The Enterprise 2.0 Conference opens on June 22 in Boston and Venkatesh Rao wonders Can Enterprise 2.0 afford to be boring (Conference Blog, June 18).

On the same day (same blog), a piece on Thoughtfarmer might prove the point with the following sentence:
"Thoughfarmer are the creators of social intranet software which adds a social layer to the basic address book and read only web pages of 1.0 style intranets."

Can we get the plain English version please.

I believe this farmer helps harvest collaboration.

There will be no psychedelic experience yet amongst the first day's highlights at Enterprise 2.0 you can count " Evening in the Cloud. From 4:30 – 8:00 pm in the Harbor Ballroom, hear how to leverage your existing IT investments from a panel of leading cloud computing vendors".

The questions raised here echo what Peter Whitehead asked in Does business understand technology any more? (Digital Business, FT, June 18).

He noted that "with every business now being a digital business – even a side-street hairdresser will have its customers comparing notes about it online – they have to engage. Yet many banks, for example, still refuse to let customers post comments online because they fear what will be said" and "the ones that get it ask: ‘How can I facilitate the dialogue with my customers’ – not to control it but to be responsive and be viewed as listening and as working with customers."

Does Nick Earle's take on Mesh Collaboration (video above) help clarifying things?

I guess there would be no need for conferences like Enterprise 2.0 if everyone already knew how to use all the nifty tools that crowd our work playgrounds plus it gives a number of people a chance do escape their boring daily and create new hashtags like #e2conf in this case.

Boredom and obscure language for Monday Work Etiquette #95

Previously: No Idea Where you're Going, How Can you Get Anywhere (Hugh Grant)?