Wow, Venkatesh G. Rao writes the article of the year, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War.  I'm going to have to reread this article and do some reflection before I have anything of value to add.  Please do yourself a favor and read this article.

Note: Social Media, Social Publishing, Social Technology.  I wish we could all settle on the same term.

Internet Evolution: "The IBM Data Governance Council sent out a press release this week predicting that within the next four years, data will become an asset that is reported on the balance sheet of corporations, and that data governance will become a statutory requirement.

This trend could bring a new emphasis on data quality and potentially increase corporate use of social networking as a means of improving that quality."

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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.

Kathleen Reidy: "I attended a star-studded open source panel this morning, with Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks, Jeff Whatcott of Acquia and John Newton of Alfresco. The panel and audience members discussed adoption of open source specifically for social applications.

There was a bit of discussion on market readiness for open source in this sector."

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Drupal and Wordpress,  were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.

Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. These finalists were selected (by Webware editors) from a pool of over 5000 qualifying nominees. But the 100 winners were selected by popular vote. These winning 100 products represent the best of the Web, according the people who use it.

Both Drupal and Wordpress were two of ten winners in the "Publishing and Photography" category.  The remaining eight winners in Webware's 100 publishing category were web services and didn't provide stand-alone applications you can install directly on your server.

Packt is pleased to announce the availability of its new book on Elgg, the free open-source tool used to create social networks. Written by Mayank Sharma, the book teaches users to create their own fully customized, hosted social network for their business, organization, or group of friends.

Elgg is an open-source social web application licensed under GPL version 2, and runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It offers a networking platform combining elements of blogging, e-portfolios, news feed aggregation, file sharing, and social networking.

"It further does not take a great leap to see how business executives could greatly benefit from being able to measure and monitor their energy and materials use in real time and share that information via a closed social network within their own company."

Eric Lundquist, "New Role for Social Networks", eWeek, March 14, 2008

"It's like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites."

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