This week in links - week 43, 2008

"Poll: Enterprise Jury Still Out on Web 2.0" by Mary Jander at Internet Evolution:

Enterprise managers are divided in their thinking about Web 2.0 applications as business tools. But in a recent poll on this site, a sizeable portion of respondents -- nearly 38 percent -- indicated the concept has lots to offer. About 28 percent think it's too soon to tell.

The ground is likely to be tilled most rapidly in sales and marketing, where social networking offers results that are more obvious than elsewhere. After all, if you can harvest X number of prospects or buyers from an online forum, that's easier to quantify than the amount of productivity gleaned from a financial services wiki, a blogosphere from HR, or a social network for multiple
departments.

Further, it's a mistake to think of Web 2.0 ever taking over most successful business applications. We're more apt to see a gradual adoption of Web 2.0 fundamentals creep into business apps than subsume them anytime soon.

"SaaS Revenue Growing, Market Set To Double By 2012" by Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise:

Initial concerns over security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become pervasive," Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

Driving the growth in SaaS deployments is businesses' desire to reduce their IT capital expenditure budget and to rapidly implement software that supports a specific business need, Gartner said. In addition, the increased availability of broadband has given organizations the bandwidth to support SaaS.

"Web 2.0ver?" by Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic Corporation (via Daniel Tunkelang):

To me, web 2.0 was, is, and will remain, an important collection of concepts that will endure:

• A read/write web, where we can participate, update, annotate, comment, link, tag, etc
• A social web, where there is awareness of relationships that can be leveraged appropriatel
• User-generated content, which is here to stay and, in fact, always has been (think: radio call-in shows, Kids Say the Darndest Things, or America's funniest
  Home Videos)
• The use of the web for communication and entertainment. People are natural communicators. We will always adapt our tools to that fundamental need.
• A personalized web, that understands what we like and how we like to get it

"Revealing the long tail in office conversations" a research paper by Michael J. Brzozowski and Sarita Yardi at the HP Social Computing Lab (download position paper here):

Blogs, wikis, and forums can break down geographic distances, workgroup boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in an organization. While these tools significantly lower the barriers to producing content, employees may perceive there to be little incentive to invest their own time in providing this content for public consumption. We found that increasing visibility often motivated employees to participate and contribute content. Employees were motivated by the opportunity for attention, and the ways in which social media tools enabled or hindered this opportunity influenced the way it was used.