Web Trends

This week I was contacted by Carl from HyperIsland - a Swedish New Media Design school - who wanted my thoughts on web trends and that.

His questions are below, with my answers, but since I'm all about the collaborative web,  it might be interesting for Carl to get your thoughts too.

Question 1
What do think is the hottest in the web industry at this moment?

It's all about web 2.0. But that's a meaningless phrase. To me it is:

Collaborative wisdom / creativity - meta tagging, folksonomies, open source creation, sharing, involvement

Question 2
What do you predict that we will see more of on the technical side in the near future?

Dynamic web functionality - Ajax, Comet

Thin client computing - Google Spreadsheets

Question 3
What future trends do you think we’ll see in the next 2 years?

More interconnection - xml style data sets that can be manipulated and used in different ways.

Question 4
What would you recommend us students to learn?
4a. Design
4b. Tech
4c. Management

If you had to choose one thing what would that be?

That really depends on what you want to do - increasingly online design and tech will be interlinked.

I think design is in some ways going to be a higher order skill set - something that can't be outsourced - but design will be difficult to untangle from tech.