Now it can be told.  For the past few months, one of my favorite social software startups, Blogtronix, has been working with publishing giant Reuters to create a new online community around environmental markets called ReutersInteractive, which quietly opened in beta last week.   For those of us who are fans and charity users (Social Media […]

It’s a familiar story.  An occupying army is bogged down in hostile territory threatened on one side by a well-armed, well-financed insurgency and on the other by a group of innovative and resourceful fanatics.  Is the wisest course to begin a phased withdrawal or should you pour more troops and resources into the trouble zone in […]

Keith Patterson is the CEO and visionary behind Itensil, Inc., a web 2.0 software firm that develops web 2.0 user interface technology and provides a hosted service called Itensil Team Activity Manager.  The product features a unique wiki + workflow integration that enables teams to turn collaborative ideas into reusable workflows.  Patterson bootstrapped Itensil from […]

Traditional read-only intranets are the Siberia of corporations.  Nobody goes there unless they have to.  Companies tend to view them as a place to park their personnel manuals, an internal phonebook, maybe some press releases, company calendar, and HR notices.  In organizations where they are the default home page, employees often see them as an annoying and unnecessary […]

Assume for a moment that you are the CEO of cool little startup in a corner of the Web 2.0 market that is hotting up quickly (wikis).  One of your main competitors (JotSpot) has just been goggled by Google and who knows what scary bunch of free web services they’re about to cobble together.  Another rival (Blogtronix) is already offering […]

An awful lot of social software vendors operate under the old field of dreams theory that “if you build it, they will come.”  Because they are often strapped for cash and have put everything they have into development, there is generally no budget for marketing, advertising, and PR. They depend almost entirely upon word of mouth–blogs and demos and meeting people […]

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence was officially launched today with a modest amount of speechifying and the announcement of an intriguing new experiment to create a Wikipedia-style community-authored book about how to use communities in business.
Called We Are Smarter Than Me, the book/project’s home is an online community and wiki managed by Shared Insights where  business professionals are encouraged […]

Talk about an idea whose time has come.  MIT will officially launch on Friday the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), a new research center whose goal to understand how to harness the power of large numbers of people—connected together through Internet and other technologies —to better solve a range of business, scientific, and societal […]

The always provocative Susan Scrupski has taken issue with Andrew McAfee’s assertion that Enterprise 2.0 is more of a transformation than a revolution: 
Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” […]

Over the past few weeks some of regulars have done a great job of focusing in on how Enterprise 2.0 differs from Web 2.0 and why those differences matter.  We seem to be moving toward a consensus on what the key characteristics of social software in the enterprise context are.  What we haven’t done so […]