2008 Information Industry Look-Ahead

From Infotoday Newslink, a Review of the Year 2007 and Trends Watch by Paula Hane:

"It’s important to pay attention to trends—both within our industry and in the larger technology, business, and cultural arenas. It helps us keep our edge and decide on new directions for services and products (...)"

"Here are a few other things I’m watching this year:

• Accelerating number of mobile content applications—and new devices
• Increased spending for online ads with further declines in print
• Increasing popularity of widgets for content delivery
• Niche community networking sites are expected to grow in popularity as people grow weary of the megasites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.)
• Increasing use of social networking capabilities in enterprise settings
• New collaborative workflow tools will emerge as companies demand more collaboration across organizations
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications will continue to grow in popularity for a segment of businesses
• Growth of open source tools and services
• Ongoing book digitization projects (Google, Open Content Alliance, etc.)
• Continued progress and growth in open access initiatives
• Further movement from fee-based to free content
• Continued buzz around user-generated content with publishers testing new publishing models
• Increased interest in text analytics, data extraction and mining, semantic search, and related technologies
• Continued interest in testing visualization tools for information discovery and analysis
• Security and privacy remain major concerns"

Hane's article also lists 2008 predictions from a number of other information industry sources and analysts.