Meta-trending: The Movements Behind the Lists

Author:

Judy Shapiro

Source:

This year started with a particular abundance in "top 10 trends" list -- best digital tech, worst tech, best lessons learned from Google, hottest social media trend that will change our lives, you get my point. The more lists I saw, the more I realized they seem to look alike.
 
For fun I decided to put a bunch of the lists together and I was not too shocked to realize that there was a commonality to the lists. They didn't actually give us "trends" but rather lists of the most interesting digital/ tech "stuff" we'll see in 2010 centered around (note my very technical language here):

• "Mobile" stuff: hardware, commerce, computing and marketing
• "Search" stuff: real time, social, semantic
• "Cloud" stuff: for consumers and businesses
• "Social media" stuff: the list here goes on and on ...

These lists left me unsatisfied because I wanted to know about the trends that shaped which technologies made the lists. In order to get at that, I had to catch my breath (after all -- this is really cool technology), take a step back and see what the trends are that transcend all the "stuff." Here's what revealed itself to me from the 30,000-foot view...