A new search engine dedicated solely to finding information within forums and communities, Twing.com recently launched new features that are said to help brand managers gain insight into company and product discussions.

General Manager Kevin Shea had this to say, “Our Saved Search and Buzz Graph products were created for our users. And they also have a lot of value for anyone tracking brand conversations.” These Buzz Graphs allow a visitor determine the popularity of a range of terms within a community space online. You can also filter terms by category and then share those results. This is fun and interesting for an average web browser, but for a brand manager it offers insight into what’s being said about different products and companies.

Twenty-eight percent of U.S. consumers read online forums compared to 25% that read blogs according to Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007. Additionally, 18% of those contribute to forums, while 14% do the same for blogs. A lot of online conversations are happening in forums.

Twing offers multiple search options plus advanced filtering and sorting tools so people can effectively search forums in ways not available until the advent of Twing.com. The company also seeks to build even more awareness of the online forum space. Twing.com is easily used by entering search terms to quickly locate specific discussions and/or topics. Visitors can register – for free – to become a Twing.com member, participate in Twing.com’s forums and take advantage of current and upcoming personalization options.

Last month Google announced the release of a beta version of industry benchmarking. This recent feature allows Google Analytics users to measure their site’s performance against others in their market as well as seeing how one particular niche compares to others in a specific industry.

You have to opt in to the service and once you do you can find it in your site stats navigation under the “Visitors” section. In this section there are a variety of charts that show your site’s traffic in blue compared against other sites, which are shown in gray. This allows you to see data such as if visitors stay longer on your pages versus other pages in markets similar to yours or you can compare your daily traffic changes with that of your industry to see if your ups and downs are occurring across the board.

The entire program is anonymous and therefore the information you se is an aggregated total rather than just information from one site. Google is hoping that this data, which was a commonly requested thing, will provide insights to users that have been previously unseen.

This benchmarking has at least one stipulation though. It only works if companies chose to share their data with the system. For that Google also introduced a new data-sharing setting page. If you chose to share your information it isn’t shown individually at any point. It’s simply collected and shared anonymously as was previously mentioned.

A lot of people classify Twitter as microblogging because this social networking service allows users to send updates called tweets to the Twitter web site. These tweets can be up to 140 characters long and you can send them using your cell phone, instant messenger or third-party applications like Facebook. While it may just sound like a lot of fun, Twitter is also a good way to network with both clients and people in your field.

When you use twitter updates are displayed on your profile page as well as delivered to any users that signed up to receive them. So, if you wrote a blog post you could twitter about it and everyone in your twitter network would be updated that you’ve just posted something. Which works well if you have a lot of followers on twitter.

If you don’t have many twitter followers don’t fret. Everyone starts with zero. A great way to meet new people interested in what you have to say is to send a message to track a specific keyword. You’ll receive posts on that keyword which will introduce you to some of the people in your field, people who may be interested in what you’re talking about.

Twitter also allows you to “nudge” people. A nudge in Twitter-speak is a friendly reminder to update a twitter account. You can also set up an auto-nudge to remind yourself to update your Twitter account every so often. Sending out nudges to your social contacts will likely make them feel special because you are taking the time to notice what’s happening in their lives. Auto-nudge is helpful because it allows you to continuously update your account with the important things you’re doing.

A final way to successful network on Twitter is to share your friends with others. If some of the people you follow are a good match for those following you can share their bookmarks to their Twitter feeds. Another option is to showcase some of your favorite Twitter members in a blog. Perhaps the people you showcase will return the favor.

The key thing to remember in social networking is the social aspect. Humans have a tendency to be curious and occasionally a bit voyeuristic. Twitter allows us to indulge that side of our personalities while meeting potential colleagues in our fields.

Microsoft recently made changes to their Live Search crawler. These changes are meant to help reduce the amount of bandwidth resources used when a site is crawled. The upgraded version 1.1 has two main features – the ability to support http compression and conditional get.

According to a blog posted on the Live Search Webmaster Center the http compression will allow the search engine crawlers as well as browsers to compress files before downloading them. The revised msnbot will support gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (sections 14.11 and 14.39). Additionally Microsoft will provide a tool to check your server’s compression.

The second new feature, conditional get, allows the crawler to ask a server if the page has been changed since the last request. If the content hasn’t changed, a server that supports conditional get returns a 304 response (not modified). When the crawler gets this response, it doesn’t download the page contents (and continues to use the version already downloaded).

Basically, this just means a more efficient way search bots crawl and index your sites, as long as your servers support the new features. Many servers do support http compression. If you need to figure out how to configure this instructions can be found in the Live Search blog entry. Additionally, the Live Search team has a page where you can test whether your site and/or server support these two new features.

Search giant Google stands to gain another profitable avenue of ad income through a new creation they are dubbing “knol.” Knol is basically a version of Wikipedia – a community-created online encyclopedia. Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, announced on Google’s website that certain people were being invited to test the service for free as of last month.

Of the request Manber stated, “Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it.”

Even though knoll is similar to Wikipedia, there are some differences. For instance, Google will have whole articles with author names and pictures while Wikipedia allows anyone to make changes to entries. Manber said, “We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors; but somehow the Web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.”

Another difference with be that knols about the same topic will remain independent and have the ability to compete for visitor attention. Wikipedia merges similar topics into one entry. Knol authors will also be allowed to have ads posted on their pages and share in the revenue.

Google did say they hope for knols on all sorts of subjects and that they do not plan to edit or endorse content. This means Google will take none of the editorial responsibility; it is the author’s alone.