LastFM

Last FM finds out what music you like (based on what you play) and then recommends other music that you might want to check out. It allows people to share their music with friends and create a sort of personalised radio show.

Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, says of that 'the fundamental idea of Wikipedia is to create and give away a freely licensed encylopaedia in every langauge in the world'.

Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article. And at its core, the site is about community.

It now has over 1.4 million articles and has, in a report by Nature, to be found to be about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Buzz: tweet volume

Twitter is a bit like having a mini blog from which you can tell the your friends what you're up to. You could almost think of it as a digital postcard. Sign up and give it a go (you can even use it inconjunction with Facebook).

Tweetvolume is a service that lets you see what people have been talking about on Twitter - it's an interesting way of seeing what phrases are buzzing.

Buzz: finding out what's being said on forums

Boardreader:
Find out what people are saying on messageboards. This service lets you search under your keyword, directing you to forums where talking about the brand you're researching.

Buzz: searching podcasts and YouTube

Podzinger:
This service lets you searches podcasts and You Tube for keywords that you enter. This could give you an interesting audio & video selection of top content that people are creating that references the brand you're researching.

Buzz: use the online community for quick polls

Yahoo Answers:
Ask a question to a responsive and broad community of people. This service can be used as a sort of online focus group and is great for testing out a hypothesis or getting a steer on perceptions. Depending on the question, you could make interesting graphs and support them with nice quotes.(A little tip, the simpler the questions, the better response rates).