Over on the Fastforward blog (and that's where I am right now, in San Diego at FASTforward '07), James Robertson asks what are the central technologies for Enterprise 2.0 -- "...are blogs and wikis really it,... Just because they have both been tremendously successful out on the web, this doesn't mean they automatically gain the same success (or play the same role) within the enterprise." I think they are not it, no. I wouldn't even say that wikis have been "tremendously successful" on the web, though blogs surely have been. Indeed, wikis - one of the oldest web technologies - have had the slowest adoption curve of any web-based tool, I believe. I would think that the technologies central to Enterprise 2.0 must be those with an 'enterprise' impact. Not an impact only on the work of a single person, or a group of people, but on the affordances of *all* enterprise work, and indeed of the enterprise IT stack as a whole. Neither wikis nor blogs fit this description. At this point, I can see no valid reason why a vendor would make an 'enterprise' choice of a wiki platform. There is no benefit to the enterprise via content management or handshake w/ the current IT stack to drive such a decision. Any set of users in the enterprise can use pretty much any tool, it seems to me. If I'm missing something, I would love to know what it is. One could make a better argument for adopting an enterprise-wide blogging platform, as blogs fit together like lego pieces, and underlying engines for tagging and so forth are nice at the platform level. Nonetheless, neither blogs nor wikis can carry any load for any content outside their realms; they are not really the platform for Enterprise 2.0. What is? Tagging, social bookmarking and social networking, that's what. Now, full disclosure; I'm involved in a startup offering just this platform: Connectbeam. So take my words with whatever quantity of salt seems appropriate to you. Yet, think about it -- don't these functions better provide a platform from which wikis and blogs might emerge than the reverse? I believe we will see wide adoption of these paradigms (and the services of Connectbeam, I hope) within the next 24 months. More on this topic later; in the meantime, back to the conference!
http://tommandel.com/blog/2007_02_01_archive.shtml...