I’d like to share a few trends that I have been watching closely over the last year. They are with a doubt interconnected, and all have implications that reach far beyond this blog post.
Read Time: 10 minutes
1. Increase in user generated content.
An increase in supply of content (tweets, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.) will create a demand for marketing and publicity of that content. The implication of this will affect many things including our psyche and how we view what we produce, how we communicate with others verbally and virtually, and how we select the products and services that are available to us. For evidence of this trend see:
- Groundswell- Social Technographics Profile research and tool- three year study shows and increase in content creators and joiners (article).
- Facebook- The significance of the growth of Facebook, if a country it would be the 4th largest in the world (updated; 3/10), is that it’s teaching/allowing people to easily become creators, because it’s easy to update your status, and it’s a gateway to blogging and other forms of generating content.
- Short mention: Twitter, Ning- These too have allowed people to easily become content creators. Ning actually is more technical, but it’s viral loop model as Fast Company put it, catches more people into becoming content creators.
2. The growth of the largest country in the world, the Internet.
Okay, it’s not a country, but it does connect us in community. Laws, social norms, and language will all be put to the test. What will we learn when the barriers come down? The irony is that even while the Internet is expanding, it’s also focused on helping us localize in the communities we live in.
- Google Translation- Google make it easy to translate a website. Before you had to translate static content to ensure you were serving your most prized website visitors, but static is not good in a changing world. Google Translator is dynamic and changes with your content. I’ve been experimenting with this on several of the international networks I consult for, and while the system isn’t perfect, it’s damn good!
Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We’ve achieved very good results in research evaluations. – Via Google
- For the local trend: among a sea of others…
- Yelp- (yelp.com) Yelp is just one of many websites/applications that help highlight local businesses.
- Local Tweeps- (localtweeps.com) A local directory to find other Twitter users by zip code.
- Gruvr- (gruvr.com) Find local music near you. Very cool tool!
- Yelp- (yelp.com) Yelp is just one of many websites/applications that help highlight local businesses.
3. Philanthropy reshapes the way the web is used.
Social ventures are one of the hottest topics today. People want to profit by making good in the world and lots of them are turning to the power of the many to do it. As the technology unfolds, trust mechanisms evolve, we may see a tremendous shift in how and why people use the Internet.
- Updated: The Pepsi Refresh Project- (refresheverything.com) Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl in 2010 to launch this project which is giving away millions of dollars to fund many different projects. Awesome!
- Kiva- (kiva.org) Kiva is microlending service that connects lenders to entrepreneurs with the mission of bringing the entrepreneur out of poverty. Since 2005, Kiva has experienced huge growth in the number of microloans. Payback on these small loans which are usually under $100, is extremely high at around 98.5%.
- Green Maven- (greenmaven.com) A project of Earthsite, lists over 5,000 businesses that are environmentally or socially just. Green Maven is a user generated business directory and search engine, and continues to amaze me with the quality of submissions.
