Some web predictions

In another bit of belated rounding-up, here are some of the predictions for 2007 from among the more technical blogs that I read.

Barry of Content Matters makes some arm-chancing but pertinent suggestions about search, rss, web advertising, widgets and blogging tools, but predicts a poor year for newspapers and MySpace ("even your Mom has heard of it"-- yep, kiss of death, for sure).

While on rss, Google Reader has added a "trends" feature, according to Bloggers Blog and an email from Dave Lull, that lets you track how many items you read from the blogs and sites to which you've subscribed. I haven't tried this yet, as I don't think it would be that useful for me; what I'd like is a comment tracking function that worked better than the ones I've tried so far.

Martyn Daniels at the Booksellers Association predicts what will happen this year for the book publishing industry. A lot more digital is the short summary, including the start of real POD (print on demand) -- more later on that.

John Battelle, king of search, makes his predictions here, accompanied by a photo of Nostradamus. Microsoft will do more spending to compete with Google, Google will integrate and build on YouTube, Yahoo! and eBay will be restructuring, mobiles and blog 2.0 will be big, and I like this one: "Amazon will continue to push beyond ecommerce into web services, the market will punish it for doing so, and by the end of the year Bezos will be forced to defend his investments as his stock takes a hit for those services' failing to find traction. It's not that I don't believe in Jeff's vision, it's the track record with things like Alexa ..".  Maybe Amazon will go back to focusing on books, then?

Comments

[Debra Hamel]

Hi Maxine. I hadn't looked at the Google Trends page before you mentioned it. No, not particularly handy, I should think. The only thing halfway useful about it is that you can see which of your subscriptions has been inactive for a long time and cull out the dead meat from your subscriptions.