Each year there’s a fleeting instant when I’m more or less happy with TrendsWatch—the moment I hit “send” to transmit the text to my editor.
Then I open my news feed and see a great story related to one of TrendsWatch themes and IT’S TOO LATE TO SNEAK IT INTO THIS YEAR’S TEXT. #frustration.
I update my presentation about TrendsWatch before each new gig at a museum or conference, but that’s only partial comfort because most people consume the forecast through the PDF download or the print edition.
So I’m very happy that my talented digital colleagues at the Alliance (HT Liz Neely and Josh Morin) have created a web version of TrendsWatch to help you stay up-to-date with the trends as they play out across the year. This site supplements the print and PDF editions by aggregating content from across the Web—twitter feeds, blog posts, articles, breaking news. It enables you to be a digital reader over my shoulder, seeing stuff I discover in my daily scanning.
Some of you have already visited (or tried to visit) the TrendsWatch site because I shared the address—Trendswatch.aam-us.org—in the report itself. Jumped the gun on that a bit, I did. How convenient that one of the chapters this year is about the important of taking chances, rapid iteration, experimentation, and failure! I’m going to flaunt the development of TrendsWatch’s web version as an example of practicing what I preach. We came up with the idea of a web presence for TrendsWatch last year—we knew what we wanted it to do, and that it fit within our broader plan for experimenting with content on the web (it is a subset of the new Alliance Labs site). We had a general idea of how a web version would work, and committed to actually inventing it as we went along.
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As it happened, some of our ideas were harder to implement than we anticipated. It wasn’t entirely obvious, for example, how make articles I tag in Diigo automatically feed into the site. And it took longer than expected to find a collection of Twitter feeds that I trust enough to show up in the site without human supervision. (A lot of promising feeds have a significant number of tweets that are personal, NSFW, or otherwise off topic.)
I know several hundred of you visited the site while it was in prep (we kept an eye on the traffic), but we waited until we were relatively happy with how it’s working to make a fuss over the launch. That would be now. Please, visit, browse, and tell us what you think! I would very much like to hear your opinion on its design and functionality. Would you rather read the text online, or do you prefer the downloadable PDF (or print edition) for consuming the report itself? We’ve packed a lot of content into each section—is that useful, or distracting? Are there things you would like to see on the web that aren’t there yet? Please give us your feedback via this short survey, and/or using the comment section, below. Thank you!
Yours from the future,
Elizabeth
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