Leaving aside the frequent appropriation of language, it’s not hard to establish a practical and theoretical link between business, war and politics: Karl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military strategist who aimed to teach clear strategic thinking, is often quoted as describing war as an extension of diplomacy. He also said that war was closer to commerce than art. At first sight, building a link between von Clausewitz, who has been dead over 150 years, Web 2.0 and openness - the specific topic of this post - might be harder. Indulge me.

I’m an avid consumer of newspapers in both paper and electronic form and first came across von Clausewitz in the the English language edition of Haaretz during the recent Labanon war. The quality of Haaretz’s articles was striking: a combination of good sources and access to high level military expertise allowed Haaretz to influence the international news agenda. Its stories resonated across the world in news organizations such as the BBC, The New York Times, Libération, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Regardless of perspective, the strategic options facing Ehud Olmert’s war cabinet were clearly and starkly laid out in the context of late breaking news. By implication, the same was true for Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. And now we are getting to my point: Nasrallah is known to be well informed about Israel. Despite constraints, he would undoubtedly have had access to the information laid out in the Haaretz pages. But this openness, brokered by a third party, was mutually beneficial: a degree of mutual knowledge allowed both protagonists to find a way out of an impasse - one which they had arguably blundered into by misreading signals. The point is that, while the principle might not extend to tactical and operational levels, openness can yield tangible, pragmatic benefits. Furthermore, this can apply even when, for whatever reasons, it is not entirely reciprocated.

Now I come to Web 2.0. Hidden beneath a thicket of soggy and sometimes disturbing language such as “hive mind” and “collective intelligence”, lie some important observations about what works on the Web. These observations are primarily about collaboration and engagement, both of which are predicated on openness and the establishment of an appropriate level of trust. Tim O’Reilly in What is Web 2.0 suggests visualizing Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices tying together a constellation of sites bonded by common values. The guiding objective is to tap into Chris Anderson’s Long Tail which, in turn, stems from the observation that the bulk of the Web’s content comes from a vast number of small sites. The trick is to harness their collective power. But how? Constellations are big and dynamic: stars burst into life, fade and die. Bloggers get bored and firms fail. Clearly some kind of fault tolerance is needed along with a new way of doing business: it won’t be possible to do one-to-one deals in the same way and users need to have faith in an essentially unregulated system. It is hardly surprising then that issues such as stickiness, real sharing and Web ethics generate so much attention: they are a pragmatic necessities for mining the Long Tail.

Actually, I’ve abridged, paraphrased and probably reduced the meaning of the original text - sorry Tim.