Kevin Kelly has a great post on editors vs. the hive mind. Kelly begins by explaining that as the amount of bottom-up content on the web exploded, he believed that “the need for some top-down selection and guidance would only increase in value. As the amount of content expanded, the demand for some intelligent guidance and selection would be worth a lot to some people.” He was shocked, then, “to see the Wikipedia disprove this notion, and show how well the bottom could work without any editors at all.” But, he goes on to say, “the supposed paragon of adhocracy — the Wikipedia itself — is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia’s process reveals that it has an elite at its center, (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears. This is why Wikipedia has worked in such a short time.”

From here, Kelly begins to build an explanation of the forces at play by drawing an analogy to evolution and intelligent design. Pure hive mind systems may eventually evolve into a valuable end-state, but they do it in biological time - relative eons when compared to internet time. No one can wait that long, so enter intelligent design.

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.

What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
…ad infinitum.

The key, then, is to find just that right combination of hive mind and intelligent design. This searching is going on everywhere now, with a great example being Citizendium’s effort to improve upon Wikipedia.

We mostly find legacy companies tending toward an overabundance of design, while new toddler companies place an emphasis on the hive mind. Somewhere in the middle lies the right mix, but that somewhere changes over time. As the new variable in the equation, the hive mind is underestimated by most, leaving those “hive mind centric” applications to achieve real innovation and garner the strongest accolades. The problem for legacy companies is that their perception of how far the hive mind can take us is too conservative. Add that conservatism to institutional constraints on audience control and a legacy company that feels like it’s pushing the envelop is often just pulling its head out of the sand. With many bottom up applications available as examples, companies with deep expertise in editing should have an advantage over pure hive mind companies at taking some of these models and applying judicious amounts of intelligent design. The challenge, though, is one of attitude.

Today’s big news was the launch of EveryBlock. A product of a team of developers including wunderkind of the moment, Adrain Holovaty, the site launched to a great deal of fanfare. Covering Chicago, San Francisco, and New York (to start), EveryBlock provides local news and information down to the block level. The information comes from a myriad of sources, including newspapers, blogs, Craigslist, Yelp, and government databases. Brad Flora on The Methods Blog has a great rundown of the site and the information it contains.

TechCrunch also covers the launch and as is usually the case, the readers’ comments are a highlight of the post. A lot of the early, cynical comments suggest that much of this has been done before and wonders how the site can make money. Holovaty answers by pointing out that much of EveryBlock’s government data existed in inconvenient formats (e.g. pdf files) and hadn’t been aggregated before. As for making money, well, Holovaty notes that the project is non-profit.

I find it really interesting when people see these kinds of information aggregations as yawners. This is because of what they know already exists on the web, as opposed to what actually exists. We’ve become so used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips that unless you’ve ever tried to find some of this stuff, you really don’t know how difficult, or tedious, it is to locate. It means the bar is that much higher for those of us actually trying to bring it all together.

I agree with some of the commenters who think EveryBlock isn’t a business, but that misses the point. The EveryBlock team has put this site together with a goal of “experimenting with new forms of journalism.” (Of course, this doesn’t help those who actually need to make money with new forms of journalism.) This would fit nicely as a feature on a newspaper site, not only as its own section, but also as an engine to power supplementary information for news stories and other items. It would be a great addition to community sites like YourHub and NeighborsGo. Think too about all of that data newspapers collect for feature stories. It’s often some kind of government data that is only used for the original report. With an EveryBlock kind of product that data could be added to the database, making it more and more robust as time goes on.

The EveryBlock team has done a nice job with this site so far and I think it serves the Knight News Challenge’s goal of transforming community news. Experiments like these provide the inspiration, and now it’s up to the next wave to extend and refine.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference has begun placing talks and performances online, with around 100 available now. If you’re unfamiliar with the conference, the organizers describe it as bringing “together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” While I might add, “and some who fancy themselves the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers,” that would be a bit too cynical.

Despite an occasional speaker who seems to have been invited on the basis of celebrity rather than content, the fact is that placing these talks online has created an incredible treasure chest of good “stuff.” Stuff is not very descriptive, but I don’t know what else to use. The videos range from talks on nature to talks on neurology to amazing performances, and my guess is that nearly every one is worth watching. Take a look, but be prepared to lose some serious time out of your day. As a sample, below is slam poet Rives, telling us what he would do if he were in charge of the Internet.

Just as I published yesterday’s post which partly talked about the need for media companies to understand what they are, comes this article in the Wall Street Journal saying that Time Warner is considering reducing its investment in cable systems.  As I was writing “For traditional media companies that believe their mission is to deliver news, not print newspapers; deliver entertainment, not broadcast over the airwaves; the future can be bright.  But it can’t be the same as the past,” (I didn’t catch the article before the post) Time Warner executives were apparently discussing whether their mission is to deliver entertainment or lay cable.

Cable has been a core part of the company and its precursors for decades and is now the biggest contributor to profits. But the long-term future of cable, as the Internet emerges as a viable venue for watching TV, is murky. Some within Time Warner wonder whether the company wouldn’t be better off if it were to get out of cable and double down on the Web — where it already owns AOL — by buying another major Internet company, just as News Corp.acquired MySpace and GoogleInc. bought YouTube.

Then comes something obvious to Time Warner, but maybe not to the general public:

Getting rid of a big chunk of its cable holdings would transform the nature of Time Warner, making it more reliant on its role as a provider of filmed entertainment and print and Web content.

This would be a transforming move for Time Warner, but one that may very well be necessary for its content business to thrive.  Two more points are made:

One argument in favor of getting out of cable is that it would free up resources for more investment in the Web.

[…]

Some also believe Time Warner should exit cable because the dynamics of that business are fundamentally different from those of Time Warner’s content operations, which include Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting and Time Inc. Most significantly, cable requires substantial capital investment that the other businesses do not.

The parallel to newspapers and printing presses is inescapable.  Oddly, though, the story goes on to say:

One of the downsides of getting out of cable, though, is that it would leave Time Warner much more dependent on slow-growing content businesses of film, television and print. Indeed, exiting from cable would seem to increase the possibility that Time Warner would eventually dispose of its publishing operations, where growth has nearly come to a halt.

Wouldn’t the point of getting out of cable be that TW could then jump start its content growth, including its “publishing” business?  The difference in point of view is made obvious when the writer refers to “film, television, and print” businesses.  Those businesses may be in trouble, but producing information and entertainment is not.  If you chain yourself to a means of delivery, you have problems, but if you open yourself up to many, you grow.

Marketing Daily has an article about General Mills’ launch of a “Worldwide Innovation Network.”  At first blush, this seems to be the sort of open innovation embraced by, among others, P&G, Peugot, and Nokia.  Really, though it looks like GM has simply opened itself up to acquiring new products through licensing and maybe acquisitions.  Not that this is a bad thing.  It all started two years ago when General Mills R&D formed an open innovation team.  This team “has traveled the globe, going to food trade and technology shows looking for technologies and ready-to-go products that could fit in to existing product lines.”  Doesn’t this beg the question of What was R&D doing before that? 

General Mills expects to gain speed to market through this program since presumably any product the company licenses or acquires will have already started down the development pipeline.  What this initiative does not seem to do, however, is tap into consumers for new ideas.  GM may already be doing this in other ways, but figuring out how to bring consumers into the innovation process may be the real Holy Grail.  It’s not clear, however, that the best model for that kind of open innovation has yet been developed.  At this point, the days of consumers offering good ideas for free are over, so some sort of reward or financial participation is a requirement.  Also needed is a way to sort the wheat from the chaff, and I have to believe there would be a lot of chaff.  The jury is still out on just how workable and sustainable such a process would be, but it certainly seems worth a try while marketplace enthusiasm is still high.

 (Via Endless Innovation)

Reuters has interesting news about Second Life - the FBI is investigating gambling.  With hundreds of casinos and the Linden dollar freely transferable into US dollars, it seems pretty clear that there is gambling in the traditional sense of the word. 

‘We have invited the FBI several times to take a look around in Second Life and raise any concerns they would like, and we know of at least one instance that Federal agents did look around in a virtual casino,’said Ginsu Yoon, until recently Linden Lab’s general counsel and currently vice president for business affairs. ‘We have specifically requested that a US Attorney give us guidance on virtual gaming activity in SL, but this hasn’t resulted in clear rules yet.’

Yoon goes on to say, “It’s not always clear to us whether a 3D simulation of a casino is the same thing as a casino, legally speaking - and it’s not clear to the law enforcement authorities we have asked.”  I fail to see how it can be considered anything but the same, although that’s different than believing it should be outlawed.

Whether the virtual casinos are a simulation, or actual gambling, I love the idea of the FBI investigating.  I wonder if the agents are undercover?  Are they armed?  Wired?  Do they have informants?  How many Linden dollars is a juicy piece of information worth?  The questions are endless.  Of course, one way to look at this is to view the FBI as just another business trying to set up shop in Second Life.  They can do some marketing, have an outreach program, maybe a gun exchange.  If we’re lucky, perhaps we’ll see Smith & Wesson opening a shop and creating virtual handguns for the agents.

Brandchannel.com has an interesting article on the proliferation of hotel brands.  Noting how difficult it is for a consumer to differentiate among all of these brands, the article states:

This is just one aspect of the branding problem. The larger hotel companies seem to spawn brands whenever the mood strikes. And the problem is getting worse. “The hotel industry has launched several new brands in the past 18 months,” says Jeff Weinstein, editor-in-chief of HOTELS magazine. “Not only is it hard to create the critical mass necessary to make these brands relevant, but these new hotel brands have to create a very distinct identity and then deliver the matching experience to have any chance of resonating in the mind of the consumer. Creating that identity, making sure there is enough demand, and then actually delivering the goods is not at all easy.”

It’s hard to argue with the notion that hotel brands aren’t what they used to be.  The days of a few major hotel chains (e.g. Marriott, Hilton, Ramada) with clearly differentiated value propositions, seem to be gone.  Now, if you consider a reservation at a Hilton, for example, you have to find out if it’s a good Hilton or a crummy Hilton (or Marriott, Ramada, etc.).  Crummy Hilton!  The very statement would seem an oxymoron 30 years ago, but now it’s possible.  With so many brands trying to reach so many segments, consistency has become a problem along with differentiation.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is the article’s contention that “the hotel industry seems to be moving in the direction of very customized offerings.”  In this view, brand proliferation is seen as the industry’s attempt to customize.  Customization is a long-term consumer trend that’s been impacting all sorts of businesses for some time now, and it seems smart for hoteliers to try to capitalize on it.  As with so many things, it’s all about the execution.  If you don’t know what a brand stands for, it’s hard to see it as customized for you.  Maybe the winning formula is a customizable brand - a hotel chain that allows guests to customize their rooms.  Or maybe a brand that offers different characteristics at different locations (e.g. green, long-term, business traveler, etc.), but with a clear, overarching value proposition (e.g. customer service, family friendly, luxury, etc.).  It’s an interesting challenge, but one that doesn’t seem to be met with the current over-branding approach.

The Independent (via Influx) has a story about Rough Trade’s intention to open a 5,000 square foot music shop in London. This move by Rough Trade, the label that launched the Smiths, is a bet on a counter trend if ever there was one. With stories of declining CD sales in the press seemingly every day, punctuated by music store closings (e.g. Tower Records), a large physical store selling CDs seems to be a Sisyphean adventure. It’s more than a counter trend bet, however, as the shop will have live entertainment and try to become a hub for a vibrant independent music scene. This aspect of the project fits squarely into a relatively recent but already stable trend - shopping as an experience. We hear so much about creating a community online, but there is no community like flesh and blood community, and that is just what Rough Trade hopes to facilitate. If indie music lovers (and all other music lovers, for that matter) find like minded souls as customers, entertainers, and employees in the shop, they’ll come back for more and be happy to purchase physical CDs rather than download (legal or illegal) digital songs. Influx notes that Amoeba Music in San Francisco is the model for the new store. If that’s true, I hope it’s just the start of the plan because Amoeba isn’t quite the kind of experience I think Rough Trade will need to create. It’s harshly lit, jammed with CDs, but otherwise not particularly welcoming (just my opinion).

Creating experiences for consumers has been seen in many businesses now, initially manifesting itself in Nike Town stores which drew consumers in for the experience as much as for the products. A while back I wrote about Living Room Theaters, a Portland cinema that tried to create the experience of watching a movie in your living room. Service and luxury are the experience. Think of another supposedly dying business - high-end stationary. When you walk into a Papyrus or Kate’s Paperie, shopping for stationary becomes an experience. You’re with like-minded people, talking with clerks who love fine paper, surrounded by creative examples of how to do more with what you are about to purchase.

Online companies, too, create this experience. Amazon was an early example as they introduced Recommendations, Wish Lists, and reviews. eBay also played the experience card as the company not only found an efficient way to buy and sell, but provided a fun auction experience. Finally, what could be more boring than a corporate Web site, right? Well, take a look at Dyson’s, but only if you’re ready to spend several hundred dollars for one of their vacuums, because that’s what you’ll want to do after your visit. Visiting that Web site is an experience.

CDs, movie theaters, paper - all products or services that are presumed to be in trouble. Creating an experience around the product or service is how some forward looking businesses are fighting back. Unfortunately there are solid long-term trends beating these businesses down, trends that won’t be reversed simply by creating product experiences. These actions can, however, slow the decline of, or even temporarily grow, the market. You want to have a portfolio of products that cover where you’ve been as well as where you’re going. Just because a certain product type or segment seems to be in decline, doesn’t mean it’s no longer worth addressing.

If you sell products to consumers (I guess that takes in a few people), you’ll be interested in Street Peeper (via PSFK).  Street Peeper posts pictures of mostly young people and their clothes (despite the name) from the streets of, New York, Miami, Berlin, Seoul, Paris, and Chicago (with more coming). The photos are searchable by label, style, or color (it’s early in the life of the site so some searches may come up a bit empty). Fashion, yes, but consumer tastes as well. Clothes are a great paradox - personalized and uniform at the same time, although the younger the wearer the less likely he or she is to believe they’re wearing a uniform. To catch a clothing trend as it moves from the personal style of a few to the uniform of a demographic, can put a business on the developing end of an incredible profit opportunity. But clothing trends cross into other areas (and vice versa) so they never really develop in isolation and are relevant to any kind of design creation.

The interesting thing about sites like Street Peeper is how available it makes this kind of research. No need to spend hot days on city sidewalks people watching, now you can just click around Street Peeper. Too bad people watching is so much fun in person.

A little while ago I posted on desktop fabricators, many of which are user or kit built.  Sears is selling a “desktop” woodworking system called the Craftsman Compucarve.  From the Web site:

Compact, computer-controlled, 3-dimensional woodworking machine with an easy-to-use interface. It allows a novice to make a complete project without a shop full of tools.The unique configuration allows it to perform many other woodworking functions, including ripping, cross cutting, mitering, contouring, jointing and routing. The CompuCarve can work in most soft materials, including wood, plastics (polycarbonate or cast acrylic) and certain types of high density foam.

It’s a bit pricey (as you’d expect) at around $1,900, but it moves us that much closer to the day when we can dream up a product and manufacture it on our desktops.  At first glance it appears to be simply a carving machine (although a pretty nifty one), but as you can see by some of the comments to this article, with some imagination it can become much more.  This is a first generation machine and as it is improved it will get easier to use and more capable.  You can read more about the Compucarve here. Another sign that the huge trend toward customization and personalization isn’t limited to the digital world.  

(Also discussed at Core77)

Business Week has an article about collaboration in the workplace, which focuses mostly on wikis.  The article begins with an anecdote about the founder of Geek Squad wondering how a member of his staff stayed in touch with employees in Anchorage.

Prodded for details, he sheepishly told Stevens that they all play Battlefield 2 online. ‘With each server, you can have 128 people simultaneously fighting each other in a virtual environment,’ said the director. ‘We wear headsets and use Ventrilo software so that we can talk over the Internet while we are running around fighting.’

Stephens, who now joins in himself from time to time, says: ‘The agents taunt each other, saying, “Hey, I see you behind the wall.” But then, while we’re running along, rifles in our hands, one of the agents behind me will be like, “Yeah, we just hit our revenue to budget,” and somebody else will be like, “Hey, how do you reset the password on a Linksys router?”"

 Is this great or what?  We have to remember, this is the Geek Squad, but still…  This immediately makes me think of “The Office” episode in which the Connecticut office of Dunder Mifflin plays a computer game (it’s a FPS - Call of Duty, maybe?).  It didn’t convey quite the same feeling of collaboration, did it?  Even if there was no communication happening during the Geek Squad game however, just playing together has to make far flung colleagues feel like they know each other.

 Much of the rest of the article talks about the use of wikis in the workplace and how natural it is for younger workers and how unnatural it is for those who are older.  These are old themes, but worth exploring again every once in a while, if only to confirm that social software like wikis continue to add value to businesses.

Xerox is another company using wikis:

Typically, high-level strategy documents are formulated by a handful of people atop the corporate hierarchy. At Xerox, Chief Technology Officer Sophie VanDebroek turned the process inside out by setting up a wiki that would allow researchers in the R&D group to define collaboratively the company’s technology strategy.

If you’re still afraid of social software - Instant Messenger, wikis, streaming media, blogs, file sharing, and online multiplayer games - you’re now losing a competitive advantage, but soon you’ll be ignoring a basic requirement of the game.

If you’re a fruit marketer, you probably feel pretty good about the health and exercise trend we’ve been living through for some time now. Unless, that is, you’re Chiquita. While the company was happy to ride along as consumers paid more and more attention to what they eat, it also realized that because ripe bananas spoil more quickly than other fruits, they were only sold in green, not-yet-ripe bunches. This means that it is very hard to purchase a single, ready-to-eat banana at a convenience store, fast food outlet, or other eat on the run outlets. While it participated in the better health trend by default, it couldn’t take advantage of consumers’ desire for convenient, portable, ready-to-eat food. An article in the International Herald Tribune (from the Boston Globe), says Chiquita may have solved that problem:

So Gen3, a product innovation consulting company, researched ways to ship bananas in the perfectly ripe yellow state and keep them that way when they arrive at shops. The company found that the pharmaceutical industry had engineered plastics that regulate air flow in boxes and decided to apply that technology to bananas.

At Chiquita’s packaging plants, workers hand-pick the bananas heading to convenience stores and other fast-food outlets for their ideal size, color, shape and ripeness. The single bananas are laid on top of one another in boxes covered with a semipermeable membrane that allows oxygen to pass through but controls the flow of carbon dioxide to delay ripening until the box is opened.

So Chiquita sells more bananas and banana loving consumers will soon be happy to find their favorite fruit where they want it when they want it. Chiquita did some research in 2005 that told them “42 percent of people would eat more bananas if they were available in more locations.” More importantly, I think, Chiquita recognized the trend toward convenience and hurried lifestyles, or the “transumer” trend as Trendwatching has dubbed it, and innovated to give consumers what they want. Why only take advantage of one trend, when you can use another as well?

Grant McCracken writes that he believes that the days of accidental friends may be numbered:

In the “old world” model, we make friends by accident. Our family is from Seattle, so that’s where we were born. Or, our Dad got a job in Chicago, so that’s where we went to school. We like to ski, and that’s how we ended up in Vermont. Accidents of birth, occupation, inclination, all of these constrain the set of people with whom we can be friends.

[…]

My guess is that machines once they are dedicated to this purpose will do a much better job of building social connections than I could do even if I were to devote all my time to it. It can detect patterns in the stuff I put on line, and find hidden resonances with the stuff others put on line. And this would be interesting. It would be fun to get an email that says ‘we’ve found a match.’

Pretty clearly we spend a lot of time and money trying to sort ourselves into like-minded groups, in both the virtual and physical worlds. We join MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn (as Grant notes) in an attempt to find people we have something in common with. We also join book clubs, sports clubs, country clubs, museums, and the SPCA, hoping that we’ll find kindred souls as members. We have a need to find people who are like us, and Grant is probably right that machines will be able to do a good job with this.

This search for people I’ll like, though, reminds me of the search for information I want to read. If I end up only reading articles on topics I’m interested in from sources I like, I’m in danger of never coming across a new thought. I also miss stumbling across information that I might not have been able to predict will interest me but does. It’s the same with people. Do you have a friend you’re surprised you can even tolerate, much less like? Someone else you enjoy talking with even though you think differently on just about any subject? Another friend from a completely different background and cultural upbringing? Of course you do. Might a machine someday match you with them?

If our social networks were the result of machine driven sifting and filtering, I have to believe that society would become polarized, with interactions among self-reinforcing groups resembling a Hardball episode - lots of talking and shouting but not much learning and understanding. It is encountering diversity of thought and experience that allows us to grow and develop intellectually. While I, like everyone else, employ filters for many of my friends, I recognize that it is accidental friends who often add the spice to life.

I suspect that Grant just has more faith in machines than I do. He no doubt believes that they will be able to pick up on something we exhibit that provides the evidence for that unlikely match. On the other hand, maybe every thirty-third search they’ll short circuit and throw out a random match. That might work.

For years now we’ve been hearing greeting card manufacturers and the Greeting Card Association talking about the enduring values of sending paper cards for holidays, birthdays, and just about any other special occasion. Fine stationary manufacturers also tout the beauty and feel of their products as a perfect antidote to the over-digitization of our society. An e-card for your special Valentine? What could be less special?

Well, e-cards may not be all they were once cracked up to be, but it’s pretty hard to ignore stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal just prior to last Valentine’s Day.

Love letters aren’t what they used to be. While young correspondents have committed their deepest feelings to paper for centuries, the latest generation of lovers is coming of age along with new technologies that let them court each other on the run. The passionate essays penned on Valentine’s Days past have morphed into bursts of instant-message affection. Confessions once sealed in envelopes are now dashed off in email. While romantics have bemoaned the end of the love letter for decades, the latest generation of amorous Americans is turning the language of love into shorthand.

Many of us may lament the loss of penned love letters and paper cards, and many of those who now resort to texting “ILU” do as well, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on their way out. Of course, expressing your feelings electronically also means that those feelings can be forwarded to friends, friends of friends, and complete strangers around the world. It’s a dangerous game, but one that’s played all the time.

Knowing that their prime consumers are middle-aged, for years card companies have discounted low demand from young people, secure in the knowledge that as those consumers get older, they will eventually turn to cards. It seems unlikely that’s the case any more. Certainly some will, but many more have learned a new way of communicating that will serve them just fine as they grow up. There will constantly be new ways to communicate, and paper has a lot of life left yet even if only as an anti-trend, but one thing seems pretty clear - the long term trend for paper cards is down.

A look at TheKnot.com’s wedding trends for 2007 (via Iconoculture) shows that even that bastion of fine paper is headed into digital territory. Making the list are

• Daily bridal blogs
• Personal URLs on invites
• Online RSVP
• Live webcasts
• Digital music
• Streaming video

I’m not sure we’re quite at the day when wedding invitations will be on Evite, but I can’t imagine that Evite isn’t working on how to get brides (and, more importantly, their mothers) to use the service for exactly that purpose.

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article by Amy Chozick, explaining how Japan has become “‘Disneyland’ for trends.” The article goes through an exhausting array of trends, including bejeweled sneakers, Jesus-themed restaurants, and robotic baby seals the keep the elderly company. Chozick traces this explosion of innovation to Japan’s recent economic woes:

Japan’s latest ferment can be traced in part to the economic slump that began in the early 1990s and lasted more than 10 years. As monolithic corporations cut jobs and lost their luster, more workers entered fashion, animation and music businesses. The number of employees in these so-called creative industries grew 16%, to 1.4 million, between 1996 and 2001, even as employees of all industries shrunk by 4.3%, according to the Marubeni Research Institute in Tokyo. Japan’s consumers began seeking eccentric products that flattered their growing sense of individuality.

While some of these new trends will travel well overseas and become hits in the US, many will not. The Jesus restaurants, for example, sound like they’ll have patrons thinking less Easter and more Stations of the Cross as, in at least one case, the restaurant is “reached by a dungeon-like brick stairwell, lit by dripping red candles, which leads to a dining area decorated with giant crucifixes, gargoyles and images of a bloodied Christ weeping on the cross.” Yikes!

On the other hand, you can always eat in a “maid café” “where waitresses dress in the black-and-white French maid outfits worn by comic book heroines. ‘Welcome home, master,’ they say upon the arrival of a new customer, typically a male. For $5, waitresses will lift a drink straw to a customer’s mouth, or write his name on his omelet in ketchup.” Sounds like home, doesn’t it? The maid cafes are inspired by “cosplay,” or costume play. You’re familiar with this from seeing people dressed as anime or manga characters. The latest is “Goth-loli,” or Goth meets Lolita.

The list goes on and on, through hot tub karaoke to ice vodka bars. Western companies are taking trend tours of Japan as it lives up to its trend theme-park reputation. It’s pretty clear that this all bears watching, but if you can’t make the trip to Tokyo, one place to follow along from your office chair is the Japan section of CScout.