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Back when it was called the "Architecture of Participation" it was easier to identify what was and what was not part of the latest era of online publishing.  Since then it got a cooler name, "Web 2.0" (thanks Tim O'Reilly!), and hundreds of start-ups have come and gone, but the fundamentals have stayed the same.  Online Architectures of Participation, The New Web, Web 2.0, etc., all convey a higher level of interaction and interoperability. 

It is still not clear to many publishers, business owners, website admins, and other interested parties, exactly which portions have true business value, and which are going to go the way of color fax machines. 

CRM Magazine this month released an article that played to some of these questions, and being the good people they are, they highlighted Near-Time as one of the platforms that is actually bringing business value, and validation to the elusive Web 2.0 space. 

  Titled The Second Coming of Web 2.0, this article surfaces many of the questions professionals have had about Web 2.0 deployments and what they mean for business. 

Our own CEO, Reid Conrad was quoted in this article - for your reference these and other highlights follow.  To access this article directly GO HERE . 

Highlights...

Cliché or not, 2.0 is useful shorthand for indicating a break with old ways of doing things; Web 2.0 is a major topic -- and so by extension is CRM 2.0, the use of Web 2.0 technologies to improve customer experience and CRM system efficiency. CRM magazine isn't above leveraging this concept -- consider our recent cover story, for example ("It's All Coming 2.0gether," December 2007), or any of a number of articles we've run since. But what's beyond the notation? What exactly is "Web 2.0," anyway?

There are several definitions -- and there's a lot of "I know it when I see it" involved -- but the most common ones revolve around social media. As William Band, vice president and principal analyst for business process and applications at Forrester Research, describes the trend in his March 2008 paper, "The CRM 2.0 Imperative," "[t]he social Web...includes fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) activities like blogging, RSS, file sharing, open-source software, podcasting, search engines, and user-generated content." Other 2.0 technologies include wikis, social networking sites and services, and even tiny content-delivery systems known as widgets. Combined with more-established technologies such as instant messaging, email, and forums, these are the tools that enable the creation of distributed communities built around common interests and goals, whether it's socializing, commenting on cricket teams, sharing a passion for theater, or forming a user group to swap software-development tips. This phenomenon has transformed the Web from a source of canned information, static messages, and banner-ad bombardment to a destination of sorts where people can interact with one another in the manner of their choosing.

Reid Conrad, the chief executive officer of social networking platform provider Near-Time , finds that the user-based genesis of Web 2.0 means his clients are usually familiar with one or more aspects of social computing. "Generally, [clients] have worked with individual enterprise 2.0 applications -- blogs, wikis, and such -- but haven't tied them together," he says. "Early users, not surprisingly, were IT professionals. Now we're seeing more line-of-business personnel -- many of our customers are Web 2.0 -- savvy and competent."

The Real Business 2.0

Despite this emerging familiarity, Web 2.0 fundamentally remains a new way of doing business -- in fact, maybe this is Business 2.0. "The traditional way our [users] interact with prospects is email; they have to change that old habit," Conrad says, adding that they have to think about when to use email, and why. Similarly, they must utilize the social environment to put information and content in the right place at the right time.

"We're finding organizations that more and more want to interact in any given format," Conrad says. "You have different forms of interaction for different purposes. Put executives in a wiki format and expect them to produce content? Well, good luck. But those same execs would be very comfortable participating in a forum." That represents a change to the idea of building valuable content: It has to be done continuously, in a living forum, instead of just creating a deliverable for several months down the line.