It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Web 2.0 mind-map, and lots of things have been happening; I’ve presented a two-day seminar on Web 2.0 in Rome, attended the big Web 2.0 “Summit” conference in San Francisco, and download several more articles and blog postings. You can find the latest version of the mind-map in the “downloads” section of my main web site at www.yourdon.com/downloads, or you can simply download the 7.6-megabyte PDF by clicking here.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve added to this version:

1. On the “Conferences” branch of the “References” page of the mind-map, I’ve added a link to the Web 2.0 Expo that’s being scheduled for April 15-18, 2007 in San Francisco.
2. On the “Cultural Issues” page, I changed the wording of one of the branches from “permanent beta” to “perpetual beta,” and included a link to the Wikipedia article about the concept of perpetual beta.
3. On the “Basic Themes” page, I updated a sub-sub-sub-branch entitled “State of the blogosphere” with a link to the latest article on Technorati, which says there are now 57 million blogs. Another link had to be updated, with the same URL, on a sub-sub-sub branch of the “Introduction” page of the mind-map.
4. On the “Trends: 10 Years From Now” page, I added a link to John Markoff’s November 12, 2006 New York Times article entitled “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense” to a branch called “What’s Next: Web 3.0: mass market -> Long Tail.” There seems to be a growing consensus that a “semantic web” will be the dominant feature of Web 3.0, and I hope to write a blog article in the next few days with my reactions to the NYT article.
5. On the “Trends” page of the mind-map, I added a link to an article entitled “Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation” on the “Impact of a new generation of tech-savvy children” sub-branch of the “Social/Cultural branch.” The author, Don Tapscott, has a book with the same title, but it was published in 1999 — before the rise of social-networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, etc. Since the article is free, I figured that would be sufficient for most people; but you’re obviously welcome to track down the book, too.
6. The same author, Don Tapscott, has a new book coming out in late December, entitled Wikinomics. He gave a short presentation of its basic themes as last week’s Web 2.0 Summit conference, and it sounded sufficiently interesting that I added a thumbnail image of the book cover, and a link to the Amazon page describing the book. All of this is on the “Wiki phenomenon” page of the mind-map.
7. On the “Products/Vendors” page, I added a new sub-branch to the main branch about “aspects of Web 2.0 usage.” This new sub-branch links to a November 7, 2006 article, “WEB 2.0: Google CEO: Take your data and run,” describing a theme I heard mentioned from two or three of the big-name speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit: if users decide that they’re unhappy with one Internet service/vendor, they should have the opportunity to take all of their data with them (including, in the case of Google, their entire history of previous searches) to the new service/vendor they’ve chosen. At the moment, it’s hard enough to export and import the “obvious” data like calendar entries, address books, and email addresses; but these speakers were acknowledging the fact that more and more of these services (think Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, your friendly Internet “portal,” your social-networking site, etc.) keep an enormous amount of “invisible” data about our history, preferences, and behavior.
8. On the “Long Tail” page of the mind-map, I’ve added a link to the Powerpoint slides from Chris Anderson’s presentation at Pop!Tech 2006, entitled “The Economics of Abundance.” As with most Powerpoint slides, it’s hard to figure out what some of the details are all about if you don’t have access to the speaker’s audio presentation (which, unfortunately, are not available); but there are some great visuals and punchy summaries of what the “long tail” phenomenon is all about. You might also want to read Chris Anderson’s blog posting about his presentation, which I decided not to put into the mind-map.
9. On the “related concepts” branch of the “Basic Themes” page of the mind-map, I’ve added a new sub-branch consisting of a link to Dion Hinchcliffe’s November 5, 2006 ZDNet article entitled “Web 2.0 definition updated and Enterprise 2.0 emerges,” which explains a new mnemonic coined by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee: SLATES. In a nutshell, it stands for Search, Links, Authorship, Extensions, and Signals. Read the article to see what this all means.
10. On the “Recurring Themes” branch of the “Basic Themes” page of the mind-map, I’ve added a new sub-branch to emphasize the recurring theme of empowering individual customers, employees, readers, citizens, etc. It’s a link to an article entitled “Web 2.0: Join the revolution,” in the November 13, 2006 issue of B-to-B magazine.

That’s it for now. More later…