Social Glass

Rod Boothby was the first person who got me really fired up about Enterprise 2.0.  I remember last year he posted quite frequently, then things went quiet.  As he indicated he’s been busy over at Teqlo releasing and testing products.

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.

A peer of mine within my company setup an external website (based on Wordpress) for us to blog about internal matters, industry trends, what we ate last night for dinner etc. He and I are both Technical Managers and, as such, are responsible for about 10 people collectively. We asked each of these people to contribute to the site on a regular basis. Without much prodding and within about a week we managed to create a vibrant system of communication and sharing with lots of blog posts and comments.
What’s fascinating to me about all this as a Manager is the insight I get into the knowledge our new hires possess. Some of these kids, fresh out of university, are in the pocket with Web 2.0 and are able to relate it to business value - ideas like using Adobe Flex, Silverlight and Java FX to break out of the J2EE MVC rut and change the way we approach UI development and user experience as a technology organization. We talk about Ruby on Rails and one of our very junior guys has launched http://enterprise20.rubyforge.org/, an open source Enterprise 2.0 project using this technology. This insight is valuable to me when staffing projects or understanding my people’s strengths and weaknesses.

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.

I was reading ITSInsider yesterday and was thrilled to discover Enterprise 2.0 TV.  I love the idea and definitely recommend you check it out.

An observation - I’ve noticed a substantial drop in posts over the past 4 weeks in Enterprise 2.0 blogs I read, namely:

• 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.

I’ve recently returned from a 2 week vacation visiting my family in snowy Colorado.  No, this is not another complaint abou the “evils of email” (Australia virtually shuts down between December 18 and January 15 anyway).  It is instead a post about the amount of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 news I had to catch up on.

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.