A few days ago, a weighty package was delivered in the mail. Picking it up, I was briefly reminded I had skipped the gym, again, that week. This isn’t a post about how rarely I get to exercise, though.

The box was from McGraw-Hill, and in it came twelve copies of Reshaping your business with web 2.0. Now, I’m an enthusiastic reader, but twelve copies are more than what I usually get when buying books: this one is the culmination of a year of work, in collaboration with fellow co-authors Vince Casarez, Billy Cripe and Philipp Weckerle. Yes, we wrote a book! In September 2007, we embarked on the following mission: define, dissect, and qualify the applicability of the recent innovations, permeating the consumer web today, to the more structured and rarefied world of the enterprise.

We wanted to bridge and relate the two environments, and show how the tools, the behaviors, and the culture of two-way participation, of collaboration omnipresent in the evolving consumer web could benefit companies hoping to foster productivity, to tighten the social fabric of their organizations, and to share information more efficiently.

Having developed an addiction for wikis, blogs, social networks and mash-ups ever since the early days of web 2.0, to the point of starting a company focusing on social annotations and ambient blog context augmentation, I felt tickled by the challenge of recasting the practices and technologies powering the web at large to address the specific needs of the enterprise, and I couldn’t have dreamt of better partners than Vince, Billy and Philipp, all from Oracle, to do it: they kept things real every step of the way, and I found the combination of our respective view-points most fruitful in coming up with actionable recommendations for CIOs and corporate IT decision makers.

About those twelve copies: I’m giving them away, on a first come first serve basis. Just ask (and promise you’ll write a review, good or bad, of the book on Amazon) and you can have yours now, even ahead of the official release date on October 2.

Speaking of official release, we’re scheduled to talk at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, on Wednesday September 24, at 1:00pm. Book signing right afterwards: come get your signed copy. Exciting!