Read/Write Web has a brief post on a Forrester report about Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise. Though RWW emphasizes that IM is #1, if you take the "moderate value" ranking blogging looks a lot better. And also, since podcasting is blogging with attachments (plus a mindset, I know), well blogs look pretty damned useful don't they!

 

Sharon Gaudin at Information Week writes:

Younger employees -- like that new batch of college grads hitting the market right now -- are going to be pushing employers to use Web 2.0 technologies on the job. And if their companies don't start adopting them, younger workers will most likely just start using them on the sly.

"The upcoming generation is going to have a major impact on business. She will expect to have access to her tools in the workplace," said Marthin De Beer, a senior VP with Cisco Systems. "It would be like someone from my generation not having access to e-mail and instant messaging. If they don't get this stuff, they probably won't be there for a long time."

Henry Story has a nice organizing concept for Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is all about micro killer apps. These are killer apps that are so simple its difficult to explain them to people. Each one of them does one tiny little thing very well. del.icio.us does bookmarking right. flickr does photo sharing and tagging. RSS/Atom helps keep track of changes to resources. Small is beautiful.

Via Gagglescape:

I'm finding this report rather interesting, if only for the number of areas where it touches on BlogMatrix is doing (rather well, I may add) which I've marked in bold:

Gartner's 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle Highlights Key Technology Themes

Web 2.0 technologies and business models dominate emerging technologies together with Real World Web and Applications Architecture

• Web 2.0
• Social Network Analysis (SNA)
• Ajax
• Collective intelligence
• Mashup
• Real World Web
• Location-aware technologies
• Location-aware applications
• Sensor Mesh Networks
• Applications Architecture
• Event-driven Architecture
• Model-driven Architecture
• Corporate Semantic Web

“The emerging technologies hype cycle covers the entire IT spectrum but we aim to highlight technologies that are worth adopting early because of their potentially high business impact,” said Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and inventor of the first hype cycle. One of the features highlighted in the 2006 Hype Cycle is the growing consumerisation of IT. “Many of the Web 2.0 phenomenon have already reshaped the Web in the consumer world”, said Ms Fenn. “Companies need to establish how to incorporate consumer technologies in a secure and effective manner for employee productivity, and also how to transform them into business value for the enterprise”.