I had the pleasure of connecting with Nikos Drakos from Gartner on his new slide deck around social software. Firstly, Nikos is a really nice guy. Second, the evolution of Gartner's thinking in the area (Nikos' thinking) is really interesting. I can't say what is in the thing (Gartner secret sauce), but one of the items that was interesting to me was the emphasis on analytics, and social filtering. To me, these are key dimensions for low overhead ways of communities to sort through lots of user generated unstructured data, and so I am really excited to see that Gartner is coming around to this.
After all, if you have 100 or 400 or more users producing content in their own ways, and not having the luxury or standards for content production, how do you make sense of it all? Social filters of course!