Fred Cavazza has an interesting and link-rich post on Enterprise 2.0:

To make a long story short, it means using inside an enterprise the successful tools of web 2.0.

Please, do not sum-up this to internal blogs or wikis, this notion gather much richer fields and above all implies deep mutations which go farther than rolling-out new tools.

Also note the emphasis in this diagram of (1) user centricity (2) syndication (3) apis; it's hard to disagree with this though I expect that syndication, perhaps coupled with Atom Publishing Protocol-style push (also see our posts on GData), will probably remain far more important than APIs. We'll see.

On e-mail:

Internal communication gets more simpler: no more lost emails, stacked replies where someone is always missing in CC, doubles and susceptibility management (”I am the project leader, why am I only in CC?“). Everything is handled by the blog engine: publication, comments, archives, categories… Blogs are also a perfect match for new comers in a team which can have access to discussions history. If you are looking for a golden rule, here it is: if more than 5 person are in CC of your mail, than you better write a post.

This is one reason we've been working so hard on serious e-mail integration of blogging and  e-mail; people are going to remain "mentally comfortably" with e-mail for a long time and will usually be running an e-mail app or have quick access to one. In the BlogMatrix Platform, with a simple cc: you can move a discussion from the e-mail world into the blog + comments one.

Brief comments:

• Fred has to revisit his CSS to increase line spacing; I actually sucked the entire article into Word and reformatted so I could read the damned thing. On the other hand, I always do that.
• Fred is much more focused on the changes to enterprise culture than I am; years of working at large three-letter acronym companies garners a certain cynicism to culture change. My personal belief is that if tools are bottom-up useful and inherently culture changing, that's where we'll see the ball start rolling.
• Also note the mention of microblogging and "lifelog" (elsewhere called a lifestream), you know, just because ;-)

"Back in skinny jeans" (we wish) has an excellent description of RSS for the everyperson, with graphics and everything:

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

This is the first of several posts I'll be making about Google Base -- and in particular, the RSS/Atom "bulk upload" format which extends those XML formats with addition information that allows Google Base population.

We're working on a project to demonstrate structured data for "sales lead". In terms of standard "exisiting" structured element, this has a contact person, company, phone number and address. In addition, we extend it with Product Name, Percentage Closed, Close Date and so forth. The title of the entry represents the Opportunity and the body is for other comments.

You can see an example of this here. If you're interested in what the blogmatrix.cfg for this looks like, I've attached a sample snippet.

We haven't done anything particular clever yet. In particular, we'll be adding the ability to query against Percentage Closed using tags, items past the close date, and maybe a few other things for the demo.

What's really neat is that we can export this into our RSS feed also, using the Google Base definitions (a mix of predefined type and some we've made up on the spot). You can view the feed (for this one entry!) here or here's the important part (reformatted for readibility):

 <rss version="2.0">
 <channel>
 ...
  <item>
   <title>
    The potential to sell 10000 shiny pennies
   </title>
   <link>
    http://home01.semantic.blogmatrix.com/:entry:home01-2006-07-13-0008/
   </link>
   <g:product_type>
    Penny
   </g:product_type>
   <gc:sales_status type="string">
    Still looking for a sucker
   </gc:sales_status>
   <gc:percent_closed type="int">
    0
   </gc:percent_closed>
   <gc:person hcard:type="fn" type="string">
    Johnny Q. Public
   </gc:person>
   <gc:organization hcard:type="org" type="string">
    Bank of Canada
   </gc:organization>
   <gc:job_position hcard:type="title" type="string">
    Secretary to the Undersecretary
   </gc:job_position>
   <g:location>
    1 Bank Street
    Ottawa, Ontario
    Canada
   </g:location>
   <gc:phone_work type="string">
    605-666-6666
   </gc:phone_work>
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

More to follow...

I was at the University of Toronto this morning, courtesy of Greg Wilson to run through in more detail the demo I gave at DemoCamp several months back (link, link). In return I got a demo of BlogScope which is tracking an impressive 2.6 million blogs as of today. BlogScope does "text stream" analysis of blog posts, tracking what's popular, what's hot ("bursts"), and doing a form a faceted analysis ("correlation") -- what other words are popular in posts that have a certain word/phrase in them -- which is cleverly done since one would expect this to be a O(N²) algorithm.

We discussed structured data, geotags, tagging (all pretty key concepts in BlogMatrix) and so forth and how they could be used to extend BlogScope. There's a lot of potential for this application in "intranets", closed networks, if RSS/Atom had widespread adoption to export events and data with an organization.

Here's another useful RDF vocabulary: SIOC, Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities:

SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) is an ontology for describing discussion forums and posts on topic threads in online community sites. This includes but is not limited to: blogs, bulletin boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.

My major issue with SIOC is that it's working in the same knowledge space as Atom N3 (previously mentioned here) but uses a different vocabulary. Obviously, RDF knows how to work around this but it's a shame that SIOC didn't use Atom's painstakingly thought out terminology. I suspect this happened because SIOC comes more from the Bulletin Board world than the Blogging one.

DeWitt Clinton has a good article about why you -- i.e. "we" -- should use Atom over RSS:

If you’re a human then you’ll probably have no problems spotting that the first one is plain text, the second one is XML-escaped HTML, and the third is HTML wrapped in an XML CDATA section. If presented in a web browser, in a HTML <div/> tag perhaps, then a human will have no trouble interpreting the content.

But if you’re a computer, it isn’t quite that easy. To a computer, the contents of a RSS <description/> element are opaque. The best a computer can do with it is hope to render it for a human to interpret.

...

What if you added semantic microformat markup to your HTML? If you’re using an opaque data format, then you may as well have spared yourself the effort, as no client will know it’s there.

Or what if you wanted to put some other structured data in your syndicated content feed? Geospacial data, perhaps. Product data. Or perhaps Google’s GData format. If it’s syndicated over RSS, no one will ever know.

So the problem is that the RSS syndication format is that it is lossy. Lossy insofar as information you had when writing the data is lost when it is passed over the wire.

...

My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication.

Alas, commenter Kosso finds the key problem with using Atom: 

Does Atom support enclosures. And multiple ones at that?
If so, I would look at creating a toolset to podcast in both formats.

However, that does not mean feeds won’t be broken. So many publishing tool are broken. RSS is ’simpler’ than atom.

...

I don’t want to fan a feed war, but I want to judge by trying to build a feed publishing tool which works.

BlogMatrix will always have a podcasting component (i.e. adding attachments to posts) and that means until Apple's iTunes accepts Atom feeds, well, RSS it is. Afterwards ... 

Atom N3 is ... well, I'll let the The Sun BabelFish Blog explain it:

Atom N3 is an ontology that closely maps the Atom feed format to N3. It clearly reveals the logical structure of the atom feed format, and is what is needed to make atom:

• easily and clearly extensible
• available to SPARQL queries
• easily mappable to java objects through frameworks such as So(m)mer

Read more here. I mention N3 because we're planning to provide an RDF interface to all the data you see here and N3 is one of the formats we plan to provide it in. If we can figure it out.