developerWorks: I'm Scott Laningham, and this is developerWorks interviews. I'm joined this time by three IBMers who are featured speakers at a new developerWorks Live! technical briefing titled "Web 2.0 goes to work," two events being held in September: one on September 12 in Raleigh, N.C., and one on September 18 in Austin, Texas. First, we have Martha Mealy who is in market planning with Lotus Software. Welcome, Martha.

Mealy: Thank you Scott. Nice to be here.

developerWorks: And we have Lauren Cooney, a member of the CTO office for information management. Hi, Lauren.

Cooney: Hi, Scott.

developerWorks: And joining also is David Barnes, Web 2.0 evangelist for IBM Software Group. Welcome, David.

Barnes: Well, thank you for having me. And you know, I want to start off if you don't mind by saying by a Web 2.0 evangelist, I work with a really cool group in IBM and it's the Emerging Internet Technologies Group. So just like Web 2.0 is an emerging technology, I'm not part of marketing and I'm not part of sales and I work with some real great super geeks, mostly developers. So that I have actually one of the coolest jobs in the company.

developerWorks: It is a cool group. It is a cool group. We've spoken to members of that team before, Rod Smith, in particular. So now I'm wondering, you know, Web 2.0 is something that comes up a lot in these podcasts. And what's going on at this particular tech briefing? Is it an overview or is it something different?

Barnes: No, this is definitely something different. In fact, beyond overview, this is more of deep dive into how we can actually use some of these technologies. I and a lot of people on the team understand that the words Web 2.0 have become overused and hyped. I'm starting to like the words evolving Web because it's not really a release like a 2.0 would imply.

And so what we want to do is dig into some of the new technologies that are really changing the landscape of the Web out there — things like PHP, REST, JSON, new ways of using RSS and Atom feeds. Not traditional information technology but suddenly really popular, far simpler than what we've used in the past. And so we want to show what we're doing within IBM to help bring that into our corporate enterprise customers, academics, into government, etc.

developerWorks: Very cool. Now, I've also heard rumors about no slide decks. What's up with that?

Barnes: Oh, I put a stake in the ground early on. [LAUGHTER] Anybody that knows my demos have always been my life, and I absolutely hate slides, especially for a technical audience because it's just too hard to show an architectural diagram and get me interested. So this conference is no slides. And all of the people that I'm dealing with, bringing into the conference are the super geeks, mostly the architects that have actually created the technology. So I'm digging deep into the labs and getting the people that can answer any question and if they don't know the answer, let's pull up the code and take a look at it and see what we can do with it.

developerWorks: Now the primary themes as I understand are collaboration, application creation, and information technology or data mining. Now is that a good way to get an understanding of the whole Web 2.0 topic or is it just what you all chose to focus on at this event?

Barnes: You know, there is a no way to get a hold of the whole Web 2.0 topic because it's not a hard definition. Certainly, Tim O'Reilly and others have put a good envelope around the meaning of Web 2.0. But what we did is we focused where can we bring that into business today. Now certainly there's things out there like Flickr and del.icio.us and things out on the Net that have created a community of people — how do we bring the value of that into the enterprise? Well, mashups are one of the ways to do that — social software, collaborative software. And then behind it, boy, there's a whole lot of unmined data.

In fact, one of the O'Reilly terms is data is the new Intel Inside. So one of the things that we're doing at this event is, how do we unlock the data and do it more easily than traditional relational databases, etc. So we brought together the things that we think we can apply today while we learn, all of us, about new technologies and how we can apply these new principles and practices.

developerWorks: So, Martha — let me turn to you. At this event, which is being held twice in September, once in Raleigh and once in Austin, Texas, you're going to talk about the importance of community collaboration and Web 2.0. What are some of your thoughts on why it's so important?

Mealy: Well, one of the key things that we're seeing a lot in the consumer space is the growth of sites like MySpace or FaceBook or LinkedIn, and we're really learning a lot from those sites in terms of how people are using that as a way to share their ideas and broadcast their ideas across a broad community. It's really without boundaries, organizational boundaries. And people are using that, those same networks, to also find experts and to begin to build professional communities again spanning organizational boundaries. And we believe that business has a tremendous amount to learn and to begin to leverage around these sorts of broader community-based collaboration concepts that fall under this broad umbrella of Web 2.0.

developerWorks: So it's not, I mean, we know it's a big deal in the consumer space, but you feel like it really does have some important application in the business space, then.

Mealy: Yes. Think about just a simple task within an organization. I'm trying to find a group of experts to put together a task force. Currently, when you think of using e mail or trying to use a common corporate directory or something like that to locate expertise, it would be tremendously difficult. You'd probably have to send out a bunch of e-mails to all the folks that you know asking them who they know or who they might nominate for such an effort. And with using some of these broad networking tools that consist of capabilities like blogging or shared bookmarks or even community building tools, it makes it much easier for an organization to know what the organization knows and for an individual to build such a team by doing a search across, say, the shared bookmarks within an organization, or the shared bookmarks that an organization may share with a business partner network. They can identify not only information but also expertise across that network. And connect with those people and bring them into a community of interest and leverage them on a task force without having to clog up e-mail to do that. And to do it in a much fast and a much more responsive way. That's just one instance of how these kinds of tools can really build efficiencies within an organization and really drive a bottom line.

developerWorks: Can you talk a little bit about some of the IBM technologies, maybe some of the Lotus technologies, that are dealing with this thing you're talking about?

Mealy: Yes, of course. We really think of the collaborative spectrum of tools that, you know, traditionally include e-mail and instant messaging of extending to this community set of tools like blogging, like the ability to share bookmarks, to build real Agile communities, even do some ad-hoc task management and project management. And linking these all into the concept of a profile so that individuals can push out their expertise across that organization and that set of integrated tools — think of all of those capabilities now in a single solution allowing an individual within an organization to quickly locate expertise or locate information.

And we're calling this suite of services Lotus Connections, and it consists of those five elements. And we also are looking at some other technologies around collaborating around data and an aspect of that is called Many Eyes that we have available on alphaWorks. So we both have a product that we're selling through the Lotus brand called Lotus Connections, as well as a service that we have hosted on our alphaWorks site, the way for a group of people in this Many Eyes capacity of looking at data together and collaborating around that data — you know, brainstorming around it both in an asynchronous and a synchronous way.

So those are just a couple of the technologies that we have to offer from IBM around this collaborative element of Web 2.0.

developerWorks: And I assume at the events you're going to be talking some about how IBM is looking to developers to take these services and maybe extend and integrate them into existing and even new business apps?

Mealy: Yes. I'm looking very much forward to the chance to get some feedback from developers and sharing with them our API strategy primarily around things like the Atom protocol. How they can help us envision integrating these services into, you know, enterprise applications. Whether it's a quick ability to include shared bookmarks in an enterprise search engine, whether it's including profiles as part of an enterprise application to better understand somebody's role when you're, you know, perhaps completing a form with them or completing a business process with them.

We're hoping that by sharing some of our strategy, our API strategy, that we will get back from developers some great input on ways they think we can really put this aspect of Web 2.0 to work inside their enterprises.

developerWorks: That's great, Martha. We should get Lauren in here. Lauren, are you still with us or have you dozed off?

Cooney: No, I'm here. [LAUGHTER]

developerWorks: Now, we know your part in this will be focused on something called Info 2.0. Just what is that?

Cooney: So Info 2.0 is a term that [Anant Jhingran] who's the CTO of Information Management, is actually started talking about probably a year ago. And specifically what it is, it's an information management technology for simplifying the interaction of data and content by information mashups. Basically what Info 2.0 does is it uses simple interfaces and tools to connect information from custom and packaged business applications or the Web, spreadsheets, and databases — just making information assembly and access easier for both IT and non-IT users.

Info 2.0 not only extends and complements the existing investments that people normally have in their information architectures but we like to look at it as sitting alongside like a legacy system in order to supplement their investments in IT.

developerWorks: So what is it about Web 2.0 that's demanding this kind of a shift in the way information is managed?

Cooney: So basically, we came to the reasoning that Info 2.0 is needed for two different reasons specifically. You know, kind of giving it an overview, Info 2.0 is needed to cost effectively speed greater information access and use for business advantage in IT departments. And we're seeing this for two different reasons.

Basically, traditional architectures did not cover these cases because one, many data sources aren't covered by enterprise integration architectures. This would be departmental content, desktop content, e-mail content, etc. And the second reason is that data sources are typically accessed in an enterprise application manner when they really need to be accessed in the situational application manner. So when I say situational application, I'm talking about an application that's created for a group of users with specific needs and applications that have a shorter lifespan based on that need.

developerWorks: OK. So now where should listeners go to get a taste of these technologies, IBM or otherwise, do you think?

Cooney: So we have actually just added all pieces of Info 2.0 on the alphaWorks services page of ibm.com. So if you want to look at Info 2.0 as a stack, I should say that, you know, Info 2.0 is something where we're really focusing on open innovation. So that's the freedom to pick and choose which technologies you want to use based on your specific need. But if you want to look at it from the stack perspective, the bottom layer of Info 2.0 is actually called Mashup Hub. And Mashup Hub is an enterprise feed server, as well as a catalog of feed and widgets usable in mashups. It's basically the hub for information sources and then it includes some additional Web 2. 0 features, such as tagging. The middle layer is DMIA, and what DMIA stands for is Data Mashups for Internet Applications. And that's the data mashup service for Web and enterprise information. It basically takes information sources and provides augmentation, the creation of new feeds and mixing and mashing of data sources. These data sources could be from the desktop, and we're also working on database connectivity so that users can pull information sources that traditionally haven't been available within Web 2.0. And then the top layer or what we kind of have been calling the presentation layer is called QEDWiki. And what that allows for is the assembly of quick situational applications and mashups.

developerWorks: Now David, I know you're going to be talking about application creation and QEDWiki, specifically. Tell us a little something about what you'll be covering.

Barnes: Oh, absolutely. Well, this is certainly one of my favorite topics. In the group that I work with, everything we do, we do in a browser, which I believe is sweet because it's a lightweight environment to work in.

What QEDWiki is is it's a wiki-based browser-based mashup-maker. So with nothing more than a browser, what we'll do is we'll actually build some mashups. We'll go out, we'll harvest some information off the Net from maybe Dapper or any source on the net and start mashing it together with some corporate information. And that's what the mashup-maker environment does.

And throughout the entire conference, we actually then go behind the scenes, these widgets that we just made, that's what we call them. Where do we store them? How do we access them? How do we tag them? How do we rate them? And like I said, we've got the people that developed our code from the ground up there with us so we can really dig in.

developerWorks: OK. This is great. Martha Mealy, Lauren Cooney, and David Barnes. All three speakers at the coming developerWorks Live! technical briefing on "Web 2.0 goes to work." Thanks so much to all three of you for your time today.

Mealy: Yes, my pleasure.

Cooney: Great, thank you very much.

Barnes: So hey, it's my pleasure and I'm hyped about it. I think we got a whole new kind of conference here, and so I hope people can join us.

developerWorks: Now the technologies mentioned today Many Eyes, QEDWiki, Mashup Hub, and Lotus Connections will all be demo'ed at the "Web 2.goes to work" technical briefings. And some lucky attendee will win an iPhone. So a lot of good reasons to make your way to one of these dates in September. Again, September 12 in Raleigh, N.C., and September 18 in Austin, Texas, with hopefully more dates and locations to come. And again, register for either event at ibm.com/developerworks. Click on Technical Events and Briefings in the right nav and you'll see a listing on one-day briefings for "Web 2.0 goes to work."

Find links to many of the things we talked about in the show notes for this podcast at ibm.com/developerworks/podcast. I'm Scott Laningham, talk to you next time.

Resources

• "Web 2.0 goes to work" briefing registration
  
  
• "Web 2.0 goes to work" wiki
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts blog
  
  
• QEDWiki
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts
  
  

About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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