Posted by Suw Charman-Anderson

Will play the role of an anti-social, fat, dumb, happy exec who doesn’t want to move into the next phase. Where is the resistance? Twelve years ago when web started to get really popular. People didn’t understand why they needed the web, thought that they didn’t need it, didn’t need to share information.

Then e-business started. Ent 2.0 is the natural evolution of e-business. they said then there were three things enterprises could do:
- share information in an extranet
- do commerce on the internet
- share information with employees on the intranet

Those three things started to take off. Could put any info up anywhere in the world, and people can see it. Didn’t need contracts, business deals, etc., could just access information. Were some extreme views, that bricks and mortar would not be needed; that didn’t happen but lots of new things did. Businesses expanded, new businesses started.

So why name it now? We can do a lot of things now that we couldn’t before, can help people to benefit from this new technology. Time for the next step, something new is happening, so right time to rename it.

Have a bunch of technologies, but the key one is that other people can update a website, can tag things. Multiple technologies but it’s important about updating. Might say we had Geocities, or message board, but they are very hard to navigate, not metadata. Take a look at Facebook, easier to navigate through. Different kinds of communities are forming, evolution taking place, very different to traditional message boards.

How do we take advantage of that. Can I create communities? hard to talk about ROI, but easier to talk about commerce. Today’s commerce sites are designed for a few markets and millions of people; not the long tail, ie. millions of markets with a few people. Long tail gets marketing people very exciting as can personalise, and meet the needs of individuals and sell more products.

What do we do with our intranet site? Very simple - when you deliver service/support to a client, you find you can improve your support documentation, if you put it up as a wiki, anyone in the field anywhere in the world can edit the manual. Live document. Can create forums and communities of interest. Make it easier for people to talk to each other, customers, suppliers, etc.

Is there going to be be a brand-new set of technologies or will existing platforms embed these technologies?

[Interlude for IBM WebSphere Portal marketing stuff which I'm not going to write up - sounds sort of a rather full-on game of buzzword bingo and my jetlag is getting in the way of my understanding anything that's not said in plain English. There's also an attempt to play a video which is not working. Sometimes I worry that I'm missing something when my brain switches off during these sorts of things, but on the other hand, these people need to learn to talk interestingly about their stuff, rather than just yapping on in impenetrable jargon.]