On September 19th, I had the opportunity to give a one-hour presentation on Web 2.0 technologies and trends to the SPIN chapter in Atlanta, Georgia; you can get the details of what I presented by clicking here to see the September 18th blog posting about the most recent version of my Web 2.0 mind-map. The audience was a lively, good-natured group of about a hundred people, and their reactions and questions were fairly similar to what I’ve heard in similar Web 2.0 presentations I’ve given in New York City, Chicago, New Jersey, and Boston in recent months. Among the highlights of the question-answer period were the following:

1. Only about 10% (or less) of the audience members indicated, in an informal show of hands at the beginning of my presentation, that they felt they were familiar with Web 2.0 concepts; this is roughly the same response I’ve gotten in other cities around the country during the past year. Yet everyone has heard of blogs, everyone has heard of Wikis, and almost everyone has heard of many of the other specific technologies and components of Web 2.0. Still, one gets the feeling that a lot of people feel that there’s so much going on that they only have a surface-level understanding of the topic. And what makes this most interesting is that I’m getting this response from an audience of tech-savvy, computer-literate IT professionals. Imagine how lost the average member of society feels!
2. “What tool are you using for presenting the ‘mind-map’ version of your Web 2.0 material?” As I’ve mentioned in various postings on this blog, I used the ConceptDraw MindMap product, developed by the ConceptDraw organization in Odessa, Ukraine. Alas, the latest version — ConceptDraw MindMap 5 — is (in my humble opinion) a huge step backward for those of us who had been happily using version 4.5 and its predecessors. But if you’re starting fresh, with no “legacy” mind-maps created in these earlier versions, it’s probably still a good choice. Alternatives include Nova-Mind, Mind Manager, and the open source mind-mapping tool FreeMind. Fro various reasons I don’t have time to explain in detail here, I’m frustrated by all of these tools, even though I think the basic concept of mind-mapping is far superior to the “bullet-point” list-presentation style that we see in Powerpoint presentations; on the other hand, I’m now thinking seriously of converting my presentation to a collaborative, quasi-wiki-style document using the presentation tool recently introduced as part of Google Apps… more about that in a future blog posting.
3. Speaking of Google Apps, someone in the audience offered an opinion rather than a question: he said that he had switched to Google Apps for most of his word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations — not because it’s free (as compared to whatever Microsoft is charging for MS Office these days), but rather because the sharing and collaboration mechanisms were so attractive. I think we’re going to hear this theme more and more often in the days to come.
4. Someone in the audience asked whether we were likely to see more examples of personal mashups in the future — i.e., a mashup created by an individual, for his or her private use, as opposed to a “professional” effort to create a mashup that might be introduced as a commercial product, or offered to the marketplace as an “industrial-strength” product/service. Personally, I think that’s what Yahoo has in mind with its Yahoo Pipes initiative; and I think that Google is moving in the same direction. Who knows: maybe Apple, Microsoft, and IBM will get on the bandwagon, too…
5. Someone asked the familiar question about the likelihood of senior management wanting to edit or censor blogs or wikis, in order to prevent outspoken, disloyal, subversive, or rebellious employees from saying something that contradicts the party line. I’ve blogged about this issue several times over the past year, and did my best to summarize my opinion that management has already lost control of this issue — and with the exception of tightly regulated organizations (e.g., financial-service companies, government spy agencies, etc.) probably never did have control in the first place. If a grumpy employee can provide “off-the-record” information to news-hungry journalists, who then proceed to write salacious articles in the mainstream media, how much worse can it be if those same employees start blogging?
6. Someone made the interesting comment that while management may be willing to let the outside public collaborate in the dissemination and distribution of information about their products and services, it’s less likely that they will be willing to collaborate with outsiders in the creation and invention of future products and services. I guess that’s true, but it’s a matter of degree: in my presentation, I gave several examples of companies (especially in the pharmaceutical industry, which I find intriguing) who are encouraging outsiders (e.g., retired employees, academic professors, students, research scientists, and others) to collaborate with them in R&D activities associated with the discovery of new drugs. Not every company will want to do this, of course; but I think the more ambitious, entrepreneurial, and innovative companies will do so, to an increasing degree…

All in all, it was an interesting night; and it gave me several ideas for additional material to be incorporated into my Web 2.0 presentation. Stay tuned for updates…