Predictions for 2005

PREDICTIONS FOR 2005

Since it's end of the year, the predictions are coming out. This is the beauty of blogs and this new medium is that these predictions, great or small, are accessible to the masses. Here are three from the tech world.

John C. Dvorak (CBS MarketWatch):
1. Internet attack
... There have been massive incidental attacks over the past couple of years as if someone is experimenting with a big one. That could happen this year too...

2. Spyware becomes mainstream news
... will become the top news story of the year, no doubt. But first the national media has to be struck by this stuff or terrorists need to be connected to it...

3. Sony, the Cell chip and the PS3
... IBM-Sony-Toshiba "supercomputer-on-a-chip" will be unveiled at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Once this chip, part of the next generation Playstation architecture, is revealed in detail it has the potential to be so important that the entire industry could change overnight...

4. Megamergers
... Bush administration it would be remiss for a large corporation not to buy the competition. Who's to stop you?...

5. MS Linux
... I don't think Microsoft can take a chance on letting this slip for too much longer...

John Battelle (Searchblog & Co-Founder of Wired):
1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK. But it's important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. I'm already seeing these forces at work over at Boing Boing, and I am sure they will continue. We'll all work on figuring out ways to stick to our principles and get paid at the same time, however, I expect that things might get more contentious before they get better, and 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world. To capture some of that value, we'll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of community journalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. This (and other things) may drive Six Apart or one of its competitors into the arms of Yahoo or AOL or even - gasp - Quark or Adobe or Marcomedia. (the rest)

Mitch Ratcliffe (Red Herring Blog):
2005: The year the media will turn inside out

The media is self-organizing. Not the old fogies, such as daily newspapers, magazines, and television networks, but the legions of self-publishers and producers on the web.

In recent months, the rise of podcasting has sent a flare up over the trenches of old media, key figures have abandoned their posts in old media to set out into the new, and now Yahoo has announced a well-documented format for RSS media syndication that will support text, audio, and, now, video delivery. A new wiki-based news organization, WikiNews, will pioneer a form of news editing that, while it’s ripe with potential problems, is a provocative change from the passive consumption of news. (full post)