Web2.0 in the enterprise

Web 2.0 is all about the transition from individual productivity (user running MS office locally) to group productivity (collective document generation & editing – forums & wikis).

Enterprise Web 2.0 benefits:

• Less email costs (increased use of blogs, wikis)
• Search benefits (document collection and archive)
• Easier updates/patches (central update as opposed to mass desktop updates)
• More transparency (this should in fact be first on the list of benefits).

When organizations don’t provide employees the necessary tools, they go out to get them thus violating company policy. A good example is employees using Yahoo mail and Gmail for storing and forwarding big company confidential documents since corporations have a 100MB mailbox limit.

P.S. Google Docs is the currently the second biggest money maker for Google after Adsense. Maybe that’ll change soon with the introduction of ads in Youtube.

Death of the Newspaper?

Livmint has published two articles that have contradictory headlines – first about readers, advertisers and analysts abandoning newspapers and second about the increase in newspaper circulation.

The panelists and participants at the Web 2.0 Expo had no doubts in their mind – the Internet was killing the newspaper, and the newspaper readers are a dying breed.

Some of my takeaways from the conference:

How Web 2.0 is owchanging traditional media?

• New Publishing – focus on aggregation & curation of content of a niche audience
• Reduced acquisition cost for content generators & editors.
• Guerilla marketing (PR, link swapping & viral marketing) as opposed to brand advertising.

For all those MSM firms hoping Web2.0 is their way out of this slump:

• Not everyone can be a content aggregator, it’s a fast-paced, “winner takes most” marketplace.