Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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The Digital Channel Intelligence (DCI) Solution unveiled last week by enterprise social intelligence vendor NetBase aims to make conversations on social channels more useful to the brands and agencies that hope to gain insight from that commentary. In a world where digital marketing is swiftly becoming entrenched in most businesses, NetBase says that DCI will offer a comprehensive, real-time picture of what’s happening across forums ranging from Facebook, to Twitter, to YouTube, to Pinterest and others. It will provide a way for digital marketers to roll up key metrics specific to each one (community growth, amplification and conversation rates, for example, as well as total impressions generated), integrating actionable insights from the broader social web. That includes providing an understanding of what fans and followers are saying to help feed digital marketing decisions and direction.

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Sarah Mitroff of VentureBeat reports that Springpad, a digital notebook service that we have covered before, has released the latest version of their service for the web, iOS, and Android. Mitroff writes, “The new version is a major overhaul of the service and includes some Pinterest-inspired design elements. We all tend to save a lot of digital information these days; it’s one of the reasons Pinterest has become so popular. But before Pinterest’s time, Evernote and Springpad were competing to be the best digital notebook to save snapshots of webpages, notes, to-do lists, and anything else you want to remember later. Springpad has become outdated in recent years, with an almost cartoony-like interface.” Read more