John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I especially not liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

These web sites will set further expectations on the internal systems you use and a requirement to integrate internal information with these external sources of information. Web 2.0 has an answer for this as well with an integration technique known as "mash up", the ability mix information from multiple sources using the web browser itself as the point of integration. These external sources of information also provide something that our internal information systems could never provide, a critical mass of opinion utilizing the Wisdom of the Crowds. We will ultimately need to combine external opinion with our internal opinion to get more accurate predictive decision making with our own unique insights inside the enterprise.

When I read what John has written, I can't help but think of our previous discussions on the strength of weak ties.  Companies that are willing to seek out knowledge internally and externally of their control boundaries are likely to have a greater business advantage over those companies that prevent their workers from taking the discussion beyond the office walls.  What a boring life that would be to only be able to talk to colleagues that wear only the same company logo you are wearing?  Companies need to accept the changes that are about to take place as their youngest workers will likely want and need to collaborate with more than just their fellow employees.  The world via social publishing offers their workers more than what most single companies can provide alone.

eWeek: A Forrester report says social networking, RSS and mashups will be among the fastest-growing technologies by 2013.

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The alternate-reality game genre has a new friend, and a new format, thanks to Penguin Books, the famous British publishing house.

On Tuesday, Penguin and startup Six to Start launched their new ARG, We Tell Stories, a new-style game that its creators say is a hybrid of traditional story-telling, Web 2.0-style mashups, interactive games and classic novels.

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Open Source Community was the first place I saw mentioning an error in a post at Mashable.com regarding Drupal 6. OSC's article is Mashable Blunders, Cleans it up, and Moves on!

I was just looking through my Google Alerts and noticed some uninformed blogger was running with these headlines today: Acquia Releases Drupal Version Six and the article contained this line: "Drupal is the content management system maker most recently in the news last December for raising $7 million."

Normally, I would ignore such nonsense since I have come to terms with the fact that there is nothing more freely available on the Internet than pure ignorance.

The Mashable.com post in question has since been corrected to the headline of Drupal Version Six Released and give credit back to Drupal.org. As you read in the comments, Acquia's Jeff Whatcott was also quick to make sure credit went to Drupal.org and not Acquia. It's not in anybody's interest for any one company to take full credit of an open source community driven product and most observers of Drupal are aware that Acquia has placed a lot of effort in assuring the community that's not what they're about.

"Underneath the hood, though, the technologies that make mashups possible are a profound change in how web sites manage and expose their data. More and more sites are exposing their data using simple RESTful APIs and XML feeds, and the new tools in Drupal 6 will make integrating that data into your sites a lot easier."

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"IBM Mashup Starter Kit is a preview of a new Web 2.0-based mashup platform that empowers business professionals to rapidly get the information they need, no matter where it resides. This toolkit enables users to assemble their own Web 2.0 mashup applications, solving business problems without aid from information technology (IT) specialists."

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"So, you want to create your own mashup? Great! Mashups -- web applications that grab information from different external sources and mix it together in new and exciting ways -- are fun to build, popular with users, and oh-so-very Web 2.0."

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"Apparently, Microsoft is diverging from the rest of the Web 2.0 world on how to approach integration and mashups. REST (Representational State Transition) is an architectural style that is transforming how systems integrate together, but it isn’t a standard. The ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) is a popular RESTful standard used by Google and Yahoo among others to integrated services and manage publishing of information. However, Microsoft has taken exception to APP that everyone else is adopting and chosen to build their own protocol."

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