About 8 months ago, in April, I posted an article on my blog titled “A Map of the World 2.0 Canon” that tried to visualize how the emerging popular literature on the impact of 2.0 could be organized. The post went mildly viral. Here’s the visualization I came up with, and links to reviews to most of the books I included back then. Read the full piece if the logic of the diagram doesn’t leap out at you. Probably time to drop/add some books, so any suggestions? For those of you who’ve been lazy about keeping up, this might make for some good Cliff Notes level material to help you fake it.

The Reviews and One-Line Abstracts

I am linking to my reviews where I have them, and to Amazon where I don’t. For a book without a review (the starred ones), if you think you have a good one, send me a link.

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Before you worry about 2.0 technology for your company, ask yourself: does the business you are in even make sense for the 2.0 world? Enterprise 2.0 as an abstraction will obviously happen; it is only a matter of time. Whether your industry actually survives to benefit is not so certain. On this site, we often discuss Enterprise 2.0 principles in the abstract, usually with a hypothetical widget manufacturing company as our implied mental model. We then ask how social media and 2.0 principles affect various functions like sales, PR or engineering. What happens when you go from widgets to specific product or service industries, like baby food, cars, finance, farming or fast food? Will YourEnterprise 2.0 make sense in 2009, the year of dual disruption from 2.0 on one end and a recession on the other?

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Several opinion-makers trying to influence President-Elect Obama’s technology policies thorough blogs. Part of the intent, no doubt, is to simply use a historic election and a public focal point to aid mass communication. But it does seem like these bloggers seem to be nurturing long-shot hopes that they’ll actually be heard. Here are three examples:

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Over the last two weeks, I read two books on how marketing, like every other enterprise function, is changing under the onslaught of 2.0 technologies. One, Spanning Silos: the new CMO imperative, by David Aaker was a serious surprise. It underpromised and overdelivered. I felt educated. Though written in a classical, non-2.0 idiom, it is extraordinarily smart and analyzes its topic solidly. You can read my review/summary at the link above. But the other — and there is no other way to say this — just made me very very sad. It is Seth Godin’s Tribes (free audio book here).

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Juan Enriquez has a great talk on the economic crisis, as part of a thought leadership series by Pop!Tech on the crisis. The video is available here. He is an excellent speaker, and this is one of the first takes on the crisis that I have found both comprehensible and believable. A great quote: “A tax cut is not a tax cut unless you and I pay less and our kids owe less.” Unlike many other commentators, he does not believe this is merely an unusually bad aftershock of a bad subprime market on an overall good economy. He makes a compelling case that that the there are systemic problems.

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I generally view a trend as nearing maturing when the Economist sits up and takes a notice. They now have a special on cloud computing:

As IT gets cloudier, the economics of the business will change

As you might expect from the Economist, they take a moderate view:

In essence, what [Cloud computing] does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.

The article is fairly well-rounded and covers expected impact on SaaS players, hardware providers and industry structure. Besides the Economist story, EC2 coming off beta and offering an SLA for its Linux cloud model, and also offering a Windows version, are signs of true critical mass.

All the more reason to vote for cloudworker as the new telecommuter! Incidentally, my neologism made the NY Times yesterday, and also featured in a piece in industry trade site SearchUnified Communications.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Sequoia being something of a bellwether in startup circles, their opinion matters. Here is an interesting slideshow from them, with their view of the financial situation and its impact on technology. How do enterprise takes differ?

Steve’s comments below got me thinking about why we don’t just accept information overload, but actually ask for it.

There was plenty of chatter in the blogs this weekend over the decision by the Obama campaign to text its supporters news of the VP pick as soon as it happened (well, as soon as the campaign was ready to release it). Most of it seemed centered around (1) the timing of the text’s release (another 3am brouhaha), (2) the “next-gen Internet outreach” approach, and (3) the pick himself. Mainly lost in the discussion was whether anyone really needed to know the information in real time, on their cells and PDAs.

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Last month, I had the pleasure of hearing Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx, speak to a group of our clients. We were graciously hosted by Rob at the FedEx Labs and took a tour of the main FedEx sorting facility in Memphis. Rob sees himself as somewhat of an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist for FedEx and will provide an excellent view of the challenges and opportunities facing large enterprises as they take the 2.0 plunge.

Rob Carter, although he runs one of the most sophisticated logistics information enterprises in the world, sees the value in connectedness and 2.0 networking. He’s well aware of the dramatic shift that is taking place as a result of the next generation web. Look for Rob’s keynote on the morning of the first day of the conference. If you have questions for Rob, send them along, and we’ll see if he can address your inquiries.

Today Ross Mayfield wrote that he had stepped down from the CEO role at Socialtext to make room for someone new. Back in July Ross announced his intention to move into the Chairman and President role and seek “CEO 2.0″ a person he described as someone who “will bring a strong operations background and have a mandate to grow the bottom line.”

CEO 2.0 is Eugene Lee, a seasoned executive with a career in technology reaching back to the mid-eighties. According to LinkedIn, Eugene has spent time at Adobe, Cisco, Banyan and Beyond Inc., a company he co-founded in 1996 and sold to Banyan in 2004.

On the Socialtext blog, Eugene writes “I’ve spent my whole career working at the intersection of people, software, and networks. I’ve always had the most fun working with really smart, enthusiastic, passionate people, going after big ideas, creating and innovating new approaches, and leading teams to deliver value to customers.”

Perhaps these changes taking place at Socialtext are a sign that the social software industry is growing up. In any case, Ross has been (and I’m sure will continue to be) a fantastic evangelist for wikis, social software and the entire Enterprise 2.0 revolution. I wish Ross, Eugene and the Socialtext team well in this new era for Socialtext.