A good friend of mine,
Harry Max, keeps pointing out that I am obsessively good at spotting trends & market moves that matter, and that I ought to use that force for good. 😉
So I'm going to experiment with some posts to point out key trends, technologies, and ideas that matter. It could cover some overlap between tweets I already do; but the idea is to capture nuggets that will matter over time. Please let me know what you think about the idea of a regular set of blog posts like this by commenting below. If I see these "trend" entries being read, and commented on, I'll continue. The thing is that I do this already; I am just making public what I have historically provided in client projects.
Trend/Things to Watch
Personalized Search. A lot has been written that while Google's strategy to make the world's informations available is a good start, it misses user relevance. Given that many of us actively share our preferences on sites like Twitte, FB, Blippy, and FourSquare, the web ought to know that (for example) I am a coffee-drinking, author, technologist, regular hiker, active reader, shoe shopping, poetry lover, sometimes backpacker, Francophile, and mom. But searches today don't take advantage of ready available information to personalize content (or advertising). The company (ies) that can take advantage of personalization acros the web (vs. netflix or Amazon which do it topically) could create a new model. Example is Gravity. Good article on former MySpace exec Amit Kaput in BusinessWeek.
Many people comment on the role of media and its shifts. I find most of the dialogue fluff because it's focused on the economics of advertising as if that is the main point. But the true and fundamental reason
media matters is the role it plays in our larger community. Without funding an independent set of voices to analyze, and help us frame key questions, we as a culture suffer.
Clay Shirkey has laid out the WikiLeaks dialogue in this context:
Society is made up of competing goods that can’t be resolved in any perfect way — freedom vs. liberty, state secrets vs. citizen oversight — but the solutions to those tensions always take place in a particular context. Sometimes a bargain is so robust it lasts for centuries, as with trial by jury, but sometimes it is so much a product of its time that it does not survive the passing of its era.
Culture "how to" worth a read for every entrepreneur AND big company exec.
