For the second time in less than two weeks I decided my blog needed a redesign. You will now find a new category in the right hand margin, Web / Corporate 2.0. I recategorized many postings and republished the entire blog.

When I first started this blog over on MSN in early January of 2004, I used the category "pushing the frontier". The term Web 2.0 was unknown. Upon a recent review of my "frontier" category posts, I found most had a Web / Corporate 2.0 focus; thus the change. I’ve also included the word corporate in my category name because … if I don’t see a potential business application, it won’t be in my blog!

Via my friend, Rafael Sidi, I learned about a new McKinsey Quarterly study on corporate use of Web 2.0 tools.  Maximize the thumbnail image of a chart from the McKinsey article to view a survey on Corporate adoption rates. I was surprised to learn that only 33% of the companies either have Web 2.0 applications installed, or even under consideration. An even higher number had no plans at all in this arena! The only area in which I have no plans yet are Mash-ups.

Finally, it is possible to get free access to the McKinsey Quarterly. It does require a free registration, but it is worth the effort. Not only is McKinsey doing research in the area of Web 2.0 tools, but they are practicing what they preach (or report). Last August, when I attended Wikimania (my thoughts), I was amazed to learn from the McKinsey attendee that they don’t lock down any pages on their internal wiki! I though I was open minded by only locking down four top level pages, which would insure consistent top level navigation scenarios. I need to be more open minded!
.

Harvard’s IdeaCast has some competition from the other side of the Atlantic. The Times (London) has a new weekly series where top professors from Cambridge, Oxford and other leading schools from throughout the world podcast on management topics.

The information and ideas are great, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. Maybe I’m too much the American (i.e a fan of talk shows and interview formats), but a well constructed question and answer podcast format between an intelligent commentator and each professor would greatly improve the end result.

Oh well, it isn’t every day that you get the opportunity to listen to such renowned faculty, thus I decided the Times MBA Podcasts deserved a posting.

A bunch of friends who are librarians told me to watch this YouTube video.  It’s subtle, but hilarious. Having said that, I admire a group of professionals who laugh at themselves. Without my corporate librarians, I would be sunk:

• March of the Librarians

I’ve just read a number of posts about MIT’s decision to cancel their subscription to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ web-based database of technical papers.  I’ve groused about both SAE’s control based approach to their content, and to a lesser extent the IEEE. Shouldn’t government funded research be freely available? This blog is my small attempt to encourage the "knowledge should be free" movement. Companies should be paid for products that add context and value to basic knowledge, but the knowledge itself should be available. Let me explain:

• Many engineering research companies subscribe to Engineering Information Village’s Compendex database. At it’s most basic level, Compendex is just a database of engineering research abstracts. However, Engineering Village enhances the value with add-in’s like tagging.
  .
• If one knows how to do research, the same basic data found within Compendex is available via Google Scholar, and other sources. Here are examples … these are both screencasts I created:
  • Google Alert + Google + RSS = Knowledge
  • Google Book Search Screencast

In summation, I hope that web collaboration trends & tools will eventually spell doom to the closed access approach. Here are two final examples … from the world of wikis (both from wikia.com). Both wikis are in their early stages:

• Engineering Wiki
• Science Wiki

Finally, my initial reference points for this blog entry were:

• It’s all about ease of access to the content (Rafael Sidi)
  (and)
• MIT Refuses DRM; SAE Digital Library Canceled (Randy Reichardt)