What do these applications have in common?

This article was originally posted on November 29, 2007.

They are all applications I saw people using during the keynote sessions at yesterday’s Gilbane Conference in Boston. OK, it’s not exactly the most random sample of people in the world, given that:

a. I was at a conference focused on enterprise content management, enterprise search, globalization, social computing, and publishing technology, and

b. I was seated near an outlet so that my colleague could charge her PC, so I was surrounded by other socket seekers

but it was eye-opening to me nonetheless. People are so used to linking and jumping to relevant content, they are doing it in real-time and opening up new threads as they consume in-person presentations. When the company “ Threadless Tees” was mentioned during the keynote, probably 10–20 users in the audience were looking at the site within 30 seconds.

I now live in fear of the day that I’m speaking at a customer event and an audience member challenges me with a blog post I wrote in 2006 while listening to me say something different. [Editor’s Note: I do reserve the right to change my mind.] :-)

There are a lot of people skeptical about web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, but there can be little doubt that new tools are being used every day to richen and accelerate the information that knowledge workers use. I saw it firsthand yesterday.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.