Roberto writes that Sun has agreed to include an Italian dictionary and thesaurus (from the Italian Native-Lang Project team) in the official OpenOffice.org distro. Congrats to Roberto & team!

Ogilvy North America is partnering with Technorati to offer clients blogs, vlogs, videos, photos, and other online user-generated media. The hope is for their clients to better understand the blogosphere and improve in building their brands.

Big Blue has announced that they are working on a new product called “Lotus Connections,” which is targeted for a late 2007 release. From the IHT:

Social networking has become one of the most buzz-worthy news terms in recent memory as the concept as spread at a viral rate throughout the realms of marketing and eCommerce, respectively.

Matt Asay has some good advice for folks asking him for career advice: “Work for an open source company.”

Line56 published an article Monday talking about presence becoming a more important part of IBM’s collaborative environment.

IBM has announced that it has teamed up with Circuit City to construct an online replica of the retail store within the virtual world of Second Life. The venture is geared at experimenting with the introduction of virtual worlds and 3-D technology into a cross-platform retail environment.

IBM continues to find itself embroiled in ongoing litigation surrounding the wrongful termination claims of former employee James Pacenza, who is suing the company over his dismissal after it was revealed that he had utilized his office computer to access sexually oriented chat rooms.

Recently IBM sued Amazon.com over patent infringement. On Thursday Amazon fired back with a suit of it’s own directed at IBM for patent infringement. The countersuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Amazon disputes that they infringe on IBM patents and that IBM infringes on patents that Amazon holds.

IBM and Yahoo! have jointly announced the release of OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a product designed to provide search functionality on both the local enterprise and web levels.

Brian Kramer from McDonalds dropped me an email with link to a C|Net story about the seriousness with which IBM is taking Second Life and other metaverses.

Based on the number of hits this blog is getting with the search term “Geronimo vs. WAS CE”, it appears that there is some confusion about the similarities and differences between Apache Geronimo and IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE).

Engineers at Sony are developing a set of wireless headphones that use a person’s skin to transmit a signal between the headpiece and music source.

IBM announced last week that a settlement had been reached in a civil suit with a very high price tag.

IBM announced last week that more than 600 partners have joined the WAS Community Edition (WAS CE) partner initiative that was launched 6 months ago. And that over 200 ISVs have already developed applications that support WAS CE.

Two major open source contributions from IBM for its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) have placed it with the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project, and out to the OASIS specification development group to create a true standard around the UIMA framework.

Social media is rapidly climbing the ladder as a primary method in which news and information is communicated to the masses. Podcasting, in particular, is becoming increasingly popular among technology enthusiasts, industry insiders, and big-name companies.

Zack, the three examples you give appear to me as signs that OSS is under attack by vendors who don’t gork the value of an open community & the customer value delivered. Yep, even the MSFT deal with Zend.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a processor that uses 512 cores to achieve up to 512 billion floating point operations per second.

Alex Fletcher, an analyst from Entiva Group is asking why IBM doesn’t have more blogs devoted to OSS projects that IBMers participates in. He points to the easily findable blogs from Sun employees who work on NetBeans & GlassFish as examples for what he’d like to see from IBM.

Leave a message for the folks in the Eclipse community that make Eclipse such a great development platform.