An interesting post from Philipp Keller on Tag history and gartners hype cycles from back in May of this year which I missed first time around. Now part of me thinks it must be possible to plot just about anything on the Gartner Hype Cycle, but it can be a useful tool for provoking reflection and discussion.
Note how Philipp indicates that we now find ourselves in the Trough of Disillusionment in 2007. Gartner define this stage in the cycle thus:
Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.
I’m not sure that this is where we are.
Phillipp suggests that:
There are no blog posts any more. Tagging is not really unfashionable but the topic is “done” à la «if that’s all what’s tagging adds to the web experience, I’m not interested in this technology any more». There isn’t much thinking and innovation going on.
I half agree. I agree that tagging is not unfashionable, but that people aren’t blogging about it to the same degree. But I can’t help wondering if we haven’t already reached the Plateau of Productivity – the last stage in the Gartner curve and absent from Phillipp’s diagram. Surely del.icio.us and Flickr can be considered mainstream and accepted?
Did we go through a Trough of Disillusionment already? Or does the Gartner curve not really apply in this instance?
Technorati Tags: folksonomies, Gartner Hype Cycle, Philipp Keller, Tagging, Trough of Disillusionment
[...] Van der wal, Stephen Downes, Paul Walk, David Weinberger and Phil Pearson also throw their two cents in – but at the end of the day – it [...]
Paul,
Good point about the Plateau of Productivity in relation to Philip’s analysis of the state of tagging. But as I’ve advocated before over at Tagsonomy.com, the Gartner Hype Cycle doesn’t really apply to tagging. Tagging is different from the enterprise category that the Hype Cycles address in many ways, not the least of which is the absence of traditional drivers like large scale packaged solutions, a community of parasitic integrators, and the psychological load of sunk costs – at least right now, though this could certainly change.
We’re using the hype cycle model / metaphor for lack of a better and more accurate way of understanding how social technologies evolve and spread – or fail to do so. Like Dr.Weinberger’s notion of the third order of order, our language and concepts don’t yet allow us to properly frame the new world.*
Put simply, we’re in the “horseless carriage” days of tagging. We may end up living in a world transformed by the automotive revolution, but as I’ve also advocated before, it’s just too early to tell.
*in fact, I’d contend that the Hype Cycle itself is an outdated frame for the technology realm, as a result of a combination of market and technology shifts. Time allowing, I’ll write this up more fully elsewhere.