David Weinberger, Andrew McAfee, and… (thud) IBM

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I will not be blogging a lot, but I have hit my first dislocation.

David was wonderful, and recapped the messages of his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, leaving us on a wonderful philosophical slight-of-hand: when everything is miscellaneous — when all information is both information and a means to makes sense of it — and the means to makes sense of it is put into our hands, then we, the edglings, control everything. It’s our world, our internet, our digital future.

I wanted to be marching down a street in the sunshine, arm-in-arm with my brothers and sisters with flags waving, singing the Marseillais. Truly. No kidding around.

Andrew was more quotidian, opting to give a report card on the progress of the Enterprise 2.0 meme in the 18 months since he coined the term. (I whispered William James’ adage to him, just before he took the podium, “you coin a new term at your own peril.”) He was at the same time both more positive (giving high marks to the spread of the meme and the maturity of the technology) and more negative (on the time frame of real revolution in enterprises) than I am. But still, I found it interesting.

Then… thud. A general manager from IBM’s software group is telling me about IBM’s Enterprise 2.0 push with business mashups and Lotus Connectors. It’s actually something I am interested in, at least a little, but the context of these ads is very, very old school.

Maybe I am too harsh when I say it just sounds mashifying business portals. Still, this is likely the transitional period that we will have to go through. The revolution will come as a series of small transitions, and so I have to put up with IBM slide shows with dozens of trademarked buzzwords, like Info 2.0(r), Lotus (r) Connections (r), annd QEDWiki (r). And an analogy to the Web 1.0 Internet/intranet/extranet model, and telling us that the Web 2.0 shift is not your father’s Internet anymore. Ok.

But it’s still arresting to go from the stratospheric thoughts of Weinberger to the screenshots of IBM’s thinly veiled marketing pitch. I have psychological whiplash.