Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

Well done Nate and Jay.

I just had a good conversation with Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0 that I’ll be blogging about next week. I’m also hoping to divulge a bit more about what I’m doing with my current employer and my new-found passion – agile development.

So stay tuned…

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

But recently we’ve seen couple of posts from Rod.  Most recently he wrote about human behavior and how it’s influenced and molded by society. Rod does a great job of diving deep below the surface of social software and I highly recommend you click over to check out his blog as you’ll find some cool, sociological insight into the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon there.

In a consulting organization we spread out, travel the world, and often find it hard to create or identify with our corporate culture. A very simple blogging application has gone a long way to create a community amongst resources working in Sydney, Melbourne, Austria and the US – all for just $8 per month. To me that’s pretty cool.

• Firestoker Blog
• Innovation Creators
• Dion Hinchliffe
• The FASTForward Blog
• Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

While I must admit I miss the more constant influx of the latest on Enteprise 2.0 I’m going to take this as a positive sign.  Perhaps this means that the brain power behind these blogs is being redirected from the blogosphere toward Enterprise 2.0 software development or implementation.   Time will tell.

In the Beginning

I first ventured into blog syndication reading Techcrunch.  Techcrunch was virtually the only blog I read until I discovered Andrew McAffee and Enterprise 2.0.  I’ve since added a series of blogs to my repertoire, including:

• Andrew McAffee
• Dion Hinchliffe
• Firestoker
• Innovation Creators
• The FAST Forward Blog
• Web 2.0 Explorer

Upon my return (and having been away from internet access for 5 days), I found over 100 unread blog posts in my feed aggregator.  This was far above the number of unread emails I had.  We talk a lot about Signals when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. In this case my “signals” backfired as I was overwhelmed with information (maybe I should just cut down on the number of blogs I read).

So, I set out to make myself current with what had been going on in the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 space during my absence.  Heaven forbid I miss out on a vital detail about some new development.  I noticed several posts about the reality of Web 2.0 startups, including this post by Michael Arrington.  It seems that many Web 2.0 companies are shutting their doors, and that few are actually going through the IPO process.  2007 should see a reconciliation with those companies that actually add value sticking around.

Maybe this also means the blogsophere will settle a bit, and that the next time I take a 2 week vacation I’ll only have 50 unread posts to read.