Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com explains the power of these web giants well in a recent blog post entitled ‘The collaboration economy’;

That’s how Google sees us, capturing our links and clicks to discover the value of those million – no, trillion – flying pages. That’s how Wikipedia and Craigslist created their value, dealing in trust and membership as a new currency.

That’s right,  we still use other people to determine the value of content and information but to determine that value, we search using tools like these. If we are looking for the number of quarts in a gallon we type that in, if we want to know about the specs on that new athletic shoe a customer just called about we type that in, and if we need to know who to call if our water pipe breaks, we search that too.

What does that mean for you and your business? How are you making information available to your customers and employees? How can it be made more available? How can it be made…. searchable?

These reporting applications include the more basic Microsoft Access and the open source Open Office Base as well as higher end products like Crystal Reports from Business Objects. Simple reports created with any of the above can be very effective and will help you take advantage of the information you have on hand.