Collective intelligence … 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.

Gartner’s thinking on trends is that they go through five stages. This is what it calls the ‘hype cycle’. The ‘technology trigger’ is the period when it becomes possible to do something for the first time. The rapid adoption of broadband over the last four years, for example, has made it possible to have mass media Web 2.0 services.

The trend then becomes over-hyped and described as a panacea for all mankind, the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’. All kinds of dreadful services get hyped just through association. (I’m too nice to provide links there, despite the temptation). Soon after, though, people realise that the trend is not quite as wonderful as it was described by its hottest advocates, and it enters the wonderfully biblical ‘trough of disillusionment’. People decide Web 2.0 is broken and no use for anything. This will be the period when the fashionable start-ups with no revenue model run out of cash and go bust.

The last two phases of the Gartner hype cycle are when the hype has disappeared and we get around to discovering exactly what really is useful about these new technologies. We climb the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ to arrive at the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.

So where are we now? Well, of course, it isn’t quite as cut and dried as the model may suggest. There are plenty of people cheering for Web 2.0 and a whole bunch of other people who say it’s a fraud. That’s human nature, I suppose. As soon as something becomes popular, others want to pull it down. We’re not quite at the tipping point into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ yet, but it will come.

Probably at about the point my book comes out. Sigh.