All in Industry Analysis

I received a request from Donna Vitasovich for a definition of “web 2.0 and web 3.0” that she could quote on her blog. I referred her to my post Using a Blog for a “Web 2.0” Presentation instead of PowerPoint. That post includes a definition of Web 2.0 that distinguishes between “Web 2.0 as Technology Infrastructure” and “Web 2.0 as Communication and Business Process.” Here’s what I wrote:
It's amazing what you can find by searching the web -- if you know how to look. I've been heads-down for the past few weeks on a client project, a strategic market analysis for an international outsourcing firm. I've been researching available public sources of sales and technology trends in a variety of markets. I've been aggressively pursuing a variety of web based research options as well as purchasing research documents in a few key areas.

Overlapping and Evolving Online Communities are becoming the Rule, Not the Exception

I received an email last night from a reader of this blog asking me to comment on cost estimates he had received for the development of a new social networking service. He wants to offer targeted services to a specific but large population segment. His thinking corresponds with a lot of interest people have these days for applying social networking techniques in a profitable or meaningful way to different population groups — young people, old people, professionals, managers, sports enthusiasts, podcasters, jobseekers, lonely hearts — you name it. If there isn’t already a MySpace/YouTube/Linkedin clone targeting any group that can write a check or reach a keyboard, there soon will be.
One of the more interesting blog comment series I've read recently is the ongoing discussion about Lotus Notes over at Rod Boothby's Innovation Creators blog. A couple of weeks ago Rod posted Lotus Notes - The Asbestos of Enterprise IT. In it he lambasted Lotus Notes' usability, among other things. This has led to some back and forth - and mudslinging - that when read in the right light tells us a lot about the advantages entrenched platforms have in large corporations when they compete with up-and-coming Web 2.0 "newcomers."
We hear a lot about the customer- and user-side benefits of Web 2.0 -- the collaboration, the rapid development and deployment, and the rapid formation of "communities" around common interests. As a change from this it's a pleasure to read some clear thinking about the business models that support Web 2.0, especially models associated with open source, software as a service, and software as an "appliance."
We (Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, Robyn Tippins, Jeremiah Owyang, and I) had fun schmoozing about three topics last Saturday: (1) HP's planned reduction in telecommuting, (2) Technological threats to the continued relevance of corporate marketing departments, and (3) Increasing incompatibility in how individual web based accounts are handled.
I've been thinking some more about the issues raised in my earlier posting The Inevitablility of "Too Many Gateways". One of the reasons the situation exists, as Ismael Ghalimi described where he has to maintain many separate accounts to manage different internet gateway services for feeds and data exchange, is that it's becoming increasingly possible to create such services and to make then available on the web.
Bloggers are commenting (e.g., here) on the replacement of Times New Roman as the default font in the beta version of Microsoft's Office 2007 released earlier this year. An initial lamentation is that the new font sets may not be available for the Mac without separate licensing. The deeper significance of this move may be that a serif font is being replaced by a sans-serif font, perhaps because the sans-serif font is easier to read on screen. So, who cares about fonts, anyway? Well, I certainly do, ever since my introduction to the Mac back in the 20th Century.