Lightweight new technologies are emerging rapidly. Some are rapidly adopted by millions of students, at least for a time. As these students enter the workforce, they'll bring different skills and arrive with identities formed through use of such technologies. I’m examining how some of these technologies are starting to be used, and will describe some possible ways they could overcome past obstacles to managing asynchronous information and knowledge. After identifying impediments, I'll demonstrate how features of unstructured tagging, weblogs, and search can address them.

These changes are likely to come faster than people expect. The presentation will start by briefly considering the more general issue of why rapid shifts in technology use have taken people (including me) by surprise, and often not been understood until much later. Psychological literature suggests that our focus on conceptual development and the use of misleading visualizations are factors contributing to our poor reasoning about nonlinear growth. I'll briefly present visualizations that might address these problems and affect how we look at the relationship between technology and behavior.

This talk draws a little from two years of longitudinal surveys of behaviors and attitudes toward weblogs at Microsoft and an in-depth qualitative study of employee weblogs and attitudes toward them, as well as some first-hand existence proofs of utility, but will largely be a logical exposition.