With such an ever-growing list of collaboration platforms and applications of all shapes and sizes I thought it would be useful to gather together five of my favourite Collaboration Software Directories in one place.

Mindquarry (an Open Source Collaborative Software Supplier ) have developed a visual resource: Periodic Table of Collaboration covering 60+ elements over 4 categories: People (Roles), Productivity Software, Collaborative Software and Methods.

Rapleaf is a neat application which takes an email address and returns an online reputation dashboard based on the owner's participation in online social networks etc. I interviewed Dan Scudder, Product Marketing for Rapleaf, to find out more.

BBC News (7 Feb 2006) report that Google is to integrate its popular e-mail service with its own instant messaging, known as Gmail Chat to allow users to chat and send e-mails from the same web browser window. The report also gives the current stats on the subscriber bases of the 'big 3' in Instant Messaging:

Newsweek report in Smoother Surfing (Jan 30) on a exciting new set of technologies known as Ajax which underpin applications such as Google Maps and promises to deliver desktop-like usability, smoothness and performance to web browser-based applications. The potential of web-based applications which are equal in usability to their desktop-based counterparts could re-energise both the ASP (Application Service Provider) and web-based application provider markets and threaten Microsoft's long-standing dominance of office-based applications.

SearchCIO.com, 2 Feb, reports on the emergence of sophisticated speech recognition software which can highlight words that can indicate trouble on the line such as ‘confused’ and ‘cancel’. The software can also monitor in real-time telltale changes in the pitch, volume and timbre of a customer's voice which indicate hostility or rising anger.

‘Social bookmarking’ is the name given to the family of technologies which began to appear a couple of years back to allow you to share your favourite internet sites with others and to ‘tag’ them with sets of keywords known as a ‘folksonomies’.

Maurene Grey in Collaboration Loop January 03, 2006 reports that two years after being signed into law, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have released their report to the US Congress on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Reuters report, Jan 6 2006, that some users are taking their lead from tagged animals and having minute RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Chips storing their personal codes implanted into their hands to allow them automatic access to computers and access-controlled locations. But its going to make you think twice about changing your password. To read Computer chips get under skin of enthusiasts.

Message archiving software can help organizations and teams achieve regulatory and corporate policy compliance, reduce the cost of eDiscovery, and reduce storage costs through mailbox management. The top message archiving software vendors include Computer Associates, EMC, IBM, Open Text, Symantec and ZANTAZ. Forrester have evaluated their strengths and weaknesses across 74 criteria in a newly published research report: (December 05) Message Archiving Software, Q4 2005