So why might Enterprise 2.0 be better?

Let's assume that in practical terms Enterprise 2.0 means the use by employees of these technologies within an organisation:

• blogs (weblogs)
• one or more wikis
• tagging and the resultant folksonomy
• RSS feeds and aggregators
• a social bookmarking site like deli.cio.us
  
• quality free-text search of the type you get with an Internet search engine like Google.
  

Assume also that all of these would use a web platform and be inside the firewall.

Imagine this possible scenario. Everyone has a blog of their own, and they have access to a team wiki and an enterprise-wide wiki. They've had a small amount of training - just familiarisation, really - and know how to use both of these applications. They also know that they can (and it would be really helpful if they did!) add tags to their posts. They have been encouraged to pause before they write an email and think, "Would this be better on the wiki or the blog?" They have also been encouraged to save all bookmarks/favourites - whether internal or external to the organisation - to the social bookmark site.

What might happen over time? If things went well, more and more useful content would accumulate on the blogs and wikis. This information (knowledge, perhaps) would be accessible to many other people, through:

• search
• RSS feeds
• the folksonomy that has been created through the tagging by users of their own posts
  
• browsing the folksonomy for bookmarks of other people on the social bookmarking site

In other words, there would be a number of routes in to information that was previously only in people's heads, or locked away in email silos. The originators would not need to decide who might find that information useful and 'push' it to them. Equally, someone wanting to know about something would not need to work too hard to find it. And there would be no need for anyone to maintain the structure in the form of a taxonomy, for example.

Magic, eh? Surely there must be a catch? Of course, but that's for the next post.