Web 2.0 Knowledge Technologies and the Enterprise

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The modern business environment

‘To someone with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.’ This is a proverb one might readily apply to information management and communication tools. To IT specialists, salesmen and web evangelists the world is pieces of information waiting to be processed, tagged and stored, such is the hype that has surrounded successive waves of technology product announcements over the past 30 years. An evidence-based database juxtaposing claims and disappointments for the IT industry would make interesting reading. Are we standing before a similar mountain of hype with Web 2.0?

There does seem to be a lot happening. A young woman of about 25, an administrative assistant at a Chinese university I visited, writes a ...