After predicting that by 2012 we'd all be sitting in the Enterprise 7.0 conference, David Weinberger, in his keynote this morning at Enterprise 2.0, continued on to portray our current revolution, "and it is a revolution," as being one in which "everything is metadata."
In this new world, order is created when we want it to, and how we want it to, and not when an "authority" deems it necessary. He thinks the web is making us smarter, and goes on to say that even companies who have not embraced web 2.0 are "about to get a 50% increase in IQ." So as providers and compilers of data, we simply have to provide everything until our customer is ready to receive it.
"All knowledge is social," declares Weinberger, and perhaps always has been but not in a way that was so dis-intermediated, or as he puts it, "miscellaneousized." It's not hype, it's "not enough already". Moreover, the very willing admission of fallibility that is incorporated into wikipedia, and wiki-based enterprise endeavors, makes them all the more credible, in Weinberger's view.
Now that we have seen the man behind the curtain, I could not help but wonder, what is it that has prompted our willingness at this point in history to embrace fallibility and fluidity in knowledge? Is it the recent failures of the traditional sources of information - the wide embrace by main stream news organizations of the rationale for the Iraq invasion, for example - or is it the facility of new web 2.0 technologies themselves?