Analysts (but also experts) make their money giving predictions, insights, forecasts.

Gartner, for example, yearly publishes a Hype Cycle for Emergent Technologies and a Hype cycle for Web Applications. I sincerely like this work, because it can help you to build a bigger picture about all the new things that come around during the year and also to understand the main topics for the year to come.

Sometimes anyway, I get really surprised about their conclusions. Bruno Giussani explains clearly how Gartner considers folksonomies as an already on the peak and low impact technology (so limited potential as well).

Let me say that I disagree. Completely.

As I commented on Mario’s post:

I don’t think Gartner is getting the revolutionary impact of the Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon.

This prediction (18 July 2006) seems to be already old and denied by what is happening today (with a stronger evidence in the US market). Web 2.0 is a revolution for millions of users (even Time bought it) and Enterprise 2.0 is deeply changing the way large companies collect, aggregate, manage and make use of their knowledge.

For me this is a transformational “technology”. Maybe the point is that this is not technology for Gartner. It is a social and cultural shift. Gartner imho finds difficult to evaluate this kind of evolution.

Gartner considers as low benefit a technology that is difficult to translate into increased revenue.

Folksonomies are definitely a part of the Web 2.0 thing and to say it completely, Gartner doesn’t exclude that tags can prove useful into corporate intranets. They simply seems to lack a way to give them a place inside companies and to measure this effect.

Anyway Gartner suggests to conduct pilots to directly evaluate the usefulness of folksonomies in your place “in acquiring and sharing corporate knowledge”. They continue saying that folksonomies “may translate into enterprise productivity, but the causal relationship will be difficult to prove and the impact hard to measure”.

My feeling is that they aren’t fully considering the new paradigm that folksonomies support but, more than that, the potentialities they have.

KM has been out there for a long time. Folksonomies are here only since 2005 and my prediction is that they have a long evolution underway and they are already used into enterprise social tagging platforms (like Cogenz and Connectbeam).

But that’s not all. The relationship between social and traditional media is changing. User contributions are making their way into online journals, even very important ones. Photos and videos are often free materials for real journalists and editors or for marketing campaigns. Comments can widen the discussion, tags can enable unexpected and powerful connections between posts, articles, contents.

I’m really into tags but I’m trying to remain objective and I don’t think that they are going to pass. I suspect they are evolving getting embedded quite transparently inside larger systems as a useful tool. As often in technology, really working functionalities quickly become commodities and people stop recognizing them as separate entities.

In December, even the New York Times adds sharing tool. Readers can save their preferred articles in a number of social media sites like Digg, Newsvine, Facebook. Tags and comments are not there, but they could be. Businessweek already introduced tags to remember your pieces on Del.icio.us and they are not alone.

So what if tagging was moving from release 1 to release 2, with improved properties like better scabability, browsability and discoverability (see Facetag.org), enterprise adoption (Cogenz and Connectbeam), better visual navigation (Joe Lamantia writing about it), smarter algorithms to create clusters and hierarchies (RawSugar and Stanford). And we are only at the beginning.

The potential? The potential is big. Large information spaces populated by millions of user generated contents are useless without a way to surf them. It can be accepted in YouTube where you chose a word and then issue a search to find a funny video. Not the same in an intranet where people are doing their work and refuse to waste hours to get that report they were looking for. Findability has a big impact (i’m talking about money and satisfaction) in an enterprise setting (but this is not the only case).

So my impression is that we have a technology with a large impact and a large potential. The more it will become transparent the more it could be changing our way to search and navigate information. In a time where information is overwhelming us, this is a fundamental effect.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.