Defrag Blog

Yikes. Apologies for the lack of blog posts - the month of May is flying by.

I’ve been reading this post by Dare Obansanjo wherein Dare takes up the subject of “web 2.0″ adoption — or, more specifically, that early adopters are not the same as mainstream adoption. The point of the post is summed up in the ending question: “…we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?”

In the context of enterprise adoption, I think its an especially good question.

We never started Defrag to deal with “web 2.0″ topics. Rather, we wanted to tackle the broad problem of information overload and how it is that technology can help to discover, sort, organize, and make useful that overload (”accerlerate the aha moment” if you will). As I look at Defrag sponsors and potential sponsors, you can see a broad swath of tool sets that get used both in the enterprise and, more strictly, by end users. That swath includes “enterprise 2.0″ (collaboration) technologies, semantic technologies and implicit web technologies. And, as I speak with folks, I’ve started to get a sense of what technologies are further into the uptake cycle than others.

To be clear, Defrag is an early adopter conference. We have lots of great enterprise folks that are thinking about BIG problem-sets and working on solving those early things. That said, you can feel that some technologies like social bookmarking in the enterprise, or social networking in the enterprise, are definitely experiencing more uptake this year than others.

The “unique” part of the Defrag conversation is watching how these technologies in different parts of the adoption cycle are interacting with each other to solve bigger problems. What does it mean, for instance, when you can tag information, discover it via social networks, search and recombine pieces of it and then feed it into different applications and uses via widgets and RSS. That process is not just *one* Defrag vendor — its a whole lot of them taken together. And really, I don’t think any of us would want that problem to be solved by one vendor (at least, I wouldn’t).

I guess in that way Defrag really is assembling the disparate bits of technology solutions. And I’d bet that that process of “defragging” will be what takes these solutions from early adopter to mainstream.