The latest IT Tech Trends Survey is now open.

We're looking to hear what you feel are the major drivers and motivators in the tech industry right now. This year we've devoted a considerable chunk of the survey to investigating business analytics - its role in the workplace and where we currently are on the adoption cycle. Typical questions:

• Where is it used in the organization?
• Where does your organization need to be?
• What are the concerns you face?

Think you have the answers? Want to share your perspective? Complete the Tech Trends survey now!

In 2010, more than 50% of the respondents told us mobile application development will overtake other types of development by 2015. And nearly 70% felt cloud computing will become the primary way organizations will acquire IT in the next five years.

So, what exactly happens to the results of this survey? Last year the survey garnered press coverage across the globe, allowing IBM to highlight its offerings for the top trends identified.

We also use the survey here at developerWorks to help shape the strategy for our content and site. It helps us ensure we're delivering relevant content that best fits the need of the 4m visitors who visit us each month.

Take the survey now and pass the word along!

Here at developerWorks, we get a lot of traffic from Twitter (and StumbleUpon via the su.pr URL shortener). We're talking to the tune of at least 200,000 clicks per month. To get that kind of traffic through other channels, such as paid search, we would shell out at least $600K - and here I'm being seriously conservative.

Great, we’re getting a bunch of traffic without having to pay any third party. But is the traffic any good? developerWorks’ core objective is engagement, and we find this Twitter traffic ranking as high in terms of loyalty (and proxy metrics such as 'average page views per session’) as any other channel at our disposal.

So here we have a social media strategy delivering tremendous ROI when measured against other marketing channels.

Now talk of using Twitter as a marketing channel may sound heretical. Whatever happened to using social media to engage in conversation? That's fine, but that isn't strictly our model. We produce technical content in the shape of articles, technical demos, trials - a lot of content that really doesn't lend itself to 140 character feedback. So we take a different approach: we adopt a content syndication model. We use Twitter to promote our content. And our content helps bolster our Twitter audience. A swirling symbiosis of content and marketing.

Sure, we've reached out and made ourselves known to people in our space (primarily through monitoring #hashtags), but no-one is going to follow us back if our content isn't appealing. How do we build and promote this content? Largely by looking at what resonates with our audience and building a content and Twitter promotion strategy around this.

This really is a content marketing story. As Edelman's Michael Brito points out:

"As long as the messaging on a company’s owned media channels is relevant, not inundated with sales propaganda, and delivers valuable information, they will essentially position themselves as a trusted advisor of content related to their own products and/or industry related information."

Being a trusted advisor really ties up with the core mission of developerWorks.

Now where does Google+ fit into this? Well, this content marketing model can be applied to any social network that has a strong technical/informational community (for this reason, we've seen this model work better on Twitter than on Facebook). Google+ has something to offer this segment. Google does have some history here, having evolved Usenet into Google Groups and swallowed up Blogger.

As an early example on this fledgling community, Digg founder Kevin Rose upped and moved his blog wholesale over to Google+. We're not quite ready to go that far with developerWorks, but if the platform continues to grow at its current rate, the Google+ for Business model could be a particularly strong fit for our content marketing strategy. There's a bunch of suppositions here, but this is definitely something we will be keeping our eye on.

If you have similar stories around content marketing on social networks, we’d be interested in hearing these!

Have you ever struggled to find a parking spot in a big city? And whilst driving around in circles have you ever dreamt of a service that lets you know where the free parking spaces are? In this era where our smartphones can tell us when the next subway train is coming and where there's traffic congestion, is this really too much to ask?

Apparently not according to Streetline.

Earlier this year the San Francisco-based tech firm launched the free Parker app which not only shows you where the parking meters are located, but also shows you which meters are available. Forget circling a five-block radius waiting for a spot to appear. With this app (currently available for iPhone and Android) you can pinpoint and snag that elusive space.

Not only does this save you gray hairs: you also cut down on emissions and congestion. The Parker app fits neatly into IBM's Smarter City vision: one that fully utilizes technology to help us humans live more efficiently in urban spaces where close proximity. So it's no wonder that Streetline won IBM Global Entrepreneurship Program's SmartCamp 2010.

What are the key tenets of a Smarter Planet? These solutions should be Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent.

The Parker app demonstrates this wonderfully:

Instrumented

Streetline captures data using self-powered sensors mounted in the ground at each parking space which can detect whether or not a space is vacant. The Parker app uses your smartphone's location sensors to know where you are and highlight local parking spots. It also uses the large screen to display a dynamic map of the nearest spots (rather than just display a list of street addresses).

Interconnected

The parking meter data from the sensors is transmitted across ultra-low power mesh networks to Streetline servers which build a real-time picture of which parking meters are vacant. This information can be shared with drivers through the Parker app, and also with city officials, operators and policy managers.

Intelligent

The Parker app is a perfect example of turning data into insight. Plotting vacant parking spots on a map helps you find a spot faster, with the added benefit of reducing congestion and emissions in busy metropolitan areas. The app even goes further: once you park, the app uses this information to provide walking directions back to your vehicle and can record how much time you have on the meter and alert you when time is getting short.

Download Parker now to see this app in action for yourself (currently available in a limited number of metropolitan centers around the US).

Why is it so tough to find anything about hooking up other tools to Google+. Actually, somewhat ironically, it seems tough to find anything on Google+ via a search on, erm, Google. Would be nice to feed it from my WordPress blog. Also what if it could also setup the service to drop my public utterings automatically onto Twitter? Save me half the work (the less social network plumbing I have to do, the more I’m likely to post). Also nice to do side-by-side comparisons with Twitter in these evaluation days.

I understand from Steven Levy’s seminal Wired piece that Facebook integration could face more than just technical hurdles.