10 for 10

Recently, a few people asked me over lunch: what's next after blogging and podcasting? Jeremy Zawodny is also posing the same question. This has all got me thinking about what technology-driven trends will revolutionize how companies communicate. Here's my list of 10 trends to keep an eye on for the next 10 years. They are in no particular order...

1. The Long Tail - small players can collectively make up a market that rivals the giants. As Seth says, small is the new big. This applies equally for journalism as well as for marketers.

2. The Read Write Web/Web 2.0 – technologies like Ajax will make the web more dynamic, turning it into a full-fledged platform. Wither the desktop.

3. Timeshifting – consumers will increasingly want to devour media on their own time, on the mobile device of their choice and without commercials

4. Collaborative Categorization – consumers, using technology, will create their own taxonomies that make it easier to find information. This is sometimes called tagging, social search or folksonomies. However, this is just the beginning.

5. Citizen Marketing – consumers will organize – either on their own or with the help of companies – to evangelize products they love and vilify those they don’t

6. The Daily Me – it’s finally here; RSS, AI and personal search tools will make it easier for people to seek out only the news they care about and tune out all else

7. It’s All a Conversation – as journalism becomes a conversation, so will marketing - just like Cluetrain said.

8. What’s Inside is Outside – mobile devices and consumer generated media mean that whatever a single eye beholds so can the world.

9. Trust Marketing – people will increasingly use social networking technology to tune in messages from individuals they trust (including citizen journalists) and tune out everyone else

10. Decentralized Communication – armies of individual employees will use technology to become the voice of every company; like it or not. The solo singer is dead. Long live the chorus.

What's on your list?

Comments

[Shel Holtz]

I just heard Eric Schwartzman's interview with NYT's John Markof, who suggested that bittorrent and RSS will combine to make TV obsolete. He expects this sooner rather than later. Subscribe to the shows you like with a Bittorrent RSS feed and watch the downloaded content on your big-screen flat-panel TV. Who needs broadcasters?

[Eric Hamilton]

I wrote an article about the cool developments I'm excited about. I think the next big change won't be one technology -- it'll be a slew of technology mash-ups that combine folksonomy (tagging), RSS, and AJAX into very creative and exciting applications that nobody has dared to dream of, yet.

I think that the web will change more over the course of the next year than it has changed in all the years before, combined.

[James Ware]

These are all intriguing and important ideas.

The one I'd add is the growing sense of "distributed presence." While I don't think technology will ever replace face-to-face (nor should it), we're experiencing an increasing sense of knowing where others are at a given time, and what they are doing. It's not only IM-ing, it's the growing capability of webcasting and VOIP, and the immediacy of editing shared files on collaborative platforms, among other developments.

I suspect that these capabilities are going to grow, to the point that we won't even consider distributed work as unusual or particularly difficult.

[Valdis]

10 years? More like 10 months! All of the items you have listed are already being worked on and will soon tip[some have], morph, or die.

Why not push yourself and really think out 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9... 10 years?

[Robert Steers]

Interesting! However these suggestions are going to be relatively obselete in the next 2 years.

Also most of these trends are web based and will take off in well off western social environments.

What about the 90% of the worlds population that does not have net access? What about people from non-english backgrounds.

Wealthy english speaking people are outnumbered considerably.