Will Coolhunting Blogs Challenge The Trend Firms?

Yesterday, I noticed two new ‘blogs’ that have been created to track ‘cool’ trends. One is Campus Vibe Trendspotter by CNN and the other is Catwalk City. Both are coolhunter style fashion blogs with on-the-street photos of fashion trends.

• Campus Vibe Trendspotter is a ‘blog’ featuring student views on style and fashion from college students across the United States. It’s written by budding student journalist that CNN have picked - they seem to collaborate on stories and send in photos on themes. The blog is more of a newsletter though: released once a week or so.
• Catwalk City is a daily photohunt on the streets of London. They find someone cool and they snap ‘em and you get to hear where they got their kit from.

The thing with these blogs is that they’re not really blogs at all. Both sites lack some basic blog fundamentals - there’s no categorization of content, no comments to allow conversation, no trackback, no RSS, little personality. CNN’s Trendspotter site is a regular column newspaper written by young folk branded as a blog. Catwalk City could be so much more: why doesn’t it even use Flickr to host its images (in fact: why don’t they just use Flickr to run their blog from??)?

Despite these negatives, the addition of these sites to the many other sites monitoring trends will create questions for folks like Look Look, Youth Intelligence (or whatever they’re now called) and TrendCentral who keep their ’spotting’ rather secret. The blogosphere is witnessing an openess to express that can’t be stopped (and can be searched for). Someone’s going to get open & global cool-hunting right one of these days and challenge the status quo.

So what will happen with the big trend firms? There will always be a role - just a different one: as we’ve said before, it’s not about what you notice, it’s about what you really see. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how the big trend services react in time to save their skins.

Campus Vibe TrendSpotter
Catwalk City

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