Enterprisey

I recently spoke at the Brightstar 6th Annual Strategic Intranets and Portals conference
I was going to blog some notes at the conference, but I stopped as soon as I saw that Michael was doing a much more thorough job than I could have done.

One thing that Michael's presentation raised for me was the relationship between web 2.0 and enterprise collaboration/km technologies. Which is driving which? I've said for a couple of years now that corporate users expectations have been raised by Google. How is it that you can normally find what you're after on the Web, where there's 8 billion pages, and you can't find anything on your corporate document repositories where there's only a few hunderd thousand documents?

Michael asked whether perhaps Web 2.0 was just the bringing of 'enterprisey' collaboration functionality to the public web. To a certain extent I think that's true, especially for those who have been using Lotus Notes for years. I also think that Web 2.0 is driving some innovations from the public web into enterprises though. Blogs, wikis, and faceted classification (tags) are to me, clear examples of this. Lightweight, 'paper thin' portals like Netvibes are also examples of the kinds of customisation that corporate users may start to expect.

Google page rank style search power is another thing that should come into enterprises. The challenge with this is that there just aren't that many links between corporate documents. The reason Google works is that a lot of relevance ranking can be drawn from the number and type of links between web pages. I think this offers a lot more promise than automated context extraction technologies like Autonomy (as fantastic as they are). It was therefore interesting to hear BEA talking about incorporating contextual links between people, documents, and groups to improve search within the enterprise portal space.

I await these developments with interest.

No One Cares

This is my new favourite t-shirt design. I think it's both amusing and enlightening. Amusing because perhaps some people do get all excited about their blogs and want everyone to read them, as evidenced by these "read my daddy's blog" suits for babies.

Enlightening because it's got me thinking further about a podcast I listened to recently which talked about the way people are actually using blogs. Anil Dash from Six Apart talked about blogs and LiveJournal, and the way that the anthropologically derived numbers of 15 and 150 seem to play out here. So while a very small percentage of bloggers have very large audiences, most people 's blogs are read regularly by less than 15 people. They've become another medium for communicating with our close friends, and of forming loose relationships with other people on the periphery of our social circles.