STEVE’s Musings

Day 3, concluded

We ran out of words, and steam, last evening, having only covered the morning sessions of the Enterprise 2.0 conference from Boston Day 3. We'll try to catch up here.

20. Mash-Ups: Are they the killer app for Enterprise 2.0? David Berlind, moderator
Panelists were Charlotte Goldsbery, Denodo Technologies, Lauren Cooney, Microsoft, Nicole Carrier, IBM, and Michaline Todd, Serena Software.

Berlind introduced the concept of mash-ups, a means of knocking together disparate elements and applets into a web page. Advantage: build it in hours. Risk: brittle, as they depend on outside service providers who may have reliability issues.

A useful distinction was made later. Portals and dashboards also build from disparate elements, but their elements only report and do not interact with each other. That interactivity is what distinguishes a mash-up.

All of the speakers have stakes in this field, IBM's Mash-up Center, Denodo, Serena Business Mash-ups and Microsoft, who has had a consumer version, Popfly available and who apparently plans a commercial tool soon.

Challenge to enterprise IT: what kind of data can we deliver to the business in a safe way: rules, privileges, policies.

Panel believes that it will be 6-months to a year before business users will be able to build their own. A sample of what's available on the web right now is Yahoo Pipes.

Examples of business related mash-ups:

event registration: showing hotel, map, photo from Flickr, weather
emergency response organizations: counter-terrorism situational awareness
retailer: an inbound shipment monitoring dashboard (weather, piracy)
avian flue data pushed onto remote devices
a customer visit: weather, golf-courses, Eventful.com, restaurants
HR: applicant search on Facebook, MySpace, etc.
Application enrichment, but it's brittle.


It was noted that maps are a component of many of the mash-ups on the public web, as well as the illustrations. This observer thought at the time that maps are easy to integrate into other data, because much has a location component, and most especially because maps are finite, 2-dimensional objects, and fit most spaces well as a result.

Panelists offered this advice moving forward (and moving forward was the only way to look, because most of the session sounded speculative rather than real.

stay in a comfortable environment (mashable tools)
make your data remixable via ATOM (a more robust syndicator than RSS)
"good enough is good enough" [one of yr (justifiably) humble svt's favorite sayings: "the pursuit of the perfect is the deadly enemy of the perfectly good."]
look for a cross-portability/interoperability platform
don't spend on tools, because they'll be free.

21. Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful, Jeffrey Walker, Atlassian, Linda Skrocki, Sun Microsystems
Walker introduced the commercial field (by the way, the connection: Sun's wiki was built with Atlassian's tool). The trend for both internal and external Enterprise 2.0 use in corporations is growing at an exponential rate, according to Forrester. Walker guess that there are about 32,000 commercial enterprise wikis, and a staggeringly high number of open source ones. Accenture has 123,000 employees, and 54,000 wiki users. IBM has 387,000 employees and 100,000 wiki users. DB, the German railroad, has 80,000 employees. Presently 15,000 are consumers or contributors to wikis; their goal is 40,000. Vodafone has a wiki that includes a blogging element; their CEO blogs. Showed an example of a corporation's finance department wiki, that incorporated a new employee tour, but which also embeds news and blogs. The developers' network for SAP, sdn.sap.com has 1,000,000 registered users.

Skrocki explained that Sun Microsystems is a unique example of external facing transparency. Its CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, writes one of the most widely read blogs ("most popular Fortune 500 blogger). She talked about what works and what to avoid, in the context of external facing wikis and blogs.

1. Relax and trust your contributors (but there is a policy: don't be stupid, but have fun). There are guidelines on line as a model. CEO Schwartz insists that they not censor anyone's blog.

2. Seen the site with content - enlist some champions to get things rolling. Bloggers are all Sun employees, although the public can comment. Wikis are contributed to by both Sun people and outside customers. The wiki has 16,000 contributors from both inside and out.

3. Guide and nurture to create a self-sufficient community, people who care to take the trouble to support, police, "gardeners," etc.

Wikis are excellent for collaboration; can be edited and commented upon. Blogs are good for debate and sequential organization, for things that are topical and have a shelf life. Wikis better for knowledge management. Some wikis have blogging capabilities built in. She has an interesting blog herself.

Walker made the point that while some leap into web 2.0, others are more shy. Placing a personal page on a wiki breaks the edit barrier. Wikis are places for useful content that people need every day; useful for project management, although widgets and templates need to be added in for tasks.

Reference was made to a useful resource, wikipatterns.com.

In response to question regarding permissions, be open, but recognize that at times security is necessary. Trust your employees.

22. Enterprise 2.0 Social Network Shoot Out, Matthew Lees, moderator.
This was an interesting free for all among four co-opetitors (an ugly term, if useful description), representatives (high, if not highest ranking) from Telligent [Community Server product; MySpace, Dell are customers], Jive Software [15% of Fortune 500 are customers], Mzinga [150 enterprise clients like Disney and American Idol], and Small World Labs [community software as a service SaaS, Save the Children, Dallas Morning News].

Here are some of the responses, to moderator and audience questions.

Enterprise 2.0 tools enable real conversations, with colleagues and clients. Is it right for your company? The companies it's right for are using it. Social software is going to be as relevant as email [12-15 years ago, email's usefulness in the corporate environment was hotly debated.]

Can radically change the way organizations work. Webex, a Mzinga client, found that the tools enabled conversation across silos.

Dallas Morning News citizen journalists contribute 500 new articles a week (and people get exposed to advertising while reading them).

Get the tools out there, in a small way, and stand back.

It will be easy to fail if the executive staff doesn't embrace.

"Build it and they will come" doesn't work. Small steps are best.

Implementation really matters, like any project. Planning, management, requirements analysis are key, and marketing is required. Have a way to measure "community vibrancy."

Pricing: Telligent and Jive use on-premise models, and price by server or seat. Mzinga and Small World are SaaS hosted tools, and charge on a monthly fee basis, at least to start.

Legal issues: how do I prevent bad things from happening? Jive's response: a good concern to have. Small World recommends executive buy in and legal group buy in. Point was made that legal people find absolutely no risk acceptable. But business needs to operate, and thus finds a comfort level with acceptable risk. And if the worst happens, be prepared to dump contents of blogs and wkis into a content management system to accommodate a legal hold. Sobering.

This was another of those unexpected events. The field is new enough, that its senior people are in their forties and sometimes their 30s, and happy to be present at events such as these. Refreshing, and some very honest opinions.

Finished up around 8:00pm. Another excellent day.

Day 4

Day 4 dawned crisp, clear and 20 degrees F cooler than the previous several pavement melting days. The last day action resumed at 8:30am. Boston looked beautiful.

23. Top 10 Design Principles for Integrating Web 2.0 in Enterprise Apps, Michael Kopec, and Dustin Beltramo, Oracle
The point they make is that the typical enterprise computer user is performance and task oriented, and is not rewarded for curiosity and exploration. They hesitate to veer from their routine, and have no motivation for innovation. Thus Web 2.0 people are not like Enterprise 2.0 people.

They corrected their title to 10 design guidelines, which they listed as follows:

Do no harm -- minimize interruptions to existing workflow
Stay in the zone -- embed tools in existing workflow
Location, location, location -- screen real estate is precious, so like Flickr, use secondary layers when clicked on.
Keep it relevant -- provide access to content not just tools
Two sides of the same coin -- bidirectional navigation required between mainline tasks and the 2.0 elements. Washington Post was the example.
Climb the corporate ladder -- be mindful and leverage existing corporate structure; provide links to teammates, groups, division
Good fences make good neighbors -- encourage the creation and discovery of ad hoc groups, but provide elaborate ways to share within but protect otherwise
Keep it simple -- don't give more than people need
Support voyeurism -- make it easy to see what each other are doing and to reach out, but also to keep private if desired.
Look for the duct tape -- examine how people use current tools and the kludges they develop to make them work.
I had high hopes for this presentation, but was disappointed that these user experience architects and designers couldn't show off their own work at Oracle. They had to content us with examples from the public web, which we didn't need their help to see.

24. Programmable web - consequences for the Enterprise, Jean Barmash, Alfresco
Alfresco, Barmash explained, provides an open source document management alternative to Sharepoint.

The drivers for the 2.0 phenomenon:

Information available and accessible (through data portability, REST APIs)
Enable creativity by removing barriers (trust users, the structure emerges as a by product of the activity: "Wikipedia doesn't work in theory, but it works in practice.")
Focus on usability (take advantage of computer power and market forces).
He gave some interesting examples.

Seamless Web -- restaurant ordering service
drop.io -- instant, private sharing spaces, totally simple
ning -- create your own private label social network
The forward looking thinker who developed the term, "programmable web," as well as the Netscape browser, among many other things is Mark Andreessen, whose blog is here, and worth staying in touch with.

Barmash distinguished functionality available from web sites using web tools as follows:

Level 1 -- "Access API" -- getting functionality through web services (REST, SOAP, JSON) -- provided by sites such as Ebay, PayPal, del.icio.us . These are difficult for technical people to use; the code lives outside the platform.

Level 2 -- "Plug-in API" -- developers inject application or new functions into the Internet application -- provided by sites such as Facebook and Firebox. Similar difficulties for technical people as above.

Level 3 -- "Runtime environment" -- applications run inside the platform itself, which resolves issues of hosting, scaling -- available at Ning, Second Life, SalesForce, Amazon. Easier for developers, can reduce development and ongoing costs by 90%

Facebook was a very public example of exposing itself for outside developers. In the short year since available, 28,000 applications have been added.

So, the Internet is the ultimate enabling platform, because simpler platforms win.

Enterprise concerns: security, security, security. But they need to evaluate carefully how much security, how much process is truly necessary.

Choose simplicity. The best companies and technologies allow people to do what they want to do.

What problems do they solve? What problems do they not solve.

This was an interesting talk, with interesting examples. All the action, however was going on across the hall, where an overflow crowd was dazzled by a presentation from Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, entitled "Enterprise 2.0 in the context of mission success." Their installed tools include social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, discussion groups, weekly activity reporting and personal/team spaces. Lucky participants raved. Sigh.

25. Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4..., Jeffrey Stamps, Jessica Lipnack, NetAge
Jessica Lipnack and her husband/business partner, Jeff Stamps led this last session of the conference. Their field is organizational dynamics, which they've studied and consulted about and written about for many years. Her blog (she also led the blogging session earlier in the conference) is an interesting window into her consultancy.

Organizations steadily grow more complex. The Internet has always been about collaboration, only with better and better tools. Teams haven't changed much, but need to, since large scale collaboration will be critical to solving planet scale issues such as global warming. And now, it's also increasingly necessary to capture "boomer business knowledge."

There are a number of critical elements to virtual teams: people, purpose, links, communication, content and time.

Teams are the sources and repository of an organization's how-to practical knowledge.

Virtual teams can benefit from knowledge management tools. Solution: embed teams within a knowledge management structure. Design a team space to include meeting information and output. Need a template so that spaces are structured similarly.

Showed off a really slick tool called Orgscope, that shows dynamic links within organizations, both position and social. Orgscope, fed by HR or Active Directory or LDAP ("reports to...") can help uncover management hotspots (30 or more direct and matrix direct reports) which are a risk.

Summary: there have been diminishing returns after the great gains in individual productivity. The next frontier is group productivity, and social tools are the way gains will probably be achieved. But this will be jolting for people used to their hierarchical management model, as it becomes intensely personal to network.

26. (No. 12, completed) Web Culture and the New Ethos of Work, Stowe Boyd, The/Messengers
I did Stowe Boyd a disservice when I ran out of steam covering his fascinating session from Day 2. So, I'll repeat what I wrote then, and complete my report.

As I am new to this field, I hope I can be forgiven for not having heard of Stowe Boyd before today. Apparently though, he is an often-quoted expert on this emerging phenomenon of social networking. He calls himself a "webthropologist," and during his one-hour talk quoted Studs Terkel, Winston Churchill, Marshall McLuhan (who predicted a global network in 1964!), Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford ("no laughing on the assembly line!") and Warren Buffet. Quite a roller-coaster ride.

His theme: the nature of work, caused by the information revolution, is changing. It's not about the number of servers in the world (an incredible, uncountable figure) but it's what we're doing.

For the western world, the Internet has become the "third space," the place people go when not interacting with home/family, or at work. The third space used to be where people gathered, the bar, the corner store. Now, people gather electronically.

This will create a conflict when confronting business, as business is designed to resist change, to be intensely conservative. He notes that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (I'm a donor!) advises blogging anonymously if one is an employee of such a business, as personal expression, as exemplified by Internet activities such as blogging, is incompatible with business.

I've run out of steam, and still have a page of notes to go. Rest assured though that I was mightily impressed with Boyd's observations, some of which were highly anthropological. We'll try to backfill the high points that remain in our next post.

The web represents decentralization, the growth of participative media represents the edge (i.e., us) vs. the center (governments, corporations, mainstream media, religion). Thus, the era on one to many communications gives way to many to many communications, and we, the edgelings, aren't going to give it back.

But, can work move to the edge? There is a web culture paradox. It's open, but its cliques quickly close to newcomers, making it exclusionary while being inclusionary, progressive yet conservative.

Networks enable self expression through art and individual craft, non-democratic but non-authoritarian at the same time.

Now, to the world of work. Heading for a post-industrial flow, where it will be increasingly populated by video gamers, who've been measured and who have enhanced perceptions. Collaboration will change; instead of the team/coach model, a Hollywood model [and I have to follow that one up, but I guess it might mean an always changing temporary confederation of experts who come together for a project, then disperse as their portion completes].

Email changed the nature of work. People used to work on one project at a time. Boyd polled the room: average, seven projects at a time.

Smart leaders are now embracing the back channel (instant messaging during a face-to-face meeting enables shy people's good ideas to surface for the first time). Larger groups develop more ideas; smaller groups better at picking among the more for the best.

Productivity is changing; network productivity impairs personal productivity. Is this bad? Is business a zero sum game? All new media destabilize organizations.

Fluidity is the new reality. Glocalization (a new term for me, I'm ashamed to admit -- haven't been on a campus in a while!). Find an opportunity -- pounce on it. The Virgin Group is an example. In a lot of only semi-related businesses, but it seems to work.

For corporate and personal success, need to drop zero-sum notions. Edgewise affiliations, networks, tribes are the new reality. The edgelings vs. the centroids. Centralized, dogmatic vs. decentralized and enigmatic. In many respects, post-capitalist.

Whew. The man is subversive, in a refreshing way. Lot's to digest, even two days later. Here's his blog, if you're interested in reading more.

It's over!
And that's about it.

The conference concluded with a town hall session, where the participants were free to share likes and dislikes. The CIA presenters, who were attending as participants also, apparently were a media sensation. There was more than one complaint about the venue ("a nice hotel in the middle of an industrial wasteland" one curmudgeon [ahem] despaired), which may have become too small for this conference, whose participation has doubled in size each year since the first one two years ago.

I really enjoyed it. One good thing about the extensive reporting I've done: I was forced to pay attention, and was rewarded for it by learning a good deal that will inform my understanding of this new phenomenon in the corporate enterprise, and my career.

I appreciate those of you who have accompanied me on this journey (my son IM'd me last night that it sounded like an interesting conference -- and I hadn't discussed with him at all beforehand where I was going or what I'd be doing).

It's it for now. Thanks,

--STEVE

Blogger's note: This post was originally written in WindowsLiveWriter (a WONDERFUL) unsung tool, for posting to my personal blog, http://mudge.essoenn.com . All of the links were scraped out in the process of porting the posts here. For this one, since there were many, I kept track, and while I don't have the energy to go back and place them in context, I can provide a list, in the sequence they appear above in the original. Call it hypolinking. Sue me.

http://pipes.yahoo.com
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/
http://blogs.sun.com/skrocki/
http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www2.seamlessweb.com/
http://drop.io/
http://www.ning.com/
http://blog.pmarca.com/
http://www.endlessknots.com/
http://www.stoweboyd.com/

BTW, I had a good time despite my handicaps (the pneumatic walking boot being the visible one), to the extent of grinding out 9,000 words for this and my other spaces. Invite me back!

Another interesting and useful day, at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, with lots of

new and or interesting information, and one really dazzling presentation.

Overnight, my lap didn't get any smaller, and still doesn't accommodate my

laptop computer. Sigh.

Steve’s Musings

Quite a bit earlier in the day, as I summarize today's sessions at the

Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

Another interesting and useful day, with lots of new and or interesting

information, and one really dazzling presentation. Overnight, my lap didn't

get any smaller, and still doesn't accommodate my laptop computer. Sigh.

Once again, I have six pages of handwritten notes, and I went through two

pens! We pick up where we left off yesterday.

4. Keynote: Rob Carter, FedEx
Mr. Carter, the CIO, was a very polished and graceful speaker. FedEx is one of

the great innovative companies of the past 35 years, and we didn't need Rob

Carter to remind us. They invented the concept of overnight delivery of small

packages, realized with a small fleet of Learjets flying out of their Memphis

hub. And now look at them. Although Carter couldn't help but show us an FAA

model of recent overnight traffic at Memphis airport, together with the all

too true admonition regarding staying at the airport hotel.

FedEx innovations have been just as paradigm shifting in the information area,

as they were one of the first organizations to realize that their true

product, not just their tools, was information. In that light, Carter showed

us the first true Internet application, the 1994 page that let consumers and

business track a shipment without telephoning. Lately, such marketing tools as

the playful "Launch a Package," a Facebook application, keeps the FedEx name

and message in front of the next generation of shippers. His message:

enterprise walls are coming down, to make way for customer connections.

5. From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community, Don

Burke and Sean Dennehy, Central Intelligence Agency.
Yup, the CIA has gone all social media on us. The Intellipedia, built on

Wikipedia but with some security enhancements, is the product for which both

are the technical evangelists. They set the tone for the process-altering

nature of their tool by displaying their presentation via Intellipedia pages,

rather than the more usual PowerPoint.

Sharing and collaboration is the challenge, for an organization whose very

pulse is secrecy. The Intellipedia, which maintains various levels of access,

an improvement over (what some might characterize as the overly democratic

nature of its model) Wikipedia, also provides tools such as del.icio.us type

tagging, instant messaging and RSS feeds. All this in the service of the CIA's

persistent issue: dealing with mysteries and conflicting interpretations.

Social media in the enterprise is a cultural problem, not a technology

problem. Burke and Dennehy have three prescriptions:

Go for the broadest audience possible
Think topically, not organizationally
Replace existing business process (instead of email to 50 people, link to a

blog)
Interesting observation I will have heard more than once: that the long-timers

in the organization are often faster to adopt social media than "youngsters,"

who join and are immediately mentored by middle-years old culture person.

Interesting advice for beginning a wiki: start with an acronym list. This gets

people comfortable with editing in a wiki environment.

This was fascinating, considering the source. Speaking of which, their wiki

publishes nothing without attribution -- sounds like a good policy for an

enterprise. Wonder if the software is available?

6. Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise

Technology: Rishi Chandra, Google Enterprise
After last night's entire 2-hour presentation on cloud computing, I'm not sure

why this session was necessary. In fact, not sure what place cloud computing

as a topic has in an Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Chandra believes that the next 10 years of innovation in IT will take place in

and via the cloud. And, as usual, consumer driven innovation will set the

pace: Instant messaging, search, VOIP are examples of technology embraced by

the enterprise that began in the consumer world. [Observation: this has been

true since the first executive schlepped his IBM PC to the office so that he

could work on Lotus 1-2-3 where the numbers were.] Social networking will

simply follow the same pattern. He sees four trends of influence:

The consumer market is Darwinian in nature -- no filter by TRBs (technical

review boards, found in IT organizations). The linkage between vendor and

consumer is direct, and highly competitive.
The rise of the power collaborator means that individual productivity will be

replaced by group/team productivity. Cloud computing enables collaboration

despite time, language, location and device differentials. Noted such

innovations as real time chat with integrated translation. All due to open

standards.
Economics of IT are changing: scalability is an issue (YouTube: 10 hours of

video are uploaded every minute; seven million photos are uploaded into Picasa

[Google's version of Flickr] daily). Scale drives unit costs to zero.

Challenge to business: is your curve in that same direction? If not, Google

offers a hosting solution for your data and application with no worries about

scalability, reliability and availability.
Barriers to adoption are falling away:
Connectivity (ubiquitous fast Internet connections)
User experience (consumers accustomed now to rich application in browser such

as Gmail.
Reliability (expectations have changed: "Google cannot be down.")
Off-line access
Security, which Google needs to prove to business. But, data carried on

business laptops is truly insecure (2,000,000 stolen per year); 66% of

thumbdrives are lost each year; 63% of those contain some business data.
While the cloud has arrived, Chandra admits that on premise software is not

going away, but repeats that most interesting innovation will be in the cloud.

There are lots of competitors in the space. Your new employees will be the

cloud generation. Google needs to earn business's trust.

7. State of the Industry: Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen, AIIM Market

Intelligence
Survey (90-page report available) indicates that

Age doesn't matter (as much as you think). Boomers often more likely to

embrace social media than millennials.
Culture matters (more than you think). A knowledge management culture is more

likely to adopt social networking.
Slow market conditions frustrate early adoption.
Strategy is hard to find.
This was an intriguing angle, because the first business conference I ever

attended in my latest, IT incarnation, was a knowledge management conference,

in Boston as it happens, eleven years ago. Haven't heard much about KM lately;

interesting that it surfaces in the context of social networking.

8. Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation: Ross Mayfield, CEO, etc.,

Socialtext.
Your typical silicon valley underdressed deep thinking presenter. He repeated

the earlier point that the PC revolution was an example of bottom up influence

for the business. File centric collaboration is the old paradigm, but there

remains a clash between the regulatory compliance document control model vs.

more free collaboration via social media. But, also repeating an earlier

point: technology doesn't matter. Social effects are not made from technology,

they are made from people. His definition of Enterprise 2.0: free form social

software adopted for the enterprise. Introduced a new product, based on a web

based spreadsheet, developed with the participation of Dan Bricklin(!) -- a

social spreadsheet (including embedded wiki tools, for distributed multi-group

collaboration) called SocialCalc to replace "email volleyball with Excel

attachments."

9. Enterprise2Open, spearheaded by Ross Mayfield, Socialtext
This was an interesting experiment in "unconference," where people who desired

to make a presentation (i.e., conference attendees, not exhibitors or

presenters) had the opportunity to submit proposals for the 3-1/2-hour block

in the afternoon, in "competition" with the more conventional sessions.

Interesting, but the conventional sessions held more interest for yr

(justifiably) humble svt so I left the unconference for the conference.

10. After Noah: Making Sense of the Flood (of information): Thomas Vander Wal,

InfoCloud Solutions.
Okay, I'm impressed. As he found occasion to remind us, Thomas Vander Wal is

the person who coined one of the most useful, if hurtful to the ears, terms of

the Web 2.0 age: Folksonomy. Wikipedia says,:

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social

indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively

creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to

traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but

also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords

are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] Folksonomy is a portmanteau of

the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy.

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 with social software

applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Websites

that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the

context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used

in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used

to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also

used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, although they are also used in

other contexts. Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information

increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A

well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is

both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited

examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us,

although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of

folksonomy.[2]

His issue: information (in the form of web pages, photographs, etc.) is

typically tagged; the tags are typically not as useful as they could be. Thus

the flood of information that is not "findable" because of inadequate tagging.

Pretty interesting, if arcane. Bottom line: enterprise tagging tools have to

be improved over the present standard, such as web based tools (i.e.,

del.icio.us) which have proven to be inadequate for enterprise use.

11. What Blogging Brings to Business, moderated by Jessica Lipnack with Bill

Ives, Cesar Brea, Doug Cornelius and Patti Anklam.
All five panelists are busy and active bloggers; the overflow crowd (160+) in

the conference room was filled (at least 20-30) with busy and active bloggers.

As my avocation, as faithful reader may have noticed, is blogging, and my

vocation has taken me to the evaluation of tools to enable social media for

the enterprise, this promised to be an interesting session. There was no

presentation; just a free form conversation.

The reason people blog is as varied as their number. And the value to business

will prove to be just as varied, and, I'm afraid, variable. One panelist

treats blogging as his personal knowledge management system; another as an

informal marketing channel. There was much consensus among panelists and

audience alike that blogging, done right, is just good for business (in the

marketing sense).

Some asked: isn't it a time suck for corporate employees? Not if the

corporation uses blogs to change business processes (replace email with blogs

as a knowledge repository, a theme noted earlier in the day).

Blogs can assist knowledge transfer across the generations, as boomers need to

be tapped of the institutional memory that can't afford to be lost when they

retire.

12. (last of the day, whew! but best!) Web Culture and the New Ethos of Work,

Stowe Boyd, The/Messengers
As I am new to this field, I hope I can be forgiven for not having heard of

Stowe Boyd before today. Apparently though, he is an often-quoted expert on

this emerging phenomenon of social networking. He calls himself a

"webthropologist," and during his one-hour talk quoted Studs Terkel, Winston

Churchill, Marshall McLuhan (who predicted a global network in 1964!),

Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford ("no laughing on the assembly

line!") and Warren Buffet. Quite a roller-coaster ride.

His theme: the nature of work, caused by the information revolution, is

changing. It's not about the number of servers in the world (an incredible,

uncountable figure) but it's what we're doing.

For the western world, the Internet has become the "third space," the place

people go when not interacting with home/family, or at work. The third space

used to be where people gathered, the bar, the corner store. Now, people

gather electronically.

This will create a conflict when confronting business, as business is designed

to resist change, to be intensely conservative. He notes that the Electronic

Frontier Foundation (I'm a donor!) advises blogging anonymously if one is an

employee of such a business, as personal expression, as exemplified by

Internet activities such as blogging, is incompatible with business.

I've run out of steam, and still have a page of notes to go. Rest assured

though that I was mightily impressed with Boyd's observations, some of which

were highly anthropological. We'll try to backfill the high points that remain

in our next post.

It's it for now. Thanks,

--STEVE