Gartner released yesterday its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The research firm has pegged Corporate Blogging and RSS as being two years away from mainstream adoption. For now, both are tumbling into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment (along with wikis and desktop search) as a result of too much media buzz. If you believe Gartner, Corporate Blogging is already sooo… last year (2004).

They’ve got a point. The media rumble about Corporate Blogging is almost deafening by now. It’s not a “new” story anymore. Which is not to say that blogging isn’t still a “new” thing to many companies.

At any rate, the five stages of hype make a lot of sense. It works something like this: new technologies get overhyped in the beginning; then they go out of favor; eventually they mature and are adopted by the mainstream but by that time they’re no longer news.

The five stages are: Technology Trigger, Peak of Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Oh, and podcasting is on the upswing, according to Gartner. It’s sliding up the Peak of Expectations. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?

The way I understand it, the hype cycle is measuring the buzz as well as the adoption rate. It
doesn’t necessarily correspond to the long-term utility – or success –
of a phenomenon like Corporate Blogging. Only time will tell.

Read more about Corporate Blogging’s downward slide into the Trough of Disillusionment…