twopointouch

Richard MacManus reports on some of the developments around Enterprise 2.0, the application of some Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to big business. There’s some debate over whether Web 2.0 is a pure consumer phenomenon and that therefore Enterprise 2.0 is a different animal.

I don’t think it is.

While many of the poster children of Web 2.0 are resolutely consumer - digg, youtube, myspace, wikipedia - their approach, and the 2.0 approach generally is about making things better for users, harnessing their input and aggregating them in clever ways. There’s nothing intrinsic to this agenda that segregates it from the business world. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Users are not just your customers, they are also you and your fellow employees. Practices, tools and technologies which make life better for users are good for everyone. The separation between consumer and business applications is, in some senses, artificial.

Lanjut →

Lunch today with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research for BT. It was quite a long, or rather intense, discussion, so I’ll only tackle the basics here. I’ve been trying to nail this semantic web issue for some time, but every time I start reading an academic paper, my attention seems to wander off. So this was a good opportunity for me. I wasn’t going to deviate. As soon as he sat down, I was in with my carefully prepared, top journalist’s question: “so what’s this semantic web thingy, then?”

It turns out that that is one of the more difficult questions. (Damn!) It depends on what you mean. You might mean turning the billions of existing web sites semantic or only about possible future sites or services. The second of these options is the most likely outcome at the present. Semantic web is partly about annotating web pages to make them amenable to machines. John prefers the expression ’semantic technologies’ to avoid this confusion.

Lanjut →