, and monetizing concepts, but fails to answer the fundamental

These are the less-obvious 7 of 10...

1) The Top Down Attitude (Military): “I’m in charge here, and the sooner you figure that out the better.”

• It's traditional, it's the most common, it's the easiest, it comes naturally, and it reflects the evil in all men.

2) Putting Paperwork Before Peoplework: Task-work is more important than "idle" talk; Relationships don't fit our "deadlines."

Here are some great insights from Harry Beckwith, straight from his book, Selling the Invisible, for "anyone in a service business - which is everyone in business."

p89- In deciding between services, research shows that most people tend go with what is more familiar (even if it is familiarity from bad press) over what is superior. So get your name out there!

Microsoft recently unveiled Live Mesh, an attempt to become the new "WebOS." What is a WebOS? Its the go-to-place to run your web services that doesn't require a hard drive (i.e. think the equivalent of iTunes, Office, AIM). Instead of reading a way-too-long post on TechCrunch to figure it out, I'm going to expand on a line from CNet:

Typo3 is our most-implemented CMS option due to its power and versatility combined with the cost savings of its open-source license. Typo3 4.2 was released yesterday, a welcome upgrade with several updates to the editing interface. We are already using it on a couple of recent sites, one of which is already live. Most of the updates are in the editing interface to improve ease of use. The highlights are a significant rework of the interface to use more ajax techniques and a general improvement of layout.

Last year Amazon shook up the web development world with EC2, the first Elastic Computing Cloud. Later the addition of S3 for storage and SimpleDB for data fleshed out their platform as a real alternative for web application development. Now Google has launched AppEngine, a virtualized application hosting system that combines some of the features of all the Amazon services for a new take on the hosted application development.

At the all-important South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSW) this year, I had the chance to sample the insight of many famous and not-so-famous players in the web space. One panel in particular was about the future of "social advertising." I have to clarify first that the term "social advertising" means different things to different people; the market itself can be thought of as a fetus, of which people are debating when to call it "alive."

Dallas has been burning with activity in the social media/Web*.* space in the last year or so. BarCampDallas, in January of 2006, somehow managed to bring out a huge amount of people with similar interests and made great , lasting connections for many of us.Whether it's geography or lack of common gathering areas, it has always seemed difficult to do so in the past. For me, it's been a great way to learn about a lot of the innovation and innovators in Dallas. Seeing that there are people as passionate as I am about exploring new ideas in technology, user experience and media is exciting.

I've been a big fan of Yahoo's developer site (http://developer.yahoo.com/) Beyond their excellent javascript library, they also have lots of good video content ranging from deep javascript tips to advice on developing for screen readers.

When the Eclipse PDT project went 1.0 I started experimenting with using it as a PHP development environment and I think I'm ready to commit to it as my standard development environment.