2008 trends (1)

After reading about the anticipated trends for 2008, I thought it might be interesting to see how relevant these are to life in Leicestershire. So here goes with a look at the first two trends:

• Make it yourself: while creating your own music, video and multimedia productions and posting them online has become commonplace (see this post about Loughborough musicians, for example), it is predicted that it will soon be just as easy to create physical goods - designing them online and having them professionally manufactured, and then joining online communities to share tips, market and sell their goods. For the past two Christmases I've used online sites to create photo calendars as gifts, although the trend takes this much further .
  

• Local networking: although Facebook will still continue to grow, trend watchers expect the social networking phenomenon to diversify next year, with the rise of smaller, "local" sites for a single neighbourhood, street or building. The BBC report suggests that local networking sites could be "very useful, enabling people to post advertisements and helping with anything from lost cats to trader recommendations. They also have the potential to recreate the kind of community spirit we like to imagine existed in the days before we spent our lives glued to computer screens". You could argue that postcards in the windows of corner shops have done sort of networking this for years! However, this isn't ground-breaking stuff as many university (and some hospital) communities have offered this sort of interaction electronically for some years (through bulletin boards, portals and Virtual Learning Environments). However this trend again raises the issue of the digital divide and disenfranchises those without access to speedy online connections.