developerWorks received the "best in class" award for community development in the first annual Small and Medium Business Social Media Marketing Awards given by New York-based AMI-Partners. The awards acknowledge Information and Communications Technology (ICT) providers who effectively use social media to inform the purchase process of small and medium businesses (SMBs). Don Best and Ryan Brock of AMI Partners talk with me about the awards, trends, and developerWorks.

Check out this week’s content highlights, then listen to our interview with Chris Wanstrath, founder of GitHub, the popular web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git revision control system. Chris talks about creating GitHub, about the user-based, collaborative interface that GitHub employs, and about his love for neo-classical heavy metal music.

Andy Glover interviews Max Ross, a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he leads the development of the App Engine datastore. Max also founded Hibernate Shards as a Google 20% project. They talk about the Google App Engine platform, how it differs from Amazon EC2, how the datastore works, and where it is going in the future

Josh Bernoff, Senior VP of Idea Development at Forrester Research, is also co-author of the new book “Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers, transform your business.” In this episode, Josh talks about why developerWorks was given the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Award in the business-to-business "supporting" category. We also talk about how social technologies are changing business, how to use them effectively, and what it all means to the IT professional. Josh shares his views on whether it’s realistic to expect people to participate in multiple social networks, and talks one of his favorite topics -- creating a HERO (highly empowered and resourceful operatives) culture in the office.

John Swanson is back with a quick word about industry recognition of developerWorks success, and Todd Watson joins for a look back at highlights from last week’s Information On Demand Global Conference.

Brian Snitzer is back with more user input and added features for the IBM Smart Business Test and Development on the IBM Cloud. Also, be sure to check out the developerWorks Cloud Computing zone for great cloud content.

Michael Curry, IBM Director of Portfolio Strategy for Information Management, shares some of what he'll be talking about around big data analytics at the Information on Demand Global Conference coming up Oct 24-28 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ajoy Kumar and Srinivas Kandikonda from Virtusa Corporation, a global IT services company, join to discuss their experience with data warehousing and ECM solutions. Both will be at the Information on Demand Conference 2010 in Las Vegas, Oct 24-28.

Rod Smith, Vice President of Emerging Technologies, IBM Software Group, and Jason Gartner, IBM's Director of Java Technologies talk about this week's news on the IBM and Oracle agreement to cooperate on OpenJDK.

Marty Moseley talks master data management and challenges/opportunities in the ballooning healthcare area. Marty is an architect in IBM's Information Agenda Tiger Team. He joined IBM as CTO of Initiate, an IBM company focused on helping its clients achieve complete, accurate and real-time views of data spread across multiple sources, utilizing master data management.