What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.

Immediately following Hart, David Weinberger gave us his vision of where the chaotic, miscellaneous, Web in all its ganglionic glory appears to be tending. Weinberger offered a radical recasting of the now hallowed nostrum, “Information wants to be free.” It’s quite otherwise — if I may paraphrase his thought: It’s we who are trying to be free from information.

Hart and Weinberger were coming to the crux of FASTforward08 from seemingly antipodal perspectives, and it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both:

In this corner, Hart, the corporate maven, looking at advanced search and context as a new platform for news and data providers like Dow Jones to actualize in ways that add tremendous and new kinds of informational value to large numbers of end users – so much so that they’ll happily pay ample subscriber fees for the privilege.

In that corner, Weinberger, looking at the “here comes everybody” energy, complexity, and messiness of the web as it is today, with its social spontaneity, its twittering micro-nets, its folksonomies that defy rational taxonomies because they’re spun from the arbitrariness of all those other minds. Each of whose lives, passions, traumas and idiosyncrasies is planting its own imprint on what matters to them. The result: a burgeoning infinity of highly idiosyncratic tags, links and ephemera, each of which makes sense within the universe of one that constitutes any single end user, but which present varying degrees of opacity to any data-mining operative whose success depends upon predicting how various sets of users organize their most vitally important data.

The differences between Hart and Weinberger come through in the differences between Hart’s dashboard and Weinberger’s “new front page.” For Hart, the idea is to know what the user needs and wants, and to build a unique set of data that changes with the contextual moment. Her example of the finance worker whose top news stories and analyses will be shaped by his or her clients’ portfolios made perfect sense, because the professional setting from day to day offers a predicable set of tasks, hotspots, and priorities.

Weinberger’s “front page,” on the other hand, is described as a rich and amorphous mess of referrals, nets, connections, keyed to the individual but marshaled by no one, controlled by no one. No two front pages of this kind will ever be alike, raising serious questions about to what extent there could ever be some commodification sufficiently compelling as to command a subscription fee.

Of course a key difference is that Hart’s dashboard is driven by professionally identified objectives and informational needs, where Weinberger’s “new front page” has as many shapes as it has users. Where Hart begins with the assumption that much of what her user needs and wants can be intuited and provided, Weinberger’s user is pretty much the vortex of a dynamic series of singularities – indeed, his user’s “front page” is more like the sign of what is unknowable until it exists, and mutates as soon as it is known. Never the same, as once was said of a river.

In a way, isn’t this one paradox at the heart of FASTforward08? Its ambitious spectrum brought the promise and excitement of advanced search techniques that will surely provide large new affordances within the Enterprise and new opportunities for monetization in the space between the Enterprise and its end users. At the same time, it touched on some thorny questions arising from the fact that human beings are usually not transparent, often do not understand themselves, and resist efforts by others to horn in where they themselves may fear to tread.

Which gives us reason to ponder one of the many suggestive things FAST ceo John Markus Lervik had to say in his opening address:

Today’s online environment is shaped by the person in it.

If true – and there’s reason to think it is becoming more true each day – then the professional knowledge worker is about to enter an environment steeped in a precocious awareness of her needs and wishes.

But those who, like irritants in oysters, generate something in the web that goes deeper than the consumption of information, could be less than delighted when approached by someone offering to do it all for them.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

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I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.