Web 2.0: new and challenging practical issues

Citation

Colomo-Palacios, R. (2010), "Web 2.0: new and challenging practical issues", The Learning Organization, Vol. 17 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/tlo.2010.11917faa.001

Web 2.0: new and challenging practical issues

Article Type: Guest editorial From: The Learning Organization, Volume 17, Issue 6

About the Guest Editor

Ricardo Colomo-Palacios Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carlos III University (Spain). He received his PhD in computer science from the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid (2005). He also holds an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa (2002). He has been working for more than ten years as a Senior Software Engineer, Project Manager, and Software Engineering Consultant in several companies including Spanish IT leader INDRA. His research interests include information systems, and more specifically, customer relationship management, human capital within IT professionals, and the use of social and semantic web for the support of the business process and information systems. He is also an editorial board member for several other international journals and conferences and Editor in Chief of International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals.

The ever-growing influence of internet in current twenty-first century everyday life has implied a paradigm shift for companies and users. A shift in the web content consumer-producer paradigm is making the web a means of conversation, cooperation and mass empowerment. Emerging killer applications combine sharing information, social dimension, undermining the very principles where content have relied for decades, namely information asymmetry and top-down content delivery. In this changing scenario, companies are also changing the way in which they communicate with their environment, including competitors, customers and employees.

Social interactions have recently found an exceptional vehicle in the recent breed of user generated content aware technologies encompassed by the “Web 2.0” buzzword (O’Reilly, 2007). The Web 2.0 phenomenon made the web social, initiating an explosion in the number of users of the web, thus empowering them with a huge autonomy in adding content to webpages, labeling the content, creating folksonomies of tags, and finally, leading to millions of users constructing their own webpages (Breslin and Decker, 2007). These technologies have forced for some organizations and initiatives an adoption that enabled meeting their business challenges and deriving competitive advantage. But mostly, they have provided a platform to foster social critical mass, particularly, due to the amount of metadata they have generated to provide tags, picture sharing environments, social bookmarks and blogs.

Organizations must face this new challenge by combining, in one hand, new management practices, and in the other, new technological tools, based in Web 2.0. In industry, the potential of using Web 2.0 technologies appears to be being gradually realized though adoption (Du and Wagner, 2006). Thus, according to a study by McKinsey (2007) consultants where 2,847 executives were interviewed, respondents inform that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments, moreover, they say they are using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration inside the company. Some authors argue that Web 2.0 technologies are invading the corporate sphere (Bughin, 2008; Davenport, 2007). Given this crucial importance and widespread interest, Enterprise 2.0 has now emerged as a term to characterize the emergence of new tools to enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers (McAfee, 2006). According to Levy (2009), Enterprise 2.0 can be seen as the Web 2.0 reflection in organizations. In this scenario, the aim of this special issue is to present new and challenging issues in the contribution of Web 2.0 for the learning organization, and in particular, its practical applications, including technological developments. There are five papers in this issue.

The first paper is “Information exchange and information disclosure in social networking web sites: mediating role of trust” by Monika Mital, D. Israel and Shailja Agarwal. The objective of this paper is to examine the mediating effect of trust on the relationship between the type of information exchange and information disclosure on social networking web sites. Through a well conducted study, authors found that there is a significant relationship between information exchange and information disclosure and, as a result of this, a relationship between trust and information disclosure. Having this in mind, social networking websites should be designed keeping in mind the utility of the exchange and the inherent trust.

The second paper discusses “Redundancy and novelty mining in the business blogosphere”. In this paper, Flora S. Tsai and Kap Luk Chan from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore show that novelty mining techniques can be applied to business blogs to help organizations filter redundant information with a very high accuracy. This paper contributes to the investigation of the feasibility and performance of detecting novel and redundant business blogs, one of the known problems of this kind of publication.

Isuru Fernando from IBM New Zealand presents a case study from which a framework for the purposeful building of knowledge communities by means of social media is formulated in “Community creation by a social media paradigm”. Based on an initiative called the BlueBI Campaign performed by the New Zealand office of IBM, the author suggests a set of best practice steering points for future social media campaigns within the organization.

The fourth paper is “Organisational blogs: benefits and challenges of implementation” by Gavin J. Baxter, Thomas M. Connolly and Mark H. Stansfield from School of Computing, University of the West of Scotland, UK. The purpose of this paper is to identify the theoretical link between blogs and organisational learning. This study is performed within the ICT division of companies and focuses more in-depth on software development projects. The main outcome of the paper is a set of guidelines presented as an implementation check list for companies considering using internal blogs.

Finally, Markus Schaal, Guven Fidan, Roland M. Müller and Orhan Dagli introduce a new method for blog quality assessment in “Quality assessment in the blog space”. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality. Authors demonstrated this method by a preliminary case study in the Turkish blog space, and compared their results with well known Google Page Rank with promising results.

Hence, the guest editor is very satisfied from the academic viewpoint with the quality and scope of the contributions to this special issue.

The editor would like to take this opportunity to thank Emerald for their kind support. I would also like to thank authors and reviewers who have contributed to this special issue. The editor likes to thank Consulting Editor Peter A. C. Smith for his endless support during the editorial process and also to Nancy Rolph, the Publisher.

Ricardo Colomo-PalaciosGuest Editor