20 years of buzzwords

We might often see buzzwords as a total exaggeration of current trends, which is half-true because, obviously, buzzwords are also signals of what’s hot out there.

I scraped my historical data (from emails, posts, chat, etc.) to represent the top buzzwords I interacted with during the past 20 years… And this is what it looks like.

This doesn’t necessary represent the industry trends year-by-year, but more likely the topics I worked on. I find it interesting though and have summed-up some conclusions in this article.

What this tells me:

1- Blogs are struggling and it seems they have reached a kind of need for repurposing since 2010.

2- SEO & E-Commerce are here to stay, even though they had dips and peaks.
In 2012 E-Commerce might have lost some buzz because it was already accelerating, and possibly because of new channels trials (the pop-up shops trend, and the brick-and-mortar (~2012) push on drive-to-store strategies).
SEO has always been a focus, but lost some buzz with social networks becoming game changers for acquisition and retargeting. On the other side, SEO gets always back on top of minds as soon as Google brings major changes in their search ranking algorithm.

These two topics are back on the top subjects for 2020–2025

3- A new shift is here, especially when you combine tech capabilities such as API economy, AI, Crypto/NFT, Metaverse and no-code/low-code, you can imagine the power of the new internet: interoperable, decentralized, creative and open. These topics are fresh, but not as fresh as they might sound. Some of them are still finding the right positioning (NFT), others are stabilized (API Economy).

These techs are definitely boosting the creator-economy and passion-economy worlds.

4-Big data is real, but the buzzword is one of the most abused ones. I have zero email threads mentioning ‘big data’ in Q3-Q4 of 2020 where same period in 2017 the word was present in many of my conversations.
What was Big before, isn’t Big today, given the exponential evolution of techniques and patterns for structured and unstructured data, as well as the whole tech and platform infrastructures.
Let’s just call this data not big data.

That’s it for me!