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What is Web 2.0? Series: Web 2.0 for Lotus, WebSphere Portal and You

Listen to Pete Janzen from IBM Lotus interview various experts from the Lotus and

WebSphere Portal development teams on Web 2.0 technologies. Hear how IBM has

utilized these technologies in the various products and how you, the developer, can

leverage them in your custom applications.

Abstract: Scott Prager leads off this series by providing an overview of what comprises

Web 2.0. Hear how concepts like collective intelligence and serving the long tail support

the social networking aspects of Web 2.0. Also, the various technologies that are

associated with Web 2.0 will be introduced. Scott Prager is the lead architect for Lotus

Discussion:

JANSEN: Welcome to our developerWorks Podcast Series on Web 2.0 as it

applies to various Lotus and WebSphere Portal offerings. My name is Pete Jansen, and

I'm the product manager for Lotus Component Designer and Enterprise Integration for

the Notes and Domino platform.

I will be your host for this podcast series where I will interview a number of our technical

thought leaders on the topics related to Web 2.0. Our objective is to enlighten you on

the various concepts and technologies that comprise Web 2.0 and how they apply to the

products we develop.

This series will broach topics like Ajax, Rest, RSS and Atom, as well as how we apply

these technologies to our Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal platforms.

For our first podcast in this series we thought it would be best to talk about what is Web

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2.0. With the recent release of Lotus Connections 1.0, the time was right to have the

lead architect for Lotus Connections, Scott Prager, an IBM Distinguished Engineer,

share his insights on what is Web 2.0. Welcome, Scott, to our podcast series.

PRAGER: Thanks, Peter.

JANSEN: So Scott, what we want to start off with is kind of an overview of what

is Web 2.0. So if you can kind of give us the highlights of, you know, what comprises

this, what comprises Web 2.0.

PRAGER: Yes, that's a good place to start because it does mean different things

to different people. But you can find some generally accepted and agreed upon

characteristics of it.

Some people when they talk about it, they might mean the technological aspects or they

might mean the social networking aspects or, you know, when we at IBM or other

companies, we may mean the business aspects of it. But there are a set of core

characteristics.

So one of those which we see very ubiquitously is using the Web as a platform -- so the

ability to deliver applications and allow users to use these applications entirely through

browser. So, you know, again the Web being the platform that, for the delivery and the

usage of applications.

Another one we see is the idea of serving the long tail -- that not only do you build

applications for the large set of users and the large, the applications that are used by

many users, but you also want to be able to build applications that previously weren't

worth it, were too expensive to build or were for too small of a group.

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But these situational applications, the divisional or team apps that again were not worth

building a full formal application for.

Software as a Service is another characteristic that we see: the idea that the service

that's provided rather than an application that's installed on site is often provided by a

company hosted somewhere on the Internet.

And interestingly, that's not actually a required aspect of Web 2.0; it's just a very

common one we see in consumer or extranet Web 2.0 and often within a business

setting companies actually don't want to have the software available to them as a

service; they want to control it. So that's one that in a business setting actually can go

either way.

When you get to one of the more behavioral characteristics, you see the concept of

collective intelligence or the buzzphrase, the wisdom of crowds. So the idea there is

that users own the data on a site and they control that data.

And what you have is an architecture of participation that encourages users to add value

to the application as they use it. The application gets better the more people use it.

So this is really the opposite of what you might call Web 1.0 or older applications where

it's that hierarchical access control in which the systems, the administrators, organize

users into roles and give them specific functionality on preexisting content.

And the last characteristic which is a pretty important one is about redoing the user

experience so it's a richer, more interactive, more user friendly and responsive user

experience than Web, earlier Web apps or Web 1.0 apps. And this is often based on

technologies encompassed in something called Ajax.

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So really what you have with Web 2.0 is really a social phenomenon around embracing

a new approach to generating, distributing Web content itself. The idea is open

communication, decentralization of authority and a freedom to share and reuse

information rather than restrictions upon information.

JANSEN: Very good. One of the things you mentioned there was in providing a

rich interactive experience. And common term for that today is a rich Internet

application. I was just wondering if just if you build a Web application that adheres to the

qualities of a rich Internet application, does that necessarily mean it is a Web 2.0

application?

PRAGER: Well, you know, again you come back to the idea that Web 2.0 is not,

may not have a hard definition. So what really makes it a Web 2.0 app I think rather

than any one specific one of these things. So rather than it being a rich application or

built using a specific technology.

And I think that's one of the common mistakes people make, is if I use this technology

then it's Web 2.0. Web 2.0 again is a combination of things. I think it's more about what

it enables rather than what technology it's built with.

So I would come back more firmly on the ground of collective intelligence, serving a long

tail, rich interactive user experience and Web as a platform rather than one specific

aspect. But it is tough to say, you know, this is Web 2.0 because I used this or because

it provides this. It's a little tricky.

JANSEN: Okay good, thanks for clarifying that. Okay, so why don't we move on

to, you know, which technologies do you feel are important to Web 2.0?

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PRAGER: So I mentioned Ajax, and that's definitely one in that group. AJAX,

which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique

for building interactive Web apps.

What it allows you to do is make pages feel much more responsive because instead of,

you know, again the old style where every time you click on something you get a new

page, Ajax is about refreshing the data model behind machines in the browser for

example. So small amounts of data being exchanged asynchronously behind the

scenes and then only that piece of the UI being refreshed in the browser.

What this means is that you have fewer round trips, you drastically reduce the amount of

data flowing back and forth, and in the end your Web page is more interactive, faster,

more functional and more usable.

JANSEN: So kind of giving the end user the experience that they have

associated with maybe a rich client in the past but providing that to a browser.

PRAGER: Yes, that's exactly right.

And that's, you know, that's another good way to look at what Web 2.0 is trying to get at,

which is combining some of the better aspects of older Web applications and some of

the better aspects of client/server or non Web applications while losing some of the

worse aspects of both. So you get something which is kind of a hybrid but still

deliverable from the Web platform, for example. And Ajax is a key aspect of that.

Some of the other technologies, XML and HTML, while people will probably be very

familiar with them as the well-known standards for UI and data representations. Those

are important because they are universally understood by browsers and across all sorts

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of devices. So those are important to the Web 2.0.

REST which is, so another acronym, REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

And that's a way of exposing your functionality for generally for programmatic usage,

although it doesn't actually have to be only for programmatic usage.

To make it as simple as possible, it's about taking the application state and capabilities,

state and functionality and dividing them into resources. And every resource is uniquely

addressable by a URL which means that if I want to get a list of people, that list if

represented by a URL, that search is represented by a URL. A specific person is

represented by a URL. A specific person's phone number is represented by a URL.

So you can essentially bookmark or access, generally through a human readable URL,

any piece of information in a system. So there's a few characteristics of a system that's

exposed through REST, and those are that of client/server system, the interface is

stateless, cacheable and layered.

So there's a few other technologies, and these are less about the specific technology

and more about the concept. So, feeds. Feeds are another one that we see coming up

a lot. Feeds provide syndication. A feed is a Web format for serving up content and

content updates to users.

To provide a feed essentially, the publisher provides a link which represents that feed

and then the user can request updates or other variations of information from that feed.

But the reason feeds are powerful is that they're really, really simple. Generally a feed

will simply contain some XML, the universal format, that's very easily aggregated or

mashed up or mixed up with other feeds, other content, other sources of information.

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There's two feed specifications which people are probably familiar with, Atom and RSS,

where RSS provides the ability to pull information through a feed URL and Atom

provides the ability to pull information, as well as the ability to write back through the

HTTP verbs.

Another technology is that we see a lot is tagging. Tagging is a really simple technology

but also extremely powerful. And all a tag is is a keyword assigned by a user when they

categorize content. So, for example, if I create a bookmark or a document in a system, I

might write that Web 2.0 is one tag and I might write Ajax is another tag.

So I can simply indicate the tags I want to use. And those can then be, those can then

be that link or that document can then be find, located via those tags.

And what happens is out of these tags that are simply entered by people, you would

imagine a kind of chaos would develop because everyone's simply entering whatever

tag they feel like.

But actually using some very simple methods of tag type ahead and tag suggestion what

happens is instead of degrading to chaos this very powerful classification develops and

you coalesce around a set of tags which, it's often called the tag cloud, which represents

the more used or frequent tags. And you develop what's called a folksonomy.

And what that means is, is it's a take off on the word taxonomy but it's really a taxonomy

or classification system that emerges purely from user controlled tagging through, so a

bottom up taxonomy that develops naturally.

And the last technology I'd mention which is probably the least, the least...the least

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which is actually a technology is the idea of mashups. Mashups are about combining

disparate information sources via very simple interface without requiring you to change

either application.

So best illustrated via an example. For example, if I had a service which mapped

addresses, I can give this service a list of addresses and it would return to me a

visualization of a map showing where those addresses were.

And if I had an instant messaging API to my instant messaging system that could give

me the addresses of all of my buddies on my instant messaging buddy list I could

retrieve the addresses from the IM service, I could give that to the mapping service, and

what I would then have is the ability for people to simply retrieve a single page which

showed the location of all the people on their buddy list in IM.

Now I didn't have to change the IM service to do this, I didn't have to change the

mapping service to do this. I just very simply made a very basic Web application that

leveraged the fact that these systems expose simple, straightforward APIs, simple

straightforward open data formats and got a powerful new application.

JANSEN: And on the mashups concept there, I think one of the things is that the

objective is to have people with domain knowledge be able to mash these various

disparate services together into one user experience and not really requiring a developer

to do that which....

You know, if you're coming from a, looking back several years where people were

integrating difference systems, you really kind of need to know those vendor specific

APIs to do that, so.

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PRAGER: Yes, that's exactly right. You see a diminishing requirement for

technological capability or for knowledge of development, more detailed development.

So while some things require people to know Java, you see more available to people

who know JavaScript and you see more, yet more available to people who simply know

HTML and CSS.

And you see, you know, an even broader set available to people who may know even

simpler technologies or no technologies at all and can simply mix and match things

through various software that's out there.

So it is also about, part of this idea of folksonomies, and about the openness of Web 2.0,

and the social networking is about decentralizing control which obviously requires you to

reduce the technical knowledge needed to build an application.

JANSEN: Great. So what I was wondering is, if you could now kind of share

some thoughts about how IBM has applied Web 2.0 to the various offerings provided by,

you know, Lotus, as well as our WebSphere Portal offering.

PRAGER: Sure, I think the place we've really seen as our, as our flagships in the

Web 2.0 space most recently are the Lotus Connections product which provide social

computing and activity centric computing.

And the Lotus Quickr product, which provides things like content management, team

spaces and situational applications. So these are two very new products just released in

June. But they were really built around the idea of Web 2.0.

So for example they both use Atom for feeds and Atom as their REST API as well. So a

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very standard interface for the REST API. They leverage Ajax technology for more

responsive and usable UIs, you know, from the connections perspective there's tagging

everywhere and the connection services are very small lightweight components.

And you look at things like the activity capability in connections, activity templates really

represent the long tail of business process. So as opposed to common work flow which

people are used to and process management which is a really big beast of a thing where

they're very hard to create, they take a lot of work, but they're important in certain cases.

There's a hundred times that many very small activities or small repeated processes that

are done on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and activity templates allow you to

encapsulate those very simply without any code whatsoever.

But it's not just about these two, the two new products I'm talking about there. For

example, we look at what's being going on in Domino for a long time and we've been

seeing Ajax being built into, Ajax capabilities being built into Web apps for a number of

years.

And Domino actually a while ago added a blog template, for example, and the ability to

generate feeds from any application. So we've seen Domino embracing a lot of these

technologies, Ajax, blogs, feeds and so on for a few years now.

Portal is also moving really strongly in a Web 2.0 direction addressing technologies like

Atom, like Ajax and focusing on being faster and leaner.

It's interesting perhaps to mention in just in passing that we see a lot of this going on in

other areas of IBM. In the WebSphere organization, and the WebSphere division, and

the Rational division, we're absolutely seeing a move towards Web 2.0.

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And going outside of the Software Group in the CIO's office itself and our, especially our

Research division, we see numerous projects and efforts going on in trying to embrace

the idea and benefits of Web 2.0.

JANSEN: Great, that was good you brought up activities as an example of

serving the long tail, I was going to ask you for an example. And I, and as you were

saying that I was thinking, yes, that, I mean, we, you know I our day-to-day work around

here within Lotus we all use activities at one point or another and it becomes a perfect

way to put something in place to gather information, share information with others who

are working on a specific task.

PRAGER: You know, let me give you an even more specific example there that

I'm really fond of because I think it's, it perhaps is the most perfect example of this.

One of the people in our consulting organization who started working with Connections

has also gone through adopting a child. And IBM offers a lot of help to people in

information, more direct assistance and so on. So there's a lot of aspects to doing this

obviously. It's a huge, huge effort and there's a lot of steps to it.

So what this guy did actually was build up an activity or use an activity to manage the

adoption, especially all the numerous people, applications, links to information and so on

and then he organized that into a template, an activity template and saved it in the

activity system as a public template.

What this means is that any one who wants to go through that process themselves --

you know, the adoption of a child -- can go here and see the dozens and dozens of

steps of information links, of experts, pointers to experts and so on, organized very

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effectively by both tags and by time periods.

So there's the before the adoption, during the process, after the adoption, to do's,

information links and so on. But it's all right there.

And that's an example of something that could never get put together, you know,

something this helpful from the, not from the perspective of the people in the HR

organization but from the perspective of somebody who actually did it and can best

explain how to do it.

So that's a great example of the long tail. No one would have ever built that if he hadn't

been able to do it rather simply based on his already, the fact that he had already

created the activity for his actual adoption itself. So creating the template became a very

simple process after that.

JANSEN: That is an excellent example, thanks. Okay, well, since we're doing

this series, you know, for developerWorks, I was hoping you could touch on, you know,

some of the things that developers who are interested in Web 2.0, which technology do

you recommend they learn first?

PRAGER: Yes. And that's a great question. One of the great parts of this is that

the technologies are relatively simple to learn, which is a good thing and some of the

concepts are relatively simple to learn. And you don't need to dive in and learn them all.

So probably the most important starting point is to learn how to build a rich Internet

application. And again, by rich I mean those things we mentioned before: fast response,

you know, more interactive and so on.

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So probably the best way to do that is to take the core things like Java Script, HTML and

XML and learn about the Ajax techniques and how to use, apply Ajax to your application

and build a, you know, one of these rich Internet applications. So I think Ajax is a good

starting point.

Micro Formats is another interesting capability which is useful for getting started and

useful for showing the integration between systems. Micro Format is really just a way of

providing some semantic meaning to human readable content which from a machine's

point of view is just text. It's often done by just creating an HTML span around some

hunk of text.

So for example a Micro Format could be used around the name of a person within an

HTML page being returned and that would allow you to hover over or click on that

person, for example, and get more information about them.

So it's a way of saying to the system, this piece of text here, these two words, that's

actually a person's name and that means that you can get more information from the

profile system for example. So there's a lot of Micro Formats out there for people, for

calendar entries and so on. And those provide some good capability.

All right, we mentioned, we talked about the REST concepts and REST APIs, that's

another important one. Again for keeping your application simple, but also for using a lot

of the apps out there.

Feeds, again, another a very important one. And a good starting point might be to build

a simple mash up using some feeds that are already available. So you know, try and

take two applications out there that you think could be combined in a way that's useful to

you.

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Concepts like or ways of working such as tagging, wikis, blogs, understand what these

things are, how they work, give them a try. It's good to be familiar with them. And more

broadly, social networking concepts.

And two other things which I think it's important to say around what should developers

be looking at, and these two things can be really helpful. The first is to embrace open

source at all levels. So get rid of the idea that of, not invented here.

Any place you can use open source where you find some good open source to use is a

bunch of work you were just saved. Contribute to back that open source if you're able

to.

We've been trying to do that within the Connections project for example, contributing

back to the role or blog server which is an open source system based on the work that

we've been doing.

And another one is mashups as far as a, more of a way of working at technologies, but

really trying to embrace mashups and open source as a way of reducing the amount of

work that you need to do as a developer. They can save you a huge amount of work.

Leverage what's already out there, don't rebuild everything.

JANSEN: That's a very good point on leveraging what's out there, as well as,

you know, I think, you know we have been embracing open source in a number of our

products and platforms over the past several years.

And it definitely, you know, has benefited our products as well as, you know, the things

that we have contributed back to the open source community has, you know, helped,

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you know, developers everywhere I would say.

So we talked a little, then we just talked about some of the technologies. But I was

wondering, you know, how could developers really utilize some of these social

networking aspects of Web 2.0 to enhance their development processes?

PRAGER: Sure, so not as much about what technologies they should use, but

how can they benefit from this themselves. And so I have a lot of direct experience with

that over the past few years of the Connections project and the activities project before

that.

And when you think about it, a lot of the things that developers need to do that they

could benefit from some of these social networking aspects of Web 2.0 really aren't

different than what other people need to do. So you do have some unique things. But in

general, if you look, so look at what, how you can benefit from these capabilities.

The use of tagging to organize and find information, the use of blogs and wikis to

communicate. Integrated profile and contact information to be able to find people and

experts.

Social networking, social network analysis to more effectively find people who are the

lynch pins of information in your organization and where are there gaps in

communication. Social bookmarking to find information. Content creation by the

masses or the wisdom of crowds.

So, you know, there's a whole list of things that are directly, directly come from the social

networking aspects of Web 2.0. But these are really not specific at all to development;

these are things that will simply help anyone who's an information worker work more

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effectively, find the people they need, find the information they need, communicate with

the people around them more effectively.

Now when you get into development specifically, you see some opportunities around, for

example, Agile development processes: the ability of these technologies to enhance

your communication more effectively, find experts and information and be more

responsive can really help an agile process.

The use of a a wiki, for example, to communicate out the latest spec or, and blogs to

communicate out the most recent changes in what's going on or to help point people to

important, important source of information they need to read. So there's really a lot

there that is general but also can specifically apply to development.

And I think it's also important to, you know, come back to something when I was talking

about the mashups and trying to reuse. You know, this whole idea of reuse comes down

here too. Feeds, Micro Formats and mashups are all things that provide you the ability

to subscribe to the information and to aggregate information.

So subscription and aggregation concepts are also I think really important to developers

in the work they do. If I don't have to go check a million sources of information but I can

simply see the important updates in the communities, in the blogs, in the source of

information I turn to.

And if I can aggregate that information together into a central place, it simply makes me

more effective. I don't waste as much time finding information or learning what's

important or notifying others.

JANSEN: Great, so I think you kind of just touched on some of the things I

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wanted you to address next which were, you know, you guys just shipped Lotus

Connections 1.0 and I know that, you know, from concept to delivery the team was

moving at a very rapid rate.

So, you know, how did you leverage some of the, you know, the concepts of Web 2.0 on

the social networking aspects when you were building out Lotus Connections? And, you

know, maybe speak to some of these, how that helped the efficiency of the overall

process.

PRAGER: Sure. So, yes, I'd better, so I'd better refer to some of those same

things I just said otherwise...

[LAUGHTER]

...

...you know, it'll look silly. But, you know, I think those same things actually came across

in the work we did on Connections.

Perhaps the most important single thing, the thing that I think was the most valuable was

how we built the team and how the team operated. And this is really a virtual team

model.

The way we discovered the people to work on this project, and the way we built it and

the way it operated was not just our development team itself, but we had people from the

Lotus Advanced Development team, we had people outside Lotus.

We had people from Research working on the product, we had people from the CIO's

office working on the product at the same time they were working on their own projects.

So we were really integrating this team. We were working with our greenhouse team

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which is way of providing software to make it more generally available outside the

organization. And a lot of feedback from really customers.

But the idea there is that we try to bring in as many people and sources of information as

possible and form this loose virtual team, you know, which is really, really about the

ideas of social networking.

And the team itself was formed, you know, we have this set of services in Connections.

We really used a federated, a loose federation model. So there is a distribution is power

and responsibility and a lot of bottom up control within the team that I think really helped

us maintain a lot of innovation and a lot of uniqueness and power in the services that

were built.

Getting into some of the more specific technologies though, a lot of team members used

blogs to recommend, to discover, to guide, to evangelize for, you know, for different

purposes. We use our administration information and our API, the specs for those are in

a wiki and we use some other wikis as well.

A lot of use of social bookmarking, both to store information and discover information. A

lot of use of activities to manage work, manage meetings, develop presentations or

communicate with customers and so on. A lot of use of early deployment.

So we see that TAP, which is the Technology Adoption Program, that's an internal IBM

thing where we can make software available within IBM to those who feel like they want

to use it.

And then other ways of getting our software out to early customers, and a lot, our

designers doing a lot of interviews means that we were really going down the path of

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design led development and building up a social network of our users to allow them to

tell us what works and doesn't rather than just guessing at it.

And I think the last thing I'd say here is there's a social software community, a semi

formal community within IBM that has become really active. It's grown to over 700

people distributed across development, product management, sales, services and so on.

And this community really uses a lot of methods to communicate.

There's synchronous and asynchronous methods they use to communicate: forums,

weekly phone calls, Q&A sessions, presentations, you know, e-mail, IM. There's just a

lot of communication going on there and that's helped us to share between development

and our services organization for example, as well as these other groups to understand

real customer experiences, to make sure everyone knows where the product is going

and so on.

JANSEN: Excellent, yes, I think, you know, by leveraging these capabilities that,

you know, to some degree may have been in place in one format or another for a while

and you know, implementing them or making them into a formal product that we've now

shipped as part of Lotus Connections...

I think that, you know, we realize benefits from this and certainly, you know, our

customers are going to start to realize a lot of benefits from this. And developers who

are supporting either customers or ISVs et cetera will also be able to realize these, the

benefits from the social networking aspects.

PRAGER: Yes, absolutely. You have the, you know, idea of eating your own

dog food or perhaps the preferable idea of drinking your own champagne. But either

one is really the same thing.

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JANSEN: Right. I'll go with the champagne analogy as well.

[LAUGHTER]

Okay, you know, recently we, one of the main conduits for our announcements around

Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr was the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. And I was jut

wondering if you could give us a brief description of what we mean by Enterprise 2.0?

PRAGER: Sure, and you know, it's, this is really a pretty straightforward thing I

think. An Enterprise 2.0 is a term that we have seen popping up a fair amount. It really

derives from Web 2.0 and, you know, the way I see it is it's used to cover to introduction

and implementation of social software within the enterprise, but also the social and

organizational changes around its use.

So really Enterprise 2.0 is about applying Web 2.0 or social software within the context

of a business. This can include social and networking modifications to company's

intranets and changes and kind of the classic platforms that large companies are using

to communicate.

It contrasts with what the enterprise software or what you might call Enterprise 1.0 that a

lot of companies use in which those impose structure prior to use. So it's about

imposing the structure and then making it available.

But Enterprise 2.0 is about encouraging use prior to providing the structure. So get it out

there, see what people do with it and even within an organization and then from there

determine exactly what the best ways to us it are.

The benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is that it's about helping organizations capture the tacit and

unstructured knowledge in their, in their teams. So once you capture that, then what you

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have to do is figure out how to pull out or distill the meaningful and reusable knowledge

and information through other mechanisms.

So for example you look at tools like blogs and wikis and social bookmarking and such

as ways of encouraging people to get their tacit knowledge out there for others. Often

simply by putting it down in a way that's comfortable for them or useful for them and the

fact that it benefits others is really just a positive side benefit that happens.

And we see that as actually a general aspect of a lot of Web 2.0 systems that it doesn't

require people to take heroic steps to make the system useful.

Simply people acting in their own interests there's a side benefit of it helping others and

we really see that in the Enterprise 2.0 area or within the business when you start

applying Web 2.0 and social networking you see how this benefit simply happens.

JANSEN: Excellent. Okay, so on tapping that potential of knowledge that's out

there within the community and making sure that it's available for use in the future.

PRAGER: Right, right, that's exactly it.

JANSEN: Okay, so we've covered a lot here in this podcast, and you know from

our introduction to kind of the basics of what is Web 2.0 and how we're using it here

within our Lotus and WebSphere Portal products. To wrap it up I was just wondering if

you can share some thoughts about where we're going with Web 2.0?

PRAGER: Sure. So we really see...and I mentioned a lot of how we're using it

now, and we really see a lot of that continuing, extensive usage internally and externally,

the ideas being brought into the products that already don't use it, further adoption and

further encouragement within the products that do use it.

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Very simply, you know, we see and I see the social and technical aspects of Web 2.0 as

absolutely strategic across not only the Connections product which I lead but across

multiple products and for Lotus overall.

We need to really spend a lot of time understanding what works and what doesn't as we

apply Web 2.0 and try and understand Enterprise 2.0 and where it's the same and where

it's different.

I think one of the most powerful things we can do because IBM has really been

aggressive in adopting these capabilities internally, not just the products we build but a

lot of research and CIO work that has fed into some of the work we've done.

So some of these products that we're shipping now have been used in IBM for a pretty

significant period of time. And we can use that knowledge not only to guide what we do

but also to when we go to customers and there often is a lot of concern among

customers about what it means to open up and decentralize.

So we can show them how we've done it for example with our own products and calm

concerns around openness, transparency and decentralization that Web 2.0 brings to a

business.

We need to make sure that though that we do enough, not just in the communication but

within our products themselves to address some of the differences between Web 2.0

and Enterprise 2.0, where in Web 2.0 it might be fine for people to be able to provide

completely unauthenticated or anonymous comments but that might not be okay in an

Enterprise 2.0 offering, for example.

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So you know, to bring it down to a sentence, what I think we're looking at in the future is

bringing the best aspects of Web 2.0 to the enterprise. So combining the enterprise-ility,

scalability, reliability and so on with Web 2.0 technologies and concepts to really

produce products that represent Enterprise 2.0.

JANSEN: Great. Thanks for that summary. And I'll look at the future there and

say that, you know, the future looks bright for Web 2.0 both within IBM as well as for our

customer facing products.

So I think that brings us to the end of this first in our series of podcasts on Web 2.0. I'd

like to thank Scott Prager for agreeing to come and share his insights on Web 2.0 with

us. So thank you, Scott.

PRAGER: Sure, glad to do it.

JANSEN: Okay.

And please be aware that once again this is the first in a series, and there will be a

number of follow on podcasts that drill down to some of the specific technologies and

how we're leveraging those on our platforms. So thanks everybody for listening and

have a great day.

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