A book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in 1999 that predicted this revolution long before Facebook and Twitter were even concepts. It was updated just last year. The full text of the book is available free at www.cluetrain.com. For those who don't have time to peruse it, the summary is that information is now controlled by the market instead of the marketer. People sharing their thoughts actually drives product sales, as well as nearly everything else. Enterprises that embrace this paradigm will benefit most. Others risk becoming irrelevant. The closest analogy for me would be the invention of the printing press -- it opened information sharing in new and profound ways.

I remember when David and company were writing the Cluetrain Manifesto and had posted their version of the 95 Thesis. They were talking about what we're getting to now 10 years ago. Point of fact, we're just now getting to Tim Berners-Lee original vision of the Web.

I have a copy of Small Pieces Loosely Joined that I've never gotten around to reading. Might be time for a search and rescue mission on my bookshelf for it.

Enterprise 2.0 is "Collaboration The Next Generation". For those of us that have been working on collaboration for the past 10 years will know that Enterprise Collaboration was the way of turning your enterprise into the global village. For years businesses used collaboration tools for departmental or even regional solutions. A few years ago the evolution of collaboration tools lead to global deployment of collaboraiton tools to support productivity on a global basis. For the first time collaboration tools were becoming part of the corporate culture and a standard way to solve problems. The result was a combination of Communications and Collaboration tools that supported the ability to organize information for projects and initiatives. In addition the communications function became a hybrid of part web site and part collaboration tools that revolutionized the way businesses communicated. So all was good and the enterprise was doing great things with collaboration.

While Enterprise Collaboration was taking off like gang busters there was another explosion happening on the Internet and that was Social Networking or Web 2.0. This was the realization that there was a need to connect collaboration to users on a personal or social level. It was becoming a run away success and everybody loved it. Unfortunately Web 2.0 was a corporate compliance and infomration security nightmare. As a result Web 2.0 was not a slam dunk for the corproate enterprise.

To bring Web 2.0 to the enterprsie required a lot of outside the box thinking. What had to happen is the creation of a Web 2.0 infrastructure inside the firewall. The original Web 2.0 was realiant on a lot of services that were readily available (free) on the Internet. Unfortunately most of those services were blocked at the firewall for most of corporate america. So imaginative vendors created those Internet services that could be installed inside the firewall. Now you could have similar services like Communites that could be created inside the firewall for enterprise use. Now web 2.0 has arrived for the enterprise but it had to be diferentiated from it's original rendition hence the name "Enterprise 2.0". And now you know the rest of the story . . .