Jane Rinzler Buckingham is president of a New York City-based trend-spotting company called Youth Intelligence, which was acquired by the powerhouse talent agency CAA earlier this year. Blond and photogenic, she is given to saying mind-altering things like, "If blue is the new black, what's the new blue?" (Trend spotters love to talk about how X is the new Y.) Three times a year, Buckingham and her staff handpick 300 trendsetters via a screening exam that covers music, magazines, brands, activities and TV shows. They recruit in coffee shops, video stores, "cool bookstores" and high schools in four or five different cities. "We're trying to go to places where you'll find some trendsetters, but sometimes we have to split it. We want to go to Kansas City, because sometimes you'll get cool music coming out of Kansas City. But it's hard to find 100 trendsetters in Kansas City."

Of course, even with the help of Kansas City's coolest, the trend watchers sometimes get it wrong. Youth Intelligence picked the WB action series Birds of Prey as a winner last year. (Birds of who? Exactly. It was canceled after a few episodes.) And the game is getting tougher. "Some of the companies we've worked with that used to get hair accessories made in China discovered that they couldn't do it anymore," says Brooks. "By the time a celebrity had worn it, it had appeared in InStyle, and then everybody wanted it right now, and then it was over in a few weeks. There's this dissemination going on, visually and through the Internet, that is killing brands." For most people, the decline of the national attention span is just another cliché; for trend watchers, it raises serious manufacturing and inventory-control problems. "It makes our job harder," Buckingham laments, "because the minute we spot a trend, we've got about four seconds to tell our clients. A mall clothing store can take down designer fashion within the next season. You see it in September on the runways. Then you've got it at Rampage and PacSun and all those places the same time you've got it in the Gucci stores, which means that it's going to be over much more quickly."

But if the Internet is making things tougher for most trend watchers, at least one trend spotter is turning its raging information flow to her advantage, using it to power the turbines of cool. Her name is DeeDee Gordon, and she's a co-founder, with partner Sharon Lee, of a new trend-spotting firm called Look-Look. Gordon has a certain notoriety in the trend-spotting industry: she was the original cool hunter, the subject of the famous 1997 New Yorker profile. Gordon and Lee both used to work for Lambesis, but by 1999 they got impatient with the way things were done. They were going out and giving kids pen-and-paper surveys when the kids were using instant messaging and two-way pagers. "We could have kept doing this the same way," says Gordon, who dresses in black and wears her plain brown hair pushed back over her ears, Galadriel-style, "but we knew better."

Gordon and Lee left Lambesis and founded Look-Look. Instead of canvassing their sources by hand, in person, they built up an army of teenagers that constantly feeds them information online. They estimate that they have 20,000 contacts, with the number expanding 500 to 1,000 a month. "It was all grown organically," says Gordon proudly, as if she were surveying a vast hemp farm. "We spent a great deal of money and up-front time handpicking these people based on peer-to-peer recruitment. It's a very different methodology from the way that most people gather bodies. We kind of modeled it after an MLM (multilevel marketing plan)—like an Herbalife or a Mary Kay or an Avon." The Look-Look kids—they're known as "field correspondents"—wander the cultural landscape with digital cameras (provided by Look-Look), uploading images from parties and concerts and sporting events for the Look-Look employees—sorry, "youth-information specialists"—to pore over. (Look-Look defines kids as ages 14 to 30. "Thirty is different now," says Lee. "Thirty is really 35 now.")

Because these kids are permanently wired to the mother ship, Gordon and Lee can ping them at will with specific requests from clients. When Calvin Klein came to them with a list of possible names for a new fragrance targeted at young men, Look-Look could quickly run the list past 10,000 or so teenage eyeballs. (The eventual winner? "Crave.") "Before, you would have to just kind of guess, or you'd have to wait," says Lee, "but because we've built this huge network, we have the capability to test the hypothesis with any kind of sample size that we want and get an immediate response. Yes, this is happening, or no, it isn't." It's an instantaneous, infallible coolometer.

You have to respect the sheer efficiency, not to mention the mass-scalability, of the feedback loop Gordon and Lee have created. They're extracting coolness from those who know and getting it to those who don't with unmatched speed and in unprecedented quantities. But it all raises some heavy sociological questions. In the old days, trends would percolate through the population slowly via the "and-they-told-two-friends" network. Now trends spread virally, via e-mail and instant messaging, with professional trend spotters snapping at their heels, hurrying them onward ever faster. In an age of universal information access, isn't everybody, by definition, in the know? What would it mean if the line between the cool kids and the uncool kids collapsed under the awesome pressure of information technology? If the trend spotters keep doing their job, an ever growing fraction of Americans will be well informed as to the proper cocktail to order. (Uh, it is still Campari, right? Right?) Will cool still be cool when everybody knows about it? When you can buy it at the Gap? And read about it in popular newsweekly magazines?

Maybe it will. Maybe the rules are changing. Zandl thinks the days of the alpha consumer may be numbered. "I'm working on a theory right now that I haven't really fully fleshed out," she says cautiously. "I'm calling it 'The Center Is the New Edge.' One of the things we've been seeing is that the edge has gotten incredibly predictable—I don't think it's very fresh anymore, because it's so focused on itself." She mentions a couple of the sturdy warhorses of cool: indie actress Chloë Sevigny and edgy fashion label Imitation of Christ. "When you really look at it, what trends are they really setting? Whereas if you go to Wal-Mart and you've got the Olsen twins with a billion-dollar business, you know there's something clearly going on."

In other words, maybe cool people aren't setting the trends anymore. Maybe what's going on is that America is finally weaning itself off an addiction to cool. If the center is the new edge, maybe mainstream will be the new radical, square will be the new hip, and—stay with me here—uncool will be the new cool. In other words, maybe there's hope for us all.

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