For those of who don’t know, I gave up freelancing to work for a large Canadian university. The change in scenery has had a big affect on my perspective about things like new technologies and the role of online communities. It also means I’m reading blogs and publications that I likely would have missed otherwise.

I was forwarded a link to Mark Greefield’s article (it’s more of a stub, really) What are the new “Emerging Technologies”? which I found intriguing since, not days earlier, I listened to Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on Net@Night talk about how old fashioned it seemed to refer to people as “bloggers”. Similarly, Greenfield states that the tech he lauded in 2005 as “emerging” is old hat now. He then lists five sites that are examples of what is today’s emerging tech.

While Greenfield makes a point (as do Leo and Amber), I have to disagree with his contention that RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. are “behind the times”. I think tech pundits like himself are so far ahead of the curve that they fail to realize that the average population are just now figuring out how to integrate these technologies into their businesses and communities. For them (us?) these very much are emerging technologies and many organizations are still unable to cope with the “new reality” that surrounds them.

That said, though, there are some organizations that are almost as far along the curve as Greenfield, giving hope that, in the future, maybe guys like him won’t be so ahead of everyone else that he won’t already be bored of the tech the rest of us are just wrapping our heads around. As an example of such a company, check out this article from Business Week on IBM’s integration of in-house social networking. Who would have thought that Big Blue could be so agile.

Tags: emergingtech, Mark Greenfield, Leo Laporte, Amber MacArthur, Business Week, IBM, social networking