Stumbled upon: Enterprise 2.0, intranets and cognitive surplusses

There are now a lot of open tabs in my browser – small wonder when researching, conferencing and preparing a new consulting gig. Let me try a rundown, no special order:

Clay Shirky says on CIO Insight that businesses are just beginning to understand the value—and challenges—of social technologies.

Nora Young of CBC Spark show posted audio from a full interview with Clay Shirky. The interview is worth hearing, and touches on some of the topics in his new book (Here Comes Everybody, see also here and here) – such as the pros and cons of social media, new business models online, and how big change comes from human motivation, not shiny new technologies. Download the mp3.

Nora and Clay started off by talking about our “cognitive surplus,” which Clay describes as “all the free thinking time that society has access to… in the brains of its citizens that isn’t getting used for specific tasks.” Think TV watching time, except Clay has some ideas on how you should be/could be spending your surplus.

There’s a (german language) issue of UNESCO Heute on the web society and its understanding and emergent uses of knowledge, this is a rather heterogenous beast, a compilation of small articles:

[…] Begriffe, Konzepte und Themen der Wissensgesellschaft mit Bezug auf das Internet

Then here’s a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit about collaboration.

Corporations all over the world are making tremendous investments in technology, from servers, to storage, and network. Although technology is used on a day-to-day basis (think about the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) deployments) to enhance productivity and to curb costs, it seems that collaboration is still best performed face-to-face. The study provides a glimpse into the reason: trust.

Jay Cross too has some hints for online collaboration (pdf). Dion Hinchcliffe is explaining where the conversation is going (“Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites“), including Twitter and Friendfeed uses for business. And Michael Krigsman analyzes power politics and pitfalls in Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Yes, we need to understand the corporate context to make this work, this is true especially when dealing with middle management. Now, getting out there and trying it is an option, it’s “show and tell” – indeed, in my experience upper management gets it rather easily. Still I somehow like this cartoon by geek and poke. Better beware this situation …

And finally check out Ross Mayfields slides of his keynote at Van Web 2.0 naar Enterprise 2.0 in the Netherlands:

I wasn’t there, nor at the Intranet Summit 2008 (Saim Alkan has a german language summary). I’ve been at the Intranet.days (meeting Saim and others) and will be here at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Varese and have some rebooting too.

Thomas Vanderwal will be there both times, in fact we will have the same flight from Milano to Copenhagen. Here, he writes on success with enterprise social tools, i.e. difficulties of applying social tools in the organisation using an illustrative model of four intersecting areas of enterprise social tools:

– tools (I would include methods as well here)
– interface and ease of use (yes, usability has some merits and plays an essential role for adoption)
– sociality
– encouraging use

Hmm, the model can serve as a good starting point, even when – as Paula Thornton observes in the comments – placing tools so prominently feels awkward.