Holiday reading

Published by Martin De Saulles | Filed under Innovation, Web 2.0

Just back from a relaxing 2 weeks of mainly sun in Brittany. I finally caught up with some books that have been on my reading list for a while: Blog! By David Klein and Dan Burstein, Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel , Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger , Mashup Corporations by Andy Mulholland, and The Long Tail By Chris Anderson. I don’t have time to write reviews of each and better reviewers than me have already done the job. However, if you are not familiar with these titles then there is a Web 2.0 (apologies for using the term but it does the job) theme to them. While several of them cover similar ground and the same blogging anecdotes seem to appear repeatedly, they certainly gave me some food for thought - holidays are great for providing the time for reflection on what you read. One of my main thoughts centres around the potentially disruptive nature of some of these new technologies for the established order within many organisations. Blogs, wikis and other web-based services allow employees to circumvent centrally controlled systems for communicating and sharing information. Obviously, this is not an original thought but I wonder how many organisations (public and private) have really started to think about this. I suspect many people are still struggling to keep control of their email inboxes and are not interested in getting to grips with a new generation of technologies. However, these new services will continue to evolve and organisations smart enough to harness their potential will be the winners. Tools for information sharing and collaborative working have never been so abundant, cheap and easy to use.