TechWeb notes a demo by IBM of enterprise-oriented mashups at a recent conference using Web services via collaboration software that are able to feed in content from both an enterprise's own content and Web sources. The claim is that these quickly developed apps can appear on desktops in as little as five minutes (Joe McKendrick at ZDNet thinks that's too slow). It's not clear when IBM will get around to making these tools "prime time" but their press release covering the demo makes it clear that enterprises have greatly increased interest in user-driven collaborative tools to drive the aggregation of content within and beyond enterprises. As highlighted in our paper on The New Aggregation, with users empowered with powerful publishing technologies increasingly the aggregation of content from publishers falls into their hands.

Now that Web services technology are in wide use within enterprises and on the Web publishers and aggregators need to think much more seriously about enabling users within enterprises to use their content in user-defined collaborative services such as mashups. Strategies based purely on I.T.-deployed portal platforms will certainly still yield strong results for many publishers, but the time is upon us when enterprise users will be demanding content within highly functional packaging that they can deploy in any number of unique configurations for themselves and colleagues. There's a lot more than weather maps that should be flowing through these applications. It is certainly early days for this type of delivery for professionally produced content, but with the accelerated pace at which these technologies are being deployed in enterprises the time to investigate effective positioning of B2B publications and content services within user-deployed Web services.