Categories: "IT business"

The Gartner Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle 2006

The Gartner Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle 2006

This is one of those examples where a picture is worth a thousand words!

Got that from Cedric Giorgi who also points to this PDF from Gartner explaining what the hype cycle is about.

Now, the interesting part is comparing the 2006 hype cycle with 2005 hype cycle.

I can't help but wonder:

  • Where the hell did Podcasting go this year? Massive adoption already? You could say that for RSS, but not for podcast. Has it fallen so deep into the out of sight lows that even Gartner did not see it this year?
  • Why did the "semantic web" become the "corporate semantic web"?
  • Are Tablet PCs going to stay at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment forever? (I would say yes!)
  • What happened to the internet micro payments? Gone forever?

Well, I guess the answers may well be in the full report, which you gotta pay big bucks for.

Anil Dash about blogging

I recently heard Anil Dash put it in this very simple way:

"A blog is a way to connect with people you care about."

And it has nothing to do with technology, feeds, etc.

It's quite another approach compared to my own (alternative) definition of blogging and the flaw would probably be that it can be applied to many other things as well (forums, IM, MySpace, etc.) Still, I like it. It kind of makes sense to look at blogs in this social way.

Furthermore, Anil would explain that we hardcore bloggers tend to think that most people would like to talk to hundreds of thousands of people through their blog. Actually, most of them don't! They regard us as somewhere between strange and psychopath. (And I do remember my girlfriend having that exact same reaction when I first told her about my blog... :roll:)

My (alternative) definition of blogging

How do people usually define blogging?

They tend to say that it's about organizing posts by reverse chronological order. That it's about writing in the first person. That's it's about being more personal. That's it's a social thing. That it's about personal sites.

Yeah right. Like we had no news sites before? No forums with personal opinions before? No personal home pages before? No discussion boards before?

To me, the main difference blogging makes is this:

  • Before blogging, all kinds of people tended to talk about a specific subject in a specific place (forum, mailing list).
  • After blogging, a specific person tends to talk about all kinds of subjects in a specific place (his personal blog).

This central paradigm shift now triggers a series of changes all other the web: we need trackback & aggregators to replace discussion threads & forums. We need new website ranking algorythms based on more complex criterias than inbound links alone. We have new forms of (referer, comment...) spam to cope with...

Then... comes collaborative blogging... where bloggers unite their efforts to publish a multi-authored blog. This then very much looks like an old-school news site or forums. Well it's still clearly different from forums since the authors are limited/selected and the new guy can only post in the comments section.

But as far as news sites are concerned, I'm not sure there really is a difference with what existed before... Maybe it's just easier than before to set up the tools needed for collaborative publishing. (Well, with b2evolution it certainly is! ;D)

The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The long tail

There's more than the code...

Oh well... I think it's been too long since I last read some great wisdom like the one on Joel on Software.

I read this really insightful peace today about all the important things beyond just the actual software code.

Here's a funny quote:

Human emotions can be really, really superficial. In particular people ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

...but the whole article is definitely a must read!

Of course, this so much applies to b2evolution as well... :-/