This blog, and the collection of esteemed writers herein, came together as a result of annual events that FAST Search & Technology sponsored, focused on Enterprise 2.0- related issues. In 2008, the last year before being purchased by Microsoft, Chief Technology Officer Bjørn Olstad offered a wonderful vision that FAST was working toward. Recast below, I’ve pulled a number of key quotes for review.

The theme of FASTforward ‘08 was “The User Revolution”. Based on what Bjørn spoke of then, one has to wonder what has happened to the potential of that revolution.

…previously people thought that intent was what they typed in a query box…And now people are seeing that intent can be captured in many ways. It can be what you type, it can be what you do, it can be how you collaborate with other people, it can be you as a person, it can be the team you work in… How do you capture intent? How do you act on intent?

Power is switching from a publishing perspective to a consumer perspective. That is a big challenge…

Bjørn explained that over time FAST had been focused more on the back end than the front end — the interaction space. And that they committed to a shift to the front end through their release of an Interaction Management module, part of their overall planned architecture.

If you can work on developing the user experience, that adds so much more value than developing deep in the core. So over time we have shifted most of the focus to create that richness about how search is powering actual algorithmic experiences far beyond what people believe was search — in portals, in deep applications, in rich applications — being powered by algorithms.

In the past, applications have kept various types of content, structured data and media as separate elements. FAST wanted to break down the barriers between these.

We have a new search core which is taking this to the next level…unstructured data, text, rich media all blended together but natively represented, and query languages of all types to access this that are also native.

…you get a new level of completeness, a data fusion model where you work on all types of data and it works on all types of queries, coming from applications (legacy) and users.

He goes on to talk about the significance of tags, but not only explicit tags, but things that can be inferred from behaviors.

That connection between work — that ability to tap into usage and convert that into metadata, implicit metadata, that subsequently can power more precise user experiences — has also been a key method.

He spoke of the difference of doing so at the individual levels and also making inferences at a team level (more social implications), moving lastly to the crowd level (wisdom of crowds implications).

In reflecting on the evolution of search, Bjørn notes while many companies have leveraged search as a mechanism for revenue generation, search can be leveraged as a business platform:

So it’s not just a technology — how can I put a search bar in the upper right-hand corner — this has become a platform as to how I can run my media company. Because the core assets have been changing. It used to be the content: I own the newspaper. Now…the power is with the user. How can they reach out to the user? Search is a key technology to do that.

It’s not just like the web search — you type a query, you get a list of links, you click on it and then you go and read it. What if it was quantitative? What if the value is not just in any document but is across documents and it’s only when you bring these pieces together that you actually see a pattern? …to get to a new level of analysis…bypassing the current BI level approach…using a much simpler access paradigm…

Talking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 that had already started to be seen across the market, Bjørn noted that even for the adoption of SharePoint, collaboration is one of the top 4 focuses. From a search perspective you can close the loop on things that go beyond the content itself and can look at the use of the content to infer value.

At that time, looking to the future of FAST Bjørn said:

The next generation technology for FAST has 3 pillars, 3 cornerstones…content [how can we aggregate it]…the user [search moves from being an API for content to something that can be managed directly]…a search core [changing the physics of search]

We need to rethink information access: is it databases, is it search, is it a business platform? This is really now changing and the technology stack is going to change forever, based on these components.

I really miss these events. The energy was tremendous.

If FAST was already moving toward this reality in early 2008, complete with customers demonstrating same, how is it that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to sell a similar vision at TED in early 2009, touted as the Next Web and Linked Data?

And what happened to all this forward momentum? Have we buried critical technologies again?

Everybody’s talking about social: social networking, social CRM, social-this, social-that. It’s all just noise to me. We’re social. Get over it. It’s redundant. It only has to be called out because the stupid technology wasn’t designed for real people. We get it already.

Heck, I’ve even been blathering about transparency, bladda, bladda. While all of this is still relevant, I now see the value in fine-tuning our focus just a bit. The real potential — the power curve — is in focusing on sharing.

Sharing is something that comes naturally to people — we want to help each other. Indeed sharing is at the top of the list in All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Working with each other ensures the survival of the species. It turns out that survival of the fittest isn’t just about strength, power and the ability to overpower others by competition — everyone for themselves — but that truly sustainable species rely equally on cooperation, or social sharing.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life.

Business cultures are ripe with language and actions of competitiveness. Many seek to ‘protect turf’. These behaviors are relevant during times of duress and/or limited resources. But embracing such language and mindsets can actually create duress and serve to unnecessarily limit the potential of existing resources.

A very telling visual representation of the limits imposed by such mindsets is the chart grabbed from a TED presentation by Johanna Blakley who spoke about the real issues that Intellectual Property protection impose on creativity and growth. [Thanks to @jorgebarba for sharing]

On the left are the 2007 Gross Sales in US $BIL of industries with low IP protection, on the right are the high IP. The evidence is staggering. Johanna also created her own chart to lay out a comparison of common items and where they fall into a copyright scheme.

Indeed what most intrigued me was when Johanna made the subtle distinctions between the idea and the expression thereof. We’ll just leave that as a pending topic to explore further, another time.

We’ve talked about IP on this blog before. The topic had high visibility at FASTforward ‘08 with a banner exclaiming (a quote that appears to be attributable to Bill Gates): “Intellectual Property has the shelf-life of a banana.” Heck, I even remember the most significant change I noticed in Bill Gates demeanor toward his competitors (even in close range on panels at Gartner conferences where the analysts relished stirring up trouble), when he exclaimed (paraphrasing):

I learned, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make money, I make money too.

And in a panel I hosted at FASTforward ‘08, I recall the most significant points brought up, related to IP and the negative implications in our changing environment:

• It’s both expensive and time consuming to actually protect intellectual property
• The rate of turnover of products is increasing at a rate that the window of opportunity to protect them is becoming shorter than the time it takes to do so
• The costs to protect IP are rising at a faster rate than the potential earnings to be gained

[Kudos to @jhagel @jobsworth @jmcgee and @billives for BE-ing the panel, and to @skemsley for covering it. I find it none-too-coincidental that they're all active on Twitter.]

Even the almighty dollar (euro, yen, etc.) is wielding its influence on concerns over publicly-shared infrastructure as companies rethink their opposition to operating in the cloud.

Enterprise 2.0 seeks to shift the balance away from oppressive, limiting cultures by facilitating open, sharing ways of working and ‘being’. Even in cultures where this is not the norm, E2.0 technologies and approaches will allow for the natural working and sharing tendencies of people to emerge and return the critical balance needed not just for sustainable survival but for productive striving (another great s-word).

FastForward colleague Bill Ives provided a glimpse of his summer hours, 21st-century style, which is informal, yet highly productive. He relays how his colleague Tom Davenport stays connected, even from the wild dunes of Cape Cod.

That was the case with me as well. Call me a wannabe “Technomadic.” From Chicago (where I was a panelist for a session at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture conference — details here), on northward to the wilderness of Upper Peninsula Michigan, Mackinac Island (pictured here), Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and, later in the summer, to the Green Mountain Inn in Vermont, I posted blogs, collaborated with colleagues, published research, and worked on applications, quite seamlessly, without anyone knowing where I was on any given day.

The Green Mountain Inn’s claim to fame is that Lowell Thomas, the famed broadcaster, would conduct his shows from the inn during ski season. In other words, Lowell wanted to get away on ski vacations without leaving work, so he brought his work with him. Now with wireless access and broadband, every average Joe can broadcast from the inn.

Some might say it’s a little obsessive to want to always stay connected; but I am my own boss, and therefore do not receive vacation pay. So I prefer to stay in touch with the world. But by spending a couple of hours a day online at a minimum, work flowed and clients were kept happy (I hope) and I still had a refreshing amount of downtime.

Technomadic is a term coined by Steve Roberts, who many years ago, set off on a cross-country trek on a bicycle outfitted with a satellite uplink, the latest communications technology and microprocessors of the time. Now, anyone can compute and collaborate, anywhere, anytime. The Web has made sense of place irrelevant to modern-day work.

The beauty of cloud computing was that it was something you just did without having to think too hard about it. Now, apparently, some people are trying to think very hard about it.

HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have just announced the creation of a “global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.”

What is the purpose of having a test bed?  I mean, isn’t the Internet and its user base the test bed for such things? (This is said partially tongue in cheek…) According to the joint press release, the “official” Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a testing environment to study cloud computing issues “on at a larger scale than ever before.”

The institutions supporting the test bed include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! will also host centers.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational later this year. Parties interested in using the test beds for their own budding cloud applications will need to go through a selection process, however.

This initiative is another sign — a very high-level one at that — of the tectonic shift taking place beneath the feet of the entire computer and software industry. End users are increasingly looking to the network to take advantage of applications, services, and utilities, versus installing and maintaining these artifacts at their own sites.

In the old days, radicals talked about workers owning the means of production.

What about owning the means of production in today’s information age?

Bob Lewis has a 21st Century take on this: why not leave it up up to the end users to supply their own computers on the job?

Here’s the lay of the land, as Bob puts it:

“When using their home computers, end-users experience a vast array of possibilities, but at the office they operate in a very constrained space; and increasingly, ‘work/life balance’ is giving way to “‘live your life wherever you are.’”

As we’ve seen from the many insights coming out of FastForward ‘08, users need to be unleashed to get their jobs done with the tools they see fit. So why not let employees do their thing with their own PCs? As Bob Lewis put it:

“No corporate-owned PCs at all. Let employees buy their own — whatever they think they need to do their jobs. It’s Nicholas Carr’s vision in reverse: Only central IT remains. Employees take over ownership of the periphery, including responsibility for their own PC support.”

We already see plenty of instances of employees using their own mobile devices for work-related connectivity. And, countless users log in from their homes to check into the intranet or for updated communications.

Of course, the legal departments would pull their hair out at the notion of everyone bringing in their own machines to work, especially in light of fears of data being taken out the door. But if there were a way to effectively lock down data either online or offline, wouldn’t this idea make a lot of sense?

So, Bob put another idea out there — virtualize. “Give end-users two virtual machines.” One virtual machine — the corporate virtual machine — could be “buttoned-down, corporate, protected, fully supported, and strongly connected.” The personal virtual machine could be the “sandbox,” on which users can do anything their hearts desire.

Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08.  It details the actions of Ford of Canada:

FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.

The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”

The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.

“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.

I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).

I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?

It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.

Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).

Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.

Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.

Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.

Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.

Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.

John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.

As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”

Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.

“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.

Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:

“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”

So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.

John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”

These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.

To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.

Below is the full list of video interviews conducted over three days at FASTforward 08. We encourage you to find the time to listen in – those interviewed had many insightful things to say, as did Jerry Michalski, our excellent host for the series, about Enterprise 2.0, the user revolution, search, and much, much more.

• Liv Brahin: UBS
• Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
• Michael Cleary: Reuters
• Bob Coxe – chief information officer for Criterion Systems
• Tom Davenport – consultant, author
• Jorn Ellefsen – CEO of Comperio
• Sue Feldman – research vice president, content technologies group, IDC
• Charles Fiesel – Roundarch
• Brooks Gibbins: vice president and general manager, financial services at FAST
• John Hagel – consultant, author
• Clare Hart – EVP, Dow Jones & Company
• Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
• Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
• Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
• Kiyosh Kurihara: President of Japanese analyst firm TechVisor JP, Ltd.
• John Markus Lervik: CEO, FAST
• Jevon MacDonald: blogger perspective
• Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
• Joe McKendrick – analyst, blogger
• Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
• Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
• Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
• JP Rangaswami: CIO of British Telecom
• Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
• Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
• Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
• Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
• Tim Stay: Perfect Search
• David Sutija – SVP of enterprise products, FAST
• Kyoko Suzuki: Computer World Japan
• Don Tapscott – strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
• Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
• Nate Treloar: SVP, Interaction Technology, FAST
• David Weinberger – speaker, consultant, author
• Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST

Keynotes:

• John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
• David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It

As I commented to my colleagues as we were wrapping up on Wednesday, we truly experienced Conference 2.0. What we accomplished and how we participated in FASTforward ’08 embodied key elements of 2.0. Moreso, what we experienced/achieved via the conference could/should be a repeatable model for other conferences (not just FASTforward ones).

Some of the elements:

• The blog itself. With Sandy being quite prolific, she had posts up faster than most of us could take notes, let alone synthesize and edit them into pieces (and as Rob mentioned in his interview, there are others of us who need time to digest it all).
• The myff08.com. While we struggled with some of the interaction elements, one high-value deliverable was having the pdfs of the keynote presentations available the same day. Someone’s checking on more ‘public’ availability of these.
• Video interviews that were available the same day. While they are a bit large I immediately noticed a huge difference in both the audio and video quality over last year. Not to mention Jerry’s impeccable skill as an MC (not to diminish David’s efforts last year). Jerry effortlessly made us all look/sound better. [Not to forget, although I did, the tireless effort of behind-the-scenes work for videography/lighting/sound, scheduling and editing.]
• Microblogging (Twitter) and photojournaling. The latter could have used a little collaborative instigation by requesting photos from the at-large crowd and suggesting a tag to post on Flickr (and I obviously need a larger memory chip in my camera). We’re also looking to get an account (or syndication) to flow related tweets through the FASTforward blog space.
• [On a negative note, the tracking devices were nearly useless – I would not recommend the effort to do that again…the bloggers had some pretty strong offline commentary about them.]

Having wireless available makes a huge difference, as does not having it when trying to facilitate near-instantaneous sharing. I had to laugh at myself as I was trying to tweet on my phone, drop it to take a photo, start typing some notes in Word when I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone and/or grabbed a pen and threw a note on paper (my thanks to facilities planning for putting power strips on the front tables of every room). If I’d continued as I had in the first session and also had my audio stick running I would have been trying to operate on 5 channels simultaneously. I can tell you – it doesn’t work. But they were all just my experiment – not something I’d been specifically asked to do. They were my way of being engaged and contributing.

The critical point here is, while we had shared a couple of ‘blogger’ calls among ourselves before the event, they were mostly about the logistics of the event. Not much more. We did not have specific assignments or even any charters – it just evolved.

Even slightly more ‘formal’ actions evolved. For a panel luncheon on Wednesday, the panelist list was firmed up that morning. The ‘intended’ blogger participants ended up with schedule conflicts and new resources were put in place.

As I had stepped up to ‘facilitate’ (a format I simply recommended and was adopted), I felt some onus to check on the room early (not asked, not planed, just seemed reasonable). The room was found to not be staged for a panel at all. Kudos to FAST, the travel group they engaged for event logistics and to the hotel staff for quickly pulling together a SWAT team to reconfigure the room in 20 minutes. For some, all of these elements stacked together, let alone any one of them, could have turned into a nervous mess or frantic disaster. Everyone simply stepped up and gave it their ‘get it done’ best and no one else noticed. [Although in the frantic mess, I did leave my cell phone in the podium afterward, and yet 3 hours later it was safely found at the Registration Desk – exactly where an event logistics person suggested I might look first.]

I had earlier shared my observations (to someone who suggested they hadn’t noticed) as to FAST’s careful staging of the ‘welcome’ experience with the:

• Wash of orange color through the grand hallway
• Greeting attendees with refreshments, served graciously and enthusiastically before reaching the registration desk
• Lively visual impressions of the drinks in the neon orange tumblers with the FAST logo on the side
• Careful positioning of the vendor booths within the normal traffic flow (although for all of that careful staging, I still didn’t find time to get to more than 1 booth the whole time).

And where did I miss the whole contest for a car? Having that on the floor with the winner’s name on the roof, was a very STRONG association to the benefits of registering early. What were those rules, terms & conditions?

I’m sure there are other conferences we could take some leads from, but this one did just nicely, thank you.

Any other 2.0 experiences/observations to report?

Postscript: See related microblogging reference.