A three year history of Web 2.0 - Business Week

Sometimes the Internet moves fast and sometimes it flutters and dances more like a butterfly making it almost impossible to figure out where it will go next. The May 22 issue of Business Week cover story is Beyond Blogs. It is a follow-up to a 2005 story, just three years ago. At that time they said: "'Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out,' we warned, adding: 'Catch up...or catch you later.'"

They took their own advice and created Blogspotting.net It is still in use. The current post is about a future BW article asking customers for ideas about what should be covered and asking for input. 0.1: We tell our readers what we think they want to know. 2.0: We work with our readers to assure our content is relevant to their interests.

Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one. We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg's economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. ... But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like Linkedin help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. ... But there's an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it's growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose "blogs" from our headline. The revised title: "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

We can relate to this. Our focus is Enterprise 2.0 but the interface between what's happening within enterprises and what is happening in the rest of the world is blurring. Executives are publicly blogging, McKinsey & Company is on Facebook and one of America's largest banks is represented on Facebook by a branch in the mid-west, not by headquarters PR. Social media with the emphasis on media rather than technology makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, there are productivity changes, HR changes and contractor interface changes that are as important to the enterprise as the more visible marketplace changes.

Since our story, major investors and corporations have focused on the profit potential of social sites. Like Baron's Twitter crowd writ large, they promise relationships, millions of them. Such media could be worth a fortune. Strike that: They'd better be. Over the past three years, tech and media companies have been opening up their checkbooks for these properties. Google gobbled up YouTube for $1.65 billion; NewsCorp bought MySpace for $588 million; and Microsoft bought a pricey slice of Facebook that put a $15 billion valuation on the company. Venture firms, meanwhile, have been racing to fund scores of social media startups.

Sometimes it is easier to guess where we are going when we have the perspective of history. When a three year period provides that kind of perspective, you know things are happening fast and fluttering in multiple directions. You can read the complete story at:Beyond Blogs