Today’s class was an open course, there were many people in the class room because today’s guest was Piers Fawkes, just a Trendspotter itself! I did not him so much, but expectations of my friends and the number of audience coming class told me how he is famous.
He has been running PSFK, which provide ideas of future or trend on Internet; blogs. The important point is that he earns money through PSFK this is why PSFK has activities such as consulting and workshops. Anyway, it is extremely difficult to keep running “Web2.0” as a business, I think.
His speech was organized by two parts, the first one was methodology and the second one was his view gotten from the method. About method, he explained how he have made PFSK’s blogs;
1, scanning and digesting ( search the fact, collect information a lot)
2, scout network (find interesting people and share visions with blogs, sometimes interview directly)
3, trend report (make report of trends)
4, ideation (work together and make plan)
(main parts are 1 and 2, 3 and 4,are for business, I think)
In the second part, his vision of future, he stressed corporations of creators, companies, and communities. In the Web2.0 world and Globalization, both of which are hard to define, everyone can become creator and can create a trend. This is amplified by community, groups of people have same mind, parties of creators. However, activities of communities are hard to maintain because they can not make money for keeping themselves running. Companies helps them and transfer a trend to a business trend, social big trend, the future.
I think his ideas themselves are not so novel, but valuable as his saying. One thing I cared was he said “the creators class” ,in the last part. This means in future, a few established people make the trend, future, the world. Even in future, however advanced IT, social structure would not change, I was felt by the lecture.
