Web Trends to Watch in 2010 from Peter Cashmore

Here is another set of 2010 predictions. Peter Cashmore, CEO at Mashable provided 10 Web trends to watch in 2010 to CNN. They all seem likely but I want to focus on four that relate to Darwin Ecosystems Awareness Engine™: real-time ramps up, content 'curation,' cloud computing, and fame abundance, privacy scarcity.

Peter commented that, “sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive ... it's a sense of living in the now.”  Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ allows you to set the time frame you sample for relevant content. It operates in the immediacy of real time and can go back to the last few hours, days or weeks.  You can see what is emerging and where it is emerging. For example, the talk about Lou Dobbs’ actions a few weeks ago first emerged on the informal media of blogs before it appeared on the mainstream media.  By looking separately at informal and formal media we could see the hot topics on each.  Often the topics on informal media are predictors of what soon will hit the mainstream.

Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions. Darwin allows you to also become your own curator. You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

Peter added that, “Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there's no doubt this transition will continue.” We are a cloud application.

Finally, Peter wrote that, “Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We're all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.” With Darwin we have the feature of rising stars and fading stars. You can see what topics are merging on the general Web or within you niche. You can also see the topics that are fading in importance.  These results are not based on popularity and are hard to push in spammy ways. The importance is based on the substance of the content itself and how it relates to other content within the target area, the whole Web or your subset.

I am pleased with Peter’s predictions for 2010 and look forward to the potential of Darwin playing a role within them.