Tech startups are enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to businesses, and rightly so. Opsware, VMware, Salesforce.com--they're just a few recent examples of startups that hit it huge, whether through buyout, IPO, or organic growth.

Many organizations are beginning to realize the value of using collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis. When used appropriately, these tools can help organizations gain a competitive edge. However, these tools can must also be monitored for legal liability and regulatory problems.

We realized that all the compliance worries that go along with e-mail and IM, those apply to social media as well, but even on an increased level in some ways. That's what we're trying to do, help companies that want to use blogs and wikis, but maybe they're financial services companies and have a lot of regulations and say, "Well, I'd like to use them but I just don't know how to deal with them now." [We want to] help them be able to adopt these technologies and ensure that compliance is being met while they use these great collaboration tools.

Do you know what is being said about your organization in the blogosphere? Rochester, N.Y.-based Techrigy's new monitoring tool, SM2, is targeted at organizations that want to scour blogs and wikis on the Web for mentions of their companies, partners and competitors to mitigate reputational damage and potential legal liabilities.

"'As this new form of communication becomes more and more mainstream, people are just going to have to start listening to it,' said the company's president and founder, Aaron Newman."

A project by the COI's Media Monitoring Unit is considering how to add blogs to its regular summaries of government coverage in mainstream press or television.

Techrigy's SM2 offering will scour the blogosphere and a company's internal networks to find out who's saying what about the company and when someone is saying something he shouldn't.

Before T.E.N. was around you were really on your own, said Aaron Newman, founder and president of Techrigy Inc., a Pittsford-based software company. It's really a conduit to a lot of resources people didnt know about before.

... the very openness of Web 2.0 platforms, the control and power that must be handed to every day workers for meaningful results to occur, and questions about accuracy, reliability, and security of such open repositories of information often gives business thinkers pause.

Its become a control problem, Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, told internetnews.com. A lot of companies are surprised to find out how many Web 2.0 applications are being used by their employees.