The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

Innovation guru and author Scott Berkun held a workshop and keynoted at the recent Web 2.0 Expo and blogged about the experience on his website.

Scott shared that he saw similarities between the current web 2.0 and social media buzz and the push technology hubub of a decade ago. He also pointed out that for the most part, vendors now, as then, fail to distinguish themselves from one another because they don’t take the time to explain how the potential of their gadgets/software/services deliver real value.

To that end Scott offered up a golden nugget of insight that anyone can use to make sense of the benefits of web 2.0 and social media:

We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.

Scott’s slides from his Web 2.0 workshop on How to innovate on time are here (pdf).

In December 2007, the BBC News website published an essay by Bill Gates on “The skills you need to succeed” in today’s digital technology world. In his thought piece, Gates pointed out that people now deal with information in almost every job and cited how critical it is to be able to use software tools effectively in the global knowledge economy. He also stressed the importance of science and engineering, and the role of collaboration in software innovation:

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

You can read the entire Gates essay here. A hat tip to Web Worker Daily, a great web resource for independent business and creative professionals, for the original link to this story.

The rise of collaboration is one of the key themes that is explored at the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conferences. In this TED video, Charles Leadbeater makes the case that passionate amateurs (pro-ams), now connected and enabled by the technologies of the web, are able to collaborate and innovate on a massive scale. The result is products and services, like mountain bikes and Wikipedia, that otherwise would not have been pursued and produced by traditional organizations. Leadbeater is currently at work on We Think: Why mass creativity is the next big thing, a book that further explores and examines the power of mass collaboration. Fittingly, Leadbeater made an early draft of the book available for download and commenting by the public. He is now incorporating the feedback into the final version of the book, slated for publication in early 2008.