I really hate all of these 2.0 labels. And I frankly don’t understand why O’Reilly media gets so much credit for the Web 2.0 label in 2004 when I’m not sure it’s deserved. The magazine Business 2.0 was around for years before this label took hold, and I was a subscriber back in the 90s.

But what the hell, we have a lazy technology media that loves to jump on new, trendy labels like a wolf pack on a caribou… so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Motorola has drunk deeply from the 2.0 Kool-aid pitcher, but it has done more than just drink. It’s walking the walk, and proving to be a leader in what it calls “Intranet 2.0”, as reported in Information Week (see Motorola’s IT Department Takes On Enterprise 2.0).

“Motorola's initiative, which it calls "Intranet 2.0," has been wildly successful, with 70,000 people using it every day, including partners. The company now has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wiki pages and uses, among other technologies, social bookmarking and tagging by Scuttle and social networkingby Visible Path.

"It actually does work," said Toby Redshaw, Motorola's VP in charge of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. "It's beyond the wisdom of the hive, it actually lets people see new relationships, to see maps of what smart people and like people have done. For any specific problem or opportunity area, there's a community that you can go and find that has the collective knowledge of the company."

At Motorola, Intranet 2.0 started fairly quietly and grew organically by word of mouth and through the use of 250 "knowledge champions" strategically placed throughout the company to evangelize the new technologies. Redshaw made it a point to keep the technology simple to use so that the evangelism would turn into actual use. E-mail used to have a lock on the company, and Redshaw said he's now seeing less e-mail use and more use of technologies like wikis and blogs to share information to wider audiences. "It has to be so easy to use so people vote with their clicks," he said.

As a former journalist, I really hate wolf-pack journalism. But the Motorola story is a good one and worth telling. IBM and Verizon also have good Intranet 2.0 stories too.

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