email part 6, the future?

I attended a meeting last night at the Canberra Branch of the Australian Computer Society where they held a talk on Web 2.0 and the future direction of email. The speaker, Ralph Dermuth, Director of Technology Sales SW service support, Asia Pacific at IBM Software Group, presented a strong argument that emails are on the way out. He indicated that the group working as a collective community was much stronger than the individual working on email in one-to-one contact. He gave a few examples but the most interesting point he presented was an employee at IBM decided that emails were not an efficient way to combine work and communication, so he decided to stop using emails and created an internal blog (not for public viewing). He used this blog as a communication channel, everyone could see what he was working on and could also contribute to the work as a group. He said the main benefit of this was to generate a community that supported each other. If a question was asked by a contributor in the comment area of the blog, anyone could provide the answer, the support gradually grew which provides a diverse range of suggestion and answers that they claim keeps IBM innovative. Apparently this form of communication was particularly successful when people were away from work.
The speaker then went on to talk about how kids use email, they interviewed a number of them and the most common answer was, they use email to contact their parents, apparently the older generation don't chat or Skype. I feel so old but privileged, I use Skype to keep in contact with my kids at school.
He then went on to say web 3.0, the "meshing" of web 2.0 technologies is the next step in enhancing communication tools. The main problem people encounter today with web 2.0 services such as Flickr, blogging and other web user contribution applications is that they are very isolating, they don't cross over and work together. "Meshing" will bring all these communities together to allow for greater interaction.

It was very interesting presentation but it did leave me feeling that I've missed the boat and was trying to swim in the wake of a ocean liner.

I'm not sure how to reference this as I said it was a presentation and the notes on APA referencing 2008 don't give details for this type but I'll give it a go, see below.

References
Ralph Dermuth, (2009). Enterprise 2.0, presented 31 March 2009, 7pm at the Southern Cross Club, Canberra.