The Gartner Group has published a study on the Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle.

The report focuses on three key themes, including Web 2.0 (the other two are Real World Web and Applications Architecture):

Under Web 2.0 there are two themes that are meaningful for individuals and small businesses:

Collective Intelligence and Social Network Analysis

Here's how the report defines them:

Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.

We are working on how small business and individuals can take advantage of the new paradigm created by the networked information economy. At its most basic level, this new paradigm affords individuals much greater capacity to do more for ourselves; at the same time we are afforded much greater ability to work in loose coordination with other.

Individuals and small businesses will benefit from collective intelligence by being both contributors to and recipients of knowledge contained in social networks. Contributions will take the form of blogging and podcasting, which enable individuals to make their private intelligence public. Blog networks and social network services like del.icio.us and flickr will aggregate these contributions and re-syndicate and organize it for continued value. Small businesses also benefit from the by-products of collective efforts in the form of low-cost software and web services that make the cost of innovation low enough to be continuous.

Small businesses can also take advantage of social network analysis by rapidly identifying experts and resources on almost any topic. The benefits cited by Gartner are applicable to any size business: being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions

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