Comments on: FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, Part 3

By: Vietnam travel agency

Vietnam travel agency — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:19:49 +0000

Vietnam, a country made famous by war, has a unique and rich civilisation, spectacular scenery and friendly people. From the Red River Delta in the north to the Mekong River in the south, the scenes throughout Vietnam are timeless, with green rice paddies tended by labourers in conical hats.

By: Matt Moore

Matt Moore — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:34:16 +0000

NitinK – I agree that we have to look at more than the numbers of bloggers. I am going to leave Bradley’s pyramid to one side for the moment.

More data: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Web_2.0.pdf

It seems to be around 30% of US internet users have played around with something that Pew labels Web 2.0ish.

Based purely on observation & guesswork, there are probably around x3 regular comment posters per internal blogger (or participants) and about x10 people who are aware that this activity is going on. Unless that blogger is the CEO.

To what extent do power laws apply inside the firewall?

And does anyone have more robust data?

(Please excuse me, I am a stats junky)

By: Jane McConnell

Jane McConnell — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 09:05:58 +0000

Andrew,your post and the following comments make for good reading for intranet managers who are struggling with if and how they should implement internal blogs. The “if” is a bigger question than the “how”. It is clear to me that 2.0 functions used internallly will be much slower coming than on the public web. This is supported by figures from a Global Intranet Study I conducted in June – August 2006 with just over one hundred companies around the world. You can see one graph on this post on my blog which is a snapshot of the “internal blogosphere” of the survey population.

link to my post:
http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2007/03/web_20_adoption.html

By: Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:43:09 +0000

Thanks Andrew. Taking the counterpoint of Euan Semple’s recent comments, we have a solid discussion on the table, which I think is a useful one. I side with you on this Andrew – not only is it difficult to get adoption, it is particularly difficult to create a technological and social context where there are useful emergent results for the enterprise.
My blog post on this:
http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/03/post_12.html

By: NCauldwell

NCauldwell — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:22:29 +0000

I’m reaching the older end of social networking generation. From my perspective, adoption of E2.0 tech won’t be a problem, so long as advanced communication experiences, provided by the likes of Facebook, can be transitioned to E2.0 apps.

Email feels archaic in comparison to the web services I use for my social life. Why would I want my comms with colleagues to be disjointed, un-tagged, and un-attached from rich personal profiles? These are people I work with, not email addresses.

If someone could just take the principles of Facebook, inc. the ‘Live Feed’, they’d have a tool I’d use and recommend to others. If you’re a E2.0 developer, please, look at Facebook, analyse the transactions and artefacts that initiate the respective transactions, and convert the whole thing to work with docs, presentations, spreadsheets, and most importantly, rewards.

By: Kathleen Gilroy

Kathleen Gilroy — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:16:47 +0000

Working inside the enterprise 2.0/web 2.0 model is much like learning a new language. And like language learning, I have found the best way to gain adoption is immersion. In a program that I developed for the American Library Association, 50 librarians were given a complete web 2.0 tool set (blogs, wikis, podcasting, and a directory) and were asked to immerse themselves in the tools and through that immersion develop applications for them. At the end of six weeks, a number of things had happened. The librarians had taken over the tools and made them their own in terms of look and feel and features. They had figured out many interesting and powerful applications for them. Now a year later, this program has been cloned at over 20 libraries. It has a very 2.0 structure and seems to be a powerful way to gain adoption. Rather than “build it and they will come,” the motto should be “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” (Winston Churchill)

By: NitinK

NitinK — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:23:21 +0000

Great point, Matt! But the fact that 8% are blogging is not to say that the total *participation* is only 8%; if you count the occasional commenters and the total lurkers, then the overall community participating in blogging is a great deal larger.

Bradley Horowitz represented this best with his 1-10-100 pyramid:
http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5

By: Matt Moore

Matt Moore — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:13:18 +0000

Web 2.0 evangelists say that everyone is blogging. How can we dam this unstoppable flood?

A Pew survey from last year stated that 19% of US 12-17 year olds blog (& 8% of adults).

Not bad but compared to SMS penetration among consumers (76% in the US for 18-24 year olds) – kinda punny.

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP Bloggers Report July 19 2006.pdf
http://psmsus.blogspot.com/2007/01/us-sms-penetration-by-age-group.html

So what I am saying is: Even in the consumer space, the use of these technologies is promising but not inevitable.

By: NitinK

NitinK — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:27:54 +0000

I think you’ve nailed it with this post – adoption is a *key issue* that will need to be overcome by Enterprise 2.0. Regardless of how useful it is (even if ten-fold), it is far from given that widespread adoption will happen and certainly not automatic.

In your post, you point out that users will vote with their feet and adopt only those technologies that make the most sense for them and that are easy to use. I would go one step further – in a corporate environment (unlike for the Internet at large), there are forces that will actually *obstruct* the rapid adoption of cutting-edge technologies – very often, the IT departments of large companies fall in this category.

The reasons are not particularly sinister – the problem is that the risk-reward profile for the IT group is often quite different (and in conflict) with that of the Enterprise at large; they have little to gain, and a great deal to lose, by encouraging early adoption of risky new technologies, even if those technologies could provide an overall competitive advantage in the medium term.

I recently posted a graph of these differing risk profiles here, on the Software Abstractions blog:
http://blog.softwareabstractions.com/the_software_abstractions/2007/02/web_25_the_soci_1.html

By: Jeremy Francis

Jeremy Francis — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:38:43 +0000

In times gone by I think I’d have landed on the ‘mandated approach to driving adoption’ for these technologies (and behaviours perhaps more critically) – and in doing so I’d have welcomed an energy vampire across my threshold.

Now, a few years to the wiser, I suspect that a tipping point will be reached, driven by a combination of societal behavioral change (already happening), new blood into the workforce and younger, prolific enterprise leaders (who’ve already crossed the tech/behavioural Rubicon) setting an example. The value proposition, privacy and security issues are distractions, which will get solved, as they did when email got introduced.

So then the question for me is how do I influence the pace at which we (my firm) take the plunge?

I want to focus where there’s passion, particularly if that happens to coincide with organisational influence (new intake and leadership) and to let the evolving networks do the leg work. There was a time when only academics used email and the Internet (10 years ago?) and look where we are today……