A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you’d see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You’ll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.
David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.
His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said “resistance is futile”, but that’s just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you’d better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don’t normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.
Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I’ve spent a bit of time with some IBM’ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it’s pretty progressive stuff — I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they’re part of Big Blue.
The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I’m assuming that there was no Q&A after all.