After work today I went straight up to London for a sort of conference on web 2.0 stuff, with an emphasis on using wikis in business.  It sounds like the sort of thing I am about 20 years too old for, and maybe I am, but it was a reasonably diverting evening.

The theme was 'enterprise 2.0' which is just a made up term to describe using web 2.0-type technologies like wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and so on in business, which is something we are thinking about at work.

Being an evening event time was, necessarily, short.  There was a lot to cram into a few hours and I found it enlightening and frustrating in equal measures.

Frustrating because we had a speaker all the way from San Francisco called Stewart Mader. In a relatively new field Stewart is one of the authorities on introducing collaborative technologies into the workplace, and has one of those brilliant Silicon Valley-type job descriptions – 'Wiki Evangelist'.   So far, so good, but a small section of the audience felt that the rest of us would be far more interested in their interruptions than in hearing the carefully-prepared presentation of an acknowledged authority.

Incidentally, what a very appropriate title Wiki Evangelist is.  The word 'evangelist' sums up images of TV preachers and with most businesses, investing time and money in wiki and blog technology takes a big leap of faith.  The return on investment is potentially huge but equally unmeasurable.  

There were some interesting case studies and so on, but all the way through it seemed to me that the important thing is attitudes and people rather than the technology.  With a lot of the examples I could think of other examples of companies who achieved the same results on earlier technologies – like bulletin boards.  Thats not to say that web 2.0 doesn't make it easier to get those results, but its worth remembering that were always attainable anyway.

Every now and then, for a brief moment, I would get pangs of jealousy hearing about companies using cutting-edge technology in new and innovative ways and wondered what it would be like to work somewhere like that, but then the optimist in me decided that it would be more fun to see such things take root and grow than to be somewhere they are already established.

The downside of it all was not getting home until 11pm.