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Recently had an encounter with people into trend aka future research and not surprisingly it was funny how general their predictions for the future were, they basically said that you cannot predict about the future, which is a fair, true and obvious statement – and then they went on to predict – huhm – had another encounter today reading the trendcentral (via Peter Svarre), where they spot out this trend:

We are finding that personal “cool” is being redefined by technology, and as a result, digital cool is spilling over into the real world. The union of technology and personal identification has created a new set of categories by which cool, or social status in different areas, can be defined. “Digital footprints,” including everything from ringtones, iTunes libraries and MySpace profiles to eBay ratings, World of Warcraft levels and YouTube views, are all contributing to a new digital social status. Who you are online is now having a significant impact on how you are perceived in the “real” world.

Well as it is often stated in this blog – despite the low amount of posts – if these people would take the time to read some of the new research done by a lot of scholars on the internet and more generally media usage, they would know that this is not a new trend, this has been going on for years – not just the intermingling of on- and off-line – but also ”digital footprints” through gaming accounts, blogs, personal homepage (1.0 style). Let me end this with a suggestion to everybody doing future/trendspotting things, read the research on the latest new mediatechnologies – it will make your job a lot easier!