Last week a new perspective on the differences between 1.0 and 2.0 came to mind: 1.0 was about showing up and differentiating yourself from everything else (such was the ‘lead’ topic of discussion with our interactive agency clients when planning their entrance to the web as a channel); 2.0 is about connecting to what’s relevant based on an ‘identity’ (a ’part’ connecting to a ‘whole’ in specific ways).

Conversations are an element of connection. While blogs help in this endeavor, they have their downsides — older stuff gets buried (without regard to its timelessness or relevancy) and the ‘cost of a click’ to get to the comments is a barrier to seeing some valuable insights. So I’m raising a comment to one of my posts. Sandro Groganz said:

“Thanks Paula for this article, especially that I learned about Democratizing Innovation - and that’s really one of the cores of Enterprise 2.0. Just look at what happens in the public since social software is in town: Wikipedia became the larget encyclopedia, millions of weblogs change the media landscape and it all leads towards democratized innovation.

All the opinions and ideas expressed in Weblogs are a sign of and trigger new innovation. Additionally, there’s what I call the ‘freedom of collaboration’: leave a comment wherever you want, add a trackback, edit a Wiki page. Anyone can contribute to a network of free innovation.

Take this into the corporate space and you have Enterprise 2.0: Colleagues who might have never seen each other, but read and comment on each others blogs, edit Wiki pages, etc. Transfer social media and collaborative encyclopedias into the enterprise and you’ll get an environment where individuals’ expertise is being valued higher, simply because it can express itself better … which is all about democratizing innovation.”

I liked Sandro’s reference to “freedom of collaboration”. It reinforces the uneasiness this stuff causes because it cannot be controlled in typical ways. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be governed (Wikipedia would not be successful without the infrastructure and governance model that was put in place, nor would it be successful if both of these were not set up to be emergent — they can change as new things are discovered).

Certainly 1.0 introduced free connections, but they were uninformed. More infrastructure was needed to create more informed connections. New mechanisms were needed to add repetitious structure (e.g. a wiki adds common structure that was typically dealt with by using templates in html — but too high of a barrier for the greater ‘common’ man — there was still room for simplification). Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order — it adds just enough structure to facilitate and leverage free energy, but not so much as to squelch it. It adds a layer of relevancy and/or identity (what’s relevant to me is somewhat inherent to who I am and what I’m interested in).

Enterprise 2.0 increases the means by which to leverage the many connections that create an ‘identity’. Odd…that’s what ‘meta’ is all about (the Greek equivalent to ‘essence’ — in front of, behind, next to — all the things that define the space that something takes up). So, I guess 2.0 is the means to begin to ‘hardwire’ a metastructure — and 3.0 is the automated version (now that we’ve settled that debate).

So (physics majors step in here) if we go with the energy analogy, are we talking about both freeing energy and adding a frequency to the signal, or does the signal have a frequency and we’re adding tuning mechanisms? And maybe if the semantic movement leveraged this analogy, they’d be able to ‘fix’ whatever barriers they keep running into?

P.S. In a comment made directly to Sandro I celebrated his insights and ability to ‘connect’ to these concepts. As we look to the barriers to entry and the ability to ‘get it’, I raised the connotation of my own inability to ’see’ the popular 3D images from the mid-90s. No matter how many different instructions people gave me and how carefully I followed them, I could not make myself see the 3D view. I began to doubt whether or not everyone really saw something at all. Eventually something ’snapped’ into place and I could see the images, but I still can’t tell you what changed and I often can’t leverage that trigger when I have problems seeing them even now. This suggests that while something might ‘be’ relevant, we still have to be able to ’see’ the relevancy.