OpenText RedDot Web 2.0 briefing

Yesterday morning I attended this event in downtown Toronto with a colleague from Prescient Digital Media, and it was a jolly good event.

Why ? Because it was not a simple product pitch by OpenText's RedDot web content management division (not that there is anything wrong with technical sales pitch presentations, if they are advertised as such). No, this was an interesting session with some good comments and input from the floor, and even better considering it was a 'Web 2.0' session, the first speaker was Craig Hepburn, who I follow on Twitter and who's blog, 'ForWebSake' is included amongst the resources on my Pageflakes site. Craig presents a great case study on the work he and his colleagues did at his previous employer, STA Travel so I suggest you check out his blog for a practioners viewpoint of the marketing potential of Web 2.0 technologies.

The second session was from Derrick Stanford, a Regional Sales Director on making web 2.0 safe. Again this was a nice overview of the linkage between web 2.0 technologies and the realm of electronic records management, not a salespitch for Livelink per-se, but an interesting discussion of how legislation is not necessarily keeping up with the tech.

So that is what is really interesting to me. Craigs great illustrations of how the use of User Generated Content (UGC) can provide huge benefits for a business, contrasted with questions from the floor about how to protect your business reputation online and how to deal with the pitfalls of blogging and greater user community interaction. This was followed by the ubiquitious discussion of whether or not Facebook should be banned, and how some people don't want to meld their work and personal tools, but that millenials do (or at least many of them) and they want to meld and merge their work and personal tools into a single view of their digital persona.

Personally I think that most people mix some elements of work and non-work life, whether deliberately or not. I mean unless your a deep undercover spy do you really maintain a tight, 'firewalled' seperation between your "9 to 5" and your "social" life ? However do we really need 'one ring to rule them all" ? OpenSocial and other protocols and standards should allow us to syndicate and aggregate and use our platform of choice, be it iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Facebook, Ning or LinkedIn etc (even Second Life ??)

Now, add this social, behavioural aspect to the inability of red tape encumbered government beauracracies to keep up with technology, to reform and 'edit' their privacy and data protection laws, and what do we have ? Well a big mess probably, and I am not going to suggest any answers but hopefully I will have provoked my four readers into thinking about this :-)