The rapid ascension of social media as a force in marketing and public relations has produced a nasty culture shock among communications professionals.  For those of us who came of age in a time when controlling the message through strategic positioning (sometimes called lying, by commission or omission), the reality that customers now have talk-back tools […]

While doing a little research on blogging platforms this morning, I was startled to be reminded that WordPress, which is far and away best of breed IMHO and feels like it has been around forever, has been in open circulation for less than two years now.  The Blogger folks started in 1999, Ben and Mena […]

A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t.  A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually […]

One of our favorite social software startups (See profile), London-based Trampoline Systems has become the first European “Enterprise 2.0” software developer to receive major investor backing, snagging a £3 million ($5.8m) financing round from affiliates of the Tudor Group. Trampoline intends to use the investment to increase sales operations, intensify R&D and establish a strategic […]

One of the most formidable barriers to the widespread adoption of social media tools within enterprises is fear of failure.   What if we make blogs, wikis and other social collaboration tools available and nobody uses them?  Unlike the consumer side of the web where the fact that individuals seek out, self-select and manage the social software they want […]

Way back on February 9, 2004, I wrote a famous (well, Doc Searls
linked to it) post called The Internet Does Not Scale/The Internet Is Not Random (scroll down)  on the collapse of Howard Dean’s mostly internet-fueled campaign in the cornfields of Iowa.  It said, in part:
The Internet is a peculiarly self-obsessed, inwardly-looking little world so […]

The biggest challenge that most managers or work team leaders face when they decide to use a wiki is getting their coworkers to use it too. Some organizations have been extremely effective at getting mass participation on their wikis, others have simply failed altogether.
The nice folks at Atlassian, the private Australian company that is among the leaders […]

I have a post on l’affaire Spocko over at the FastForward Blog today.  Nathan Gilliatt has an even better follow up here.

Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a survey on social network usage that confirms what we had assumed:  social networking is a giant and genuine sociological phenomenon among American teenagers. More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers.  MySpace is […]

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 […]