Blake Ross has cynical list of ten predictions for the new year. The best ones are:
Another blog search engine will release a list of top 100 bloggers. Every blogger on the list will blog the news in the form of: “Wow, I’m honored to have made it onto the top 100 list” with a link back to the list maintainer’s blog. The list maintainer will in return blog: “I’m honored to see that the list has been covered by such a high-profile blogger” with a link back to the winner’s blog. The link incest will continue for weeks until it has propelled the list maintainer himself into the top 100, at which point the list will be declared a sham and the blogosphere will erupt in outrage.
AOL, after months of extensive market research on the effects of the walled garden model on the distribution and consumption of interactive media, will rotate its logo by another 90 degrees. Chairman Dick Parsons will boast that the new logo “reflects the new direction of our company,” but founder Steve Case will make an impassioned plea in the New York Times to break up the logo into a circle and three triangles.
900,000 more websites will add RSS feeds. Bloggers will cover all of them. One of the sites will be the blog of an obscure profession, such as shoe cobbling. This will be groundbreaking news, because now shoe cobblees will be able to participate in a Conversation with their shoe cobbler. Thirty-seven VC firms will invest in the cobbler.
I especially like the term “link incest”. Link incest is the back-bone of the blogging economy…It seems like more and more people starts to realize that Web 2.0 really is like in the story The Emperors Cloths, where a child suddenly shout out: “But the Emperor is Naked…”
A new war has heated up on the IM market – Skype is releasing IM developer tools. This on the same day that Google Talk was launched – what a co-incident…If AOL, MSN and Yahoo got a bit nervous about Google Talk, I guess this announcement wasn’t too welcome either. Tuff days on the IM market – but very interesting too, competition is healthy and will bring out the best products, however I believe this will be the beginning of the end of the weaker IM’s that are already struggling to keep it up. The Skype IM developer tools will enable softwares and web services to integrate Skype IM to their offering which is really very welcome. Expect to see Skype IM on many desktop applications and web services like dating, social networks and blogs in the near future. And by the way, why not on browsers too?
Follow me!
