Best you might've missed

Here is this week's roundup of articles.

Emergent collaboration/community

The Online Collaboration Potential For The Networked Small Business Company. "Here is the open thought of a collaborative business developer [and] a reader of Kolabora."

"How are new capabilities within communications technologies going to change the shape and scope of human communities?" The president of the World Future Society provides some thoughts to answer this question.

E-learning

"Can Interest in Distance Training be Sustained in Corporate Organizations?" "... the ability to sustain distance training is deeply rooted in the success during the early stages of implementing distance training and the integration of the work and learning environments."

"Honesty in Online Education." "This article attempts to critically analyze the arguments on both sides of the online cheating debate while presenting techniques for circumventing and alleviating issues related with online education."

Traditional training/learning/human capital

"Seven Key Indicators Measure Value of Learning." A CLO magazine article about Zeroed-In Technologies. Request a more-detailed paper on this from the company here.

Five Takes on Creative Leadership. A special section based on presentations from the Wharton West Leadership Conference. (Also see our March Leadership issue of T+D next week.)

"Case Study: Investing in People who Invest in People." Based on ASTD research showing that companies that invest in training perform better on the stock market, Laurie Bassi launched an investment company. (See this 2002 T+D article as well.)

"Climbing the Pay Scale." Business 2.0 takes a look at labor shortages happening now and their effect on salaries. Expect even more of this in the future; I report on the issue in my upcoming April Intelligence column.

Create your own mission statement. An interactive exercise from Franklin Covey. (Thanks, Lifehacker.)

Five Mini-Quizzes to Test Your Customer Service Email Writing Skills. Each quiz is based on a chapter from Clear, Correct, Concise Email: A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents.

General business

Is Business Management a Profession? A long but worthwhile read from Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge publication.

A Day in the Life of Tom Peters. A collection of photos. Not all that informative, but kind of fun to check out.

"Ego Makes Entrepreneurs?" BusinessWeek's Q+A with researcher Brian Wu on his award-winning paper "Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry."

Why Do We Overcommit? Study Suggests We Think We’ll Have More Time In The Future Than We Have Today. Interesting research from the American Psychological Association. (Thanks, Lifehacker.)

"Build a Great Brand for Your Business." An article from the Small Business Times. (Thanks, Small Business Blog.)

Technology

How to Receive and Listen to Podcasts. Podcasts are one of the new big things. This informative article from Amy Gahran gives you the basics. (Also see this article on videoblogging vs. podcasting.)

The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. From Mobile PC magazine, an interesting and fun article that might also make you nostalgic.

Forget Spam. Have You Been Spimmed? Instant messaging, which is being used more and more as a business tool, has its own breed of spam.