Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis give people the ability to publish and share whatever they want. Though those tools can capture knowledge that might otherwise be lost, all the extra information out on the Web can spell headaches for businesses if they can't keep tabs on what's being said. That's where startup Techrigy comes in with software to track blog and wiki conversations.

Rochester, N.Y.-based Techrigy's SM2 offering, due out this summer, scours the blogosphere and a company's internal networks to find out who's saying what about the company and notifies administrators when someone is saying something he shouldn't. "We're trying to help organizations say, 'OK, well I know these tools are going to be used, so how can I make sure we're not going to be sued and we're safe when we use it,' " Techrigy president Aaron Newman said in an interview.

In an InformationWeek Research survey of 250 business technology professionals earlier this year, respondents cited security as the biggest stumbling block to adopting Enterprise 2.0 technologies. With the use of blogs and wikis skyrocketing, something's gotta give. "Half of the world is still very scared, saying no one can blog. That's not very productive," Newman said. "Communication is going to get out beyond the firewall and you're just going to have to find out ways to do that securely."

SM2 has two pieces. The first, available by the end of July, is a hosted service for blogs that will integrate with blog search engines Technorati, Blogdigger, and Google Blog Search to find out if a company's employees are blogging and where and what they write. "We have signatures in place so you can say, 'I want to know whenever someone named Bob Johnson starts blogging on MySpace or LiveJournal,' " Newman said. The service can then look at those blogs for things like racial slurs, off-colors jokes, and terms or wording that would represent a leak of intellectual property or personal information. SM2 can also track competitors' blogs and general comments about the company.

The other piece, available later this summer, is software that finds and parses internal blogs and wikis. The software goes out on the network, discovers Web servers, and looks for any one of 25 popular blog or wiki applications. Techrigy hopes to add support for more apps soon. It then looks through wiki edits and blog posts just like the hosted service does on the Internet and can notify an administrator when certain things are written.

Still, Enterprise 2.0 content-authoring technologies include much more than just blogs and wikis. It also could include Facebook messages that aren't indexed by search engines, twittr feeds, work-related Gmail, and online office applications like Google Docs and Spreadsheets. "The whole issue of data being stored everywhere becomes important," Newman said. "We're focusing on blogs and wikis today, but I think there's so much to expand into."