September 8, 2007
In his comments on Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation, Simon Edhouse raises a good point that merits some further discussion. Simon says,
“Many different technologies, platforms or applications may be ‘potential’ disruptions, but may fall by the wayside, change, or join forces with other forces and be transformed and possibly end up ‘disrupting’. But I think we all know that a real ‘disruptive innovation’ needs to not cause a little disruption, but rather have a seismic affect on industries, in the “IT ecosystem” as Joe noted.”
Theories and models describing innovation, the diffusion of innovation, technology change, and technology adoption abound. But I think there are three characteristics of disruptive innovations that bear on the question of tagging.
First, *innovations are only disruptive when they change an existing ecosystem.* The retractable cup holder in cars is a good example of an innovation that wasn’t disruptive. Did anyone - besides the dashboard cup tray people (and how many of them were there anyway…?) - go out of business after cup holders became standard in cars?
Contrast this with the introduction of the personal computer. To millions of individuals and small businesses, the personal computer was simply new: it was a new opportunity to purchase computing capability for a class of needs and situations not addressed by mainframes and minicomputers. But to Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the other leaders of the thriving minicomputer ecosystem, the PC was a genuinely disruptive innovation.
Second, *disruptive innovations become visible only in retrospect*. Three separate events are necessary: first, a change in ecosystem; second, recognition of that change by the parties affected; finally, a change in the framing used to understand that ecosystem by all parties. Clayton’s description of packet switching [great example!] fully supports this understanding, so I’ll share it again.
…Packet-switching is a great example of an innovation whose value / impact / disruptive nature became apparent over time. In fact, most of the telecom industry regarded packet-switch based things as irrelevant because of the low quality. But low quality also often simply means “low cost” when judged by a different standard of reference.
Third, *a disruptive innovation is often something transposed or transplanted from another frame of reference*. Cubism, Fauvism and other Modernist styles and movements reflected the influence of transplanted Asian, African and other newly recognized art cultures on Western artists and their work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Similarly, the Dada and Surrealist movements have roots in the literary and artistic exploration of concepts and ideas from the field of Psychology.
How does this bear on tagging?
First, is the growth of tagging disrupting any existing ecosystems? Specifically, has tagging seismically affected the established IT or information management realms, the two existing ecosystems currently seen as the most likely candidates for disruption by tagging?
The consensus from the tagging community of interest is “No, but stay tuned.” Gene smith noted recently that the good people of LibraryThing are innovating their product / service offerings in ways that could directly impact the business of library catalog management, and the customer experience of a library catalog. While LibraryThing is clearly innovative, it’s not yet disrupted the information management ecosystem. Likewise, the new social bookmarking offerings from leading enterprise portal vendors reflect incremental incorporation of new capabilities, rather than wholesale shifts in the portal landscape. Flickr isn’t showing pictures of crowds of unemployed metadata management professionals standing on sidewalks outside former workplaces, holding signs that read, “Noteconomicallyviable“.
Second, is tagging disruptive in retrospect, in a way that indicates changing frames of reference? I think the answer to this is a qualified “Yes”. Tagging is in retrospect disruptive, but only for a small community. For David Weinberger and other early adopters who propose frames for a living, tagging has already passed through the two stages of disruption and recognition, and is in the midst of the third stage where it becomes part of a new or revised frame of reference.
However, for the rest of the world, though many people now tag on a daily basis (at least in limited contexts), tagging is not part of a new frame of reference. Tagging remains ‘below the cultural waterline’ in this stage of it’s growth curve.As Simon says, “To speculate whether ‘tagging’ by itself is a ‘disruptive innovation’ is, I’m sure, premature.”
Third, is tagging genuinely new, or is tagging a transplant from an existing frame? I believe social tagging is new to most frames of reference, and not a transplant. Tagging in the sense of applying labels meant to serve as some sort of metadata to a collection of resources - for a group or individual - is a very old idea. But explicitly social tagging that results in the collective creation of clouds of tags seems definitively new*.
That makes approximately one and one-half matches out of three. Hitting .500 is outstanding in baseball, but I don’t believe it is enough to qualify tagging as a disruptive innovation.
*If you consider social tagging as a straightforward transplanting of social media mechanisms and concepts to the established realms of metadata and information management, then you’re clearly a member of the small community of people that thinks about both social media and information management on a regular basis. Compared to the number of people who think about major league sports on a regular basis, this is not a large group, which takes us back to the idea that tagging is disruptive only retrospectively, and for a select community.
September 5, 2007
Before I reply to comments from KatB & Simon Edhouse on The Tagging Growth Curve, a quick reminder that this series of postings has as it’s primary point of departure the idea that the smoothly drawn analyst’s curve for describing technology growth misrepresents the noisy and unpredictable fluctuations of reality. The outcome is that this conversation is as much about the models currently in use in the technology industry for framing how technologies grow, change, and spread, as about the specifics of tagging.
At some point, it may be necessary to branch these topics in pursuit of further clarity; on either, or both in relation.
@Simon: Incremental growth along these two paths is what we’re seeing at the moment. The apparently slow increase in the size of the total population of people and organizations who’ve adopted tagging is consistent with the idea that innovation happens during those periods when the rate of diffusion is slowed, due to the increased requirements of crossing a community boundary.
A partial list of those requirements would be:
* lower cost
* rising user experience quality
* social facilitators: advocates, ambassadors, evangelists
* conceptual bridges - like ‘horseless carriage’ - to overcome the increased friction of reconciling the new and different with an old frame of reference lagging in terms of awareness and understanding of tagging
The graph charting the curve for the rate of innovation - if it’s possible to chart something as slippery as innovation - would likely appear as the inverse of the growth curve. A curve for innovation would show spikes (for quality of innovation, quantity of innovation, or both…?) during the intervals when the spread of tagging is slower.
Anyone who wants to understand the mechanisms, rates, trajectories, etc. of technology growth should really look at diffusion and innovation as they inter-relate. Doing otherwise seems like trying to understand population sizes based only on the single factor of births or deaths, but not both working together.
@KatB: Technology innovation is definitely a social process - good of you to surface that angle explicitly. Social tagging is - well - inherently social. Taking that for granted (which says a lot about my initial frame of reference), I brought in the biological model without mentioning this given.
My knowledge of the Technology Acceptance Model is limited. What makes it a good model for the new explicitly social technologies? As opposed to the previous (non-social) technologies prevalent when TAM was formulated?
My goal in suggesting punctuated equilibrium as a better model than the Gartner Hype Cycle was to explore the fit of a different way of looking at tagging than is customary for the broad IT frame of reference. That does not discounting any other kind of model directly. There may be fundamental conflicts between one or more of the various models on the table that I’m unaware of at the moment, but then I’m unaware of them 
Another question to ask in testing how well punctuated equilibrium fits as a model for diffusion is “Does punctuated equilibrium apply to open source technologies?”
Ravi of Luinuxhelp posted a mind map of the lineage of linux distributions in April of 2006 that surfaced in the open source and linux communities. The updated version of that map looks like this:
And these two images (from Patterns and Rates of Species Evolution by Michael J. Benton) illustrate speciation as it appears under punctuated equilibrium; first in general, and then specifically for bryozoans in the Caribbean.
We should keep two things in mind while considering these evolutionary charts: the illustrations come from completely different frames of reference; and apparent similarity - visual or otherwise - is no guarantee of genuine similarity on any level. But there is still compelling likeness in these renderings of the lineage of an open source OS, and “tiny colonial animals that generally build stony skeletons of calcium carbonate, superficially similar to coral”. Clearly, in the real world, linux distros and bryozoans are wildly unlike. Yet their evolutionary trajectories may show some of the same patterns at this level of abstraction.
Which means that punctuated equilibrium as a model might have something to say about open source software in general. [Here I have to say that informed contributions from the linux community are welcome, as I’m not qualified to discuss it’s workings in any detail.] And if such is the case, then punctuated equilibrium seems to correspond to the known patterns of diffusion and evolution in the two major spaces in which software technologies evolve at the moment (until another production model arises) - commercial, and open source.
And just in case there’s any question about my professional qualifications for discussing evolutionary mechanisms, it should be clear I am in no way a sociobiologist, ethologist, geneticist, evolutionary biologist, morphologist, etc. So I’m borrowing freely from other fields to seek a new model, which means I run the risk of borrowing concepts from either (or both) in ways that don’t make sense in their original contexts.
September 1, 2007
A recent flurry of postings from the tagerati on the state of tagging follows up on the idea broached by Phillip Kelleher, and then addressed here in previous posts; to wit, tagging is in a bit of a lull, if not an authentic spate of the doldrums.
A quick listing of postings from the thread:
I’ll assume you’ve read all these worthwhile pieces, and move on to discuss what seems most interesting about both the state of tagging, and what the above interpretations of that state imply about how we think of the intertwined phenomena of technology and culture change in general.
The apparently irregular growth and spread of tagging is simply example of the real nature of how innovations spread. Professional analysts and other meaning makers tend to draw smooth graphs to depict these things. But in reality, natural systems (and the tagging / technology landscape is a legitimate ecosystem) are noisy, cyclical, chaotic, complex, fuzzy, non-linear, and unpredictable. They only appear to follow smooth curves at a high level of abstraction, or a low level of resolution.
When the subject is growth, adoption, and change for tagging, a better comparison to use when gauging status (and thus implied progress) is punctuated equilibrium, the idea “that evolution jumps between stability and relative rapidity”. [Yes, this is also only an approximate frame for tagging. With that noted, I still believe it is better than those frames in current use.]
To set the stage for a look at how this maps to the growth of tagging, I’ll quote Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldrige on punctuated equilibrium:
In summarizing the impact of recent theories upon human concepts of nature’s order, we cannot yet know whether we have witnessed a mighty gain in insight about the natural world (against anthropocentric hopes and biases that always hold us down), or just another transient blip in the history of correspondence between misperceptions of nature and prevailing social realities of war and uncertainty. Nonetheless, contemporary science has massively substituted notions of indeterminacy, historical contingency, chaos and punctuation for previous convictions about gradual, progressive, predictable determinism.
These transitions have occurred in field after field; Kuhn’s celebrated notion of scientific revolutions is, for example, a punctuational theory for the history of scientific ideas. Punctuated equilibrium, in this light, is only palaeontology’s contribution to a Zeitgeist, and Zeitgeists, as (literally) transient ghosts of time, should never be trusted. Thus, in developing punctuated equilibrium, we have either been toadies and panderers to fashion, and therefore destined for history’s ashheap, or we had a spark of insight about nature’s constitution. Only the punctuational and unpredictable future can tell.
From Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge
Applying the frame of punctuated equilibrium to the growth of tagging implies a very differently shaped growth curve.
This illustration shows a growth curve with several stages of rapid growth, followed by plateaus of comparative stability. Each stage is a complete cycle of diffusion throughout a community: Pioneers, Enthusiasts, Commercial Innovators, the Commercial Market. Technologies begin “below the cultural waterline”, meaning that they are not part of the generally known or accepted constellation of how things work, and move “above the waterline” to awareness and acceptance.
Boundaries formed by common interests, goals, levels of expertise, or expected investment separate the communities from one another. Each successive community is larger in size. The criteria for successful adoption and diffusion change with each community. Generally, the entry cost thresholds for members of a given community to adopt the technology will become lower, meaning less need for specialized knowledge, or substantial time or or money investments. Of course, this simply means that different actors within successive communities bear investment costs in different proportions. In the pioneer days, everyone “pitches in”. As adoption proceeds across community boundaries, relative equality of participation in innovation - and thus cost sharing - declines.
If you have a commercial perspective - meaning you either want to make money on tagging, or you want someone else to figure out the difficult bits for you and just what they come up with - the goal is to bring the technology “above the cultural waterline”. Crossing this threshold means successful commercialization and profit for those who invest to lower barriers for as successive communities.
Note, it is during the plateaus that innovation occurs. These intervals that sometimes feel like doldrums are the periods when serious minded people are quietly tinkering, building things, and circulating half-complete alphas to friends, colleagues, and thought leaders within their respective communities.
It is during the spikes that the members of the next and larger community adopt the new, refined technology.
What does this mean for tagging? More specifically, how should we understand the state of tagging with this model as a guide?
First, tagging is definitely past the Pioneer stage, when only a few even knew or heard of it. The burst of tag mania that began a few years ago (and is now, in retrospect, clearly over) marked the close of this phase, and the beginning of visible experimentation amongst Enthusiasts. Yes, thanks to vastly lowered design and development costs, organizations are often enthusiasts. Think of the ever-multiplying menagerie of social bookmarking tools that debuted in 2005 and 2006.
Second, tagging is in transition from the stage of experimental exploration by the Enthusiasts, to being legitimately productized, or transformed by money-making organizations - the Commercial Innovators - into something that can be sold for a profit. The recent eWeek demo of not one but *four* enterprise tagging tools from leading vendors BEA, Cogenz, Connectbeam, and IBM, shows this quite clearly.
As long as our current models of adoption and change hold true (and there are good reasons to think these fundamental modes of production are changing), tagging will follow two paths to varying degrees. The first path leads tagging to become commercialized as a recognized part of the technology ecosystem, in which case we can expect to see all the customary signs of productization and the Commercial Market such as packages, vendors, integrators, public release schedules, service tiers, big-ticket invoices, etc. The second path leads tagging to open source legitimacy, with ongoing commitment from a hybrid community of developers and users, and a permanent place in the open source infrastructure. A quick survey of the open source community shows several tagging projects underway, at varying levels of activity.
My current prediction is that tagging will progress along both paths for the next 12 months, pursuing commercialization under the aegis of existing enterprise solutions, while the open source community comes to some sort of consensus on the level of effort tagging needs or warrants. Looking at things from the macroscale, we should check in about a year…
