Best of the blogs: Those small, quasi-specialty communities popping up all over the Web are all the rage, Lena West points out in this Social Media 360 entry. Ad dollars are being woven in, even by major companies — a trend West believes will snowball. “No matter if a corporate strategy is well-executed or not, if enough companies do it, other companies will do it, too. Call it follow-the-leader or the blind-leading-the-blind, whichever works.” That said, there are of course benefits, such as the fact that a company can buy ads and that’s all it takes to claim they’re involved with social media. “It’s funny how the world works when you have the money to spend.” The news beat: IBM lays out its Lotus Foundation suite for SMBs and details a roadmap for Domino and Lotus, at its Lotusphere conference. Microsoft ratchets up its assault on virtualization by acquiring Calista Technologies and making changes to its own licensing terms. Intel ships its first dual-core Celeron processor, a low-end chip for desktops. And Gartner estimates that India’s IT services will reach $11 billion by 2010 fueled, in part anyway, by demand for new technologies and applications.Columnist’s corner: A startup thought it was doing things the right way by working with a consultant for database and Web development. The first six months were packed with progress, components were available for testing and they worked as expected. “Except the lead developer forgot a key fact: the matches were many to many, not one to one, and his database architecture didn’t anticipate that. Whoops. Time for an architectural redo,” our Off the Record author writes. “But it never happened. The firm went silent for weeks and sometimes months, then promising they were almost done, only to disappear again.” What happened? It’s not real clear though it seems “our CEO negotiated an on-the-cheap deal.” And, well, that’s what they got. Naivete and cheapness kill a launch. A technically-unsophisticated overseas development shop and a year later the project simply faded away. “In hindsight, we all screwed up.” Software Development