Ross Mayfield of Socialtext kicked off this report from leading content technology companies in Silicon Valley by noting that Web 2.0 has little to do with technology and everything to do with people who have social incentives to publish and share content. Contributions could be small or could be central to an online community, but all in all it's being driven by social incentives and not traditional contracts. Tools such as Digg and Memeorandum provide collective intelligence, but importantly they also provide constructive intelligence by being able to collaborate on content quality, ratings and feedback. Socialtext is working hard to get more friendly and enterprise-ready to make it easier to publish collaboratively. Licensing is a key factor in helping communities grow.

Wikipedia is the poster child for this concept, one that allows people to chip in to the pool at a very low threshold. When Wikipedia bought the old eHow community usage was slogging along until they went to a Creative Commons license, at which point the encouragement to share and collaborate with the content soared. So openness in social content requires thinking on many levels to encourage collaboration.

In the enterprise space, Ross sees the central purchasing and I.T. function of many institutions also stifling collaborative content. Instead of heavy projects Socialtext helps enterprise users to get small enterprise communities working, build enthusiasm from the core community outwards to include other users - and in the process bit by bit replace the long cycles required to get much enterprise content on the typical Intranet portal. Some organizations such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), a major bank, flip this concept on its head and mandate one wiki infrastructure to encourage efficient content sharing. Simple software, yes, but with a major impact for organizations with enormous assets on the line.

Michael Walsh of Leverage Software demoed visual tools in Salesforce.com to help people collaborating on enterprise tasks to understand who has similar interests and skills that may help them to meet their objectives. Leverage also and licenses data that can help people to visualize how people in a community fit a given profile geographically. R.J. Pittman of Groxis focused on "Work 2.0," indicating their focus on mission-critical enterprise applications, Their spin on Web 2.0 is to focus on how content is socialized within a software product. Grokker is a content visualization tool that helps users understand patterns in search results or other collected data sets. R.J. demoed some interesting examples of how Grokker can be used to visualize content clusters into visual knowledge maps, which can be shared easily with other users.

Both the Leverage and the Grokker tools were interesting and valuable, but this is Web 2.0...how? The mismatch of these presentations underscores the dilemma that many have with the abuse of the Web 2.0 "movement." For many Silicon Valley companies Web 2.0 may nothing more than a source of bullet points that can be inserted into slide decks pushing what they were going to talk about anyway: their products. I can hear the notion of "connectedness and relatedness" that R.J. was pushing, and content visualization indicating the power of social collaboration is an important byproduct of social publishing. But these tools in and of themselves are not social publishing.

I think that Ross' important messages about how to build communities effectively using social publishing tools got a bit lost in the shuffle of the usual "this is my platform" spiels that software companies are likely to provide at conferences. Good stuff, guys, but keeping the focus on users as publishers is the core of Web 2.0: the rest is just ways to get in the door to talk with people about your software. Nevertheless, many publishers should consider content visualization functions as an important extensions of their product lines to make content more accessible on a human level - and many do already. Perhaps this is why so many companies have gone to variations on the "2.0" theme that seem more attuned to their real focus.