Demonizing Web 2.0 (not just Facebook)
Being a supporter of Web 2.0 philosophy (and Enterprise 2.0, or call it Corporate Web 2.0 if you like), I find it disturbing whenever articles misrepresenting Web 2.0 surfaced on the media.
The Australian media has been portraying social computing or collaborative technologies as disruptive for too long that I find it compelling to write something about it. Although the article is mainly about employees “wasting time” on Facebook, but Facebook as a whole, represents what an Enterprise 2.0 application would possibly look like and there are certainly a lot of parallels that can be drawn between the two. The article highlighted the threat that such emergent technologies can be disruptive at workplace, which is what I would like to argue otherwise.
The article at AcidLabs gave a very good rebuttal and assessment on this.
Social computing has come a long way since the stone-age days of forum posts to the modern-days of blogging and wikis. However, social computing is also not only about blogs and wikis. Blogs and wikis are merely small strategic parts of Web 2.0 that a corporate entity can use to facilitate some of the enriching features of Web 2.0. Taggings are used to enrich the discovery process by which a person could locate another person and all its connected entities (such as blogs ).
I like the blog at SocialGlass as it provides a lot of insight on how Web 2.0 philosophies can be leveraged within a corporate environment to increase strategic advantages that otherwise would not have been accessable without the same philosophy that’s been misrepresented in the media. Take this article for example as it explains how Enterprise 2.0 technologies can actually be leveraged in conjunction with proper data management principles to create a single master discoverable entity of a person within a enterprise environment. These are just one of the many leverages that incorporating Enterprise 2.0 into a corporate strategy can bring.
The fact is that if you look around you carefully, you will have noticed a lot of companies in the US and Asia have slowly embraced Web 2.0 as an integral part of their corporate strategy. CNN has implemented blogs and RSS signals, and ABC News has implemented taggings to enrich the discovery and search process. Google is of course at the forefront of Web 2.0 technologies with their vast army of free applications on offer and a single integrated entry at iGoogle.
I could write a whole essay on this given the time, but I will let Charlie here below convince you on some of the advantages on utilizing Web 2.0 at work. 
This is a presentation by Scott Gavin and as mentioned in his website, a picture paints a thousand words. Let the video convince you.
The underlying part is this: If employees spend 15 minutes in Facebook or other social applications at work, it may not always incur 5 billion to the businesses. Do not let a few rotten eggs throw you out from reaching the golden eggs beneath it.
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