Trends 2006

The obligatory exercise in futurology....

Metadata
Last year we saw a huge rise in metadata and in particular shared metadata, its is my (rather safe) prediction that this year we will see more metadata and better harnessing of that metadata. Or put another way, this year will more than ever before be about managing information overload, through harnessing metadata and social metadata.

Attenuation
The theme of this years ETech is attenuation, which is about filtering and prioritising the information flow, so that it is more relevant and more timely. One recent example is e-mail filtering based on social networks (via slashdot), also see this essay on attenuation by Matt Webb author of Mind Hacks.

Attention
In the category of more metadata we are going to see much more of the concept of attention (see AttentionTrust, or use favorite search engine/blog finder/search engine for more info). In particular as well as learning to harness attention data more efficiently as individuals, I think we may well see some backlash over corporate use of attention data, as gathered by the Google Toolbar for example.

Next years mashups
Which brings me on to my next hot topic - integrated web apps or distributed web clients or a better name someone else comes up with. These are tools which combine web services to enhance the the users experience of the web, they are essentially remixes/mashups with an emphasis on the user rather than the website, although I wouldn't go as far as saying they have to be client side. I would classify the rash of personalised homepages/portals (eg google/ig) in this category, as well as client side integration such as Blogger Web Comments, Book Burro, and some of my own user-scripts in this category. Greasemonkey and Firefox Extensions are going to be serious drivers in this area; for a cross-platform solution we'd have to get around the cross-domain scripting issue, I'd love it if 2006 was the year that chestnut was cracked - but don't hold your breath.

All the rest
Also on a continual upward trend (due mostly to mainstreamification): tagging, open api, open data, aggregators, ajax. There will also be some major shifts in the aggregator space - but more on that another day.

I'd love to see the semantic web get a bit of momentum this year, perhaps with SPARQL as the driver, but I'll wait and see before I make any predictions.