Technically Speaking

Almost too late, and in some countries it already is 2008. Let’s see how I do this year.

1. Advertising online – Now that it’s quite apparent the only viable economy in these times are online, most of the advertising you see in 2008 will be online. Mobile and video advertising will command big bucks, and traditional advertising via banner ads will continue strong.

2. Censorship – Censorship of the internet by countries, states, cities will be a big issue in the early part of 2008. While it’s privacy that everyone is concerned about, about the middle of the year we’ll see Silicon Valley’s finest entrepreneur’s take advantage of this. I’m sure we will see quite a few new companies making millions by year’s end on this.

3. Social Networks – Just like 2007, social networks will continue another year of healthy growth. Not so much the big dogs, but more like smaller more niche social clubs will be formed. The big sites will continue their steady growth, and will continue to make big money via advertising.

4. Less Blogs – There will be your major blogs, and the minor bloggers will bow out when they can’t seem to make money online like some of the big dogs. This will result in better coverage of emerging technology and more money for the upper tier of bloggers.

5. Television – Will rebound. Crazy you say? But with the push to HD that is mandated here in the US by 2009, there will be a big push for new tv sales in 2008. Now as far as the industry goes, it’s dead. Stick a fork in ‘em. Most of the content will move online by mid-year, and the content left on television will have a hard time making it since most of the advertising money will follow online.

6. Newspapers – Most of them will began to cease actual production of black ink on recycled paper by year’s end. Most if not all will dedicate their reporting to the online versions. Near the end of the year, most will be touting it as their company going green.

7. Green – Will continue to remain strong throughout 2008. As noted above, with newspapers ceasing to put out a printed version, other companies will follow online. If the product can be produced better online (such as news updated as news happens – newspapers) – it will come online. The money will be abundant online in 2008 and many companies will have no option if they want to survive. In factoring in all the options, the corporate moves will have green in mind when they make major moves.

Technically Speaking, I think I put up too many predictions last year. It’s been a fantastic year for me personally. As many of you long time readers remember, this blog started here on this domain on January 1, 2007. It’s been one full year now here. Happy New Year everyone and be safe so that you can come by and read my occasional ramblings in 2008. cruises

It has been quite a year for myself personally, but now is the time to sit back and take a look at my 2007 predictions. Written exactly one year ago on my old blog (free wordpress) before I moved here to the present location.

Let’s review each one:

1. There will be a new video content delivery system that will debut in 2007 that will blow away what is currently out there. This will not “kill” YouTube or any of the other video services, but it will be more like a CDN that is on steroids. This CDN will be the killer and talked about place in early 2007, and will be given many awards come this time next year.

My Review: Didn’t happen obviously, but let’s hope that my insider is still working hard on this.

2. Social Networks will consolidate, but still experience huge growth. Sites such as the one I posted about this morning will become the norm. People will be attracted to social networks in 2007 even more. The difference will be that social networks will become more specialized such as Shuzak (for programmers, mathematics, etc…) and places like MySpace will be the central network point. People will start to realize that they will need centralized points such as Spokeo, as they will want to join only networks with distinct focus.

My Review: Social Networks continued to grow by leaps and bounds.

3. AOL and Yahoo will merge by end of 1st quarter 2007; maybe even sooner.

My Review: Didn’t happen, AOL survived, Yahoo survived a CEO change and both are still separate entities.

4. Super Bowl Sunday (February 4th, 2007) will be 50/50 Beer ads and Web 2.0 ads and new startup ads. Anyone happen to have $2.5 million to loan Rex Dixon? I’d love to do a 15-30 second ad (whatever $2.5 million will by this year for SB Sunday ads!)

My Review: Super Bowl Sunday was so long ago, I really forget the ads by now. I do remember vaguely that there wasn’t as many startup companies (unless you count the cameo by Digg’s Kevin Rose) this past year.

5. RSS and Widgets will have a nice marriage in 2007. We are already seeing allot of that, but I think the two will marry up nicely and be more abundant in 2007.

My Review: Slow process but widgets are starting to evolve. More probably coming in 2008.

6. WebOS – I can’t forget my favorite 2007 item! WebOS – maybe not GoogleOS, but I think WebOS will make great strides in 2007.

My Review: Wrong again. WebOS hardly made a whisper in 2007.

7. Television as we know it will really start to come to the end of its rope in 2007. We already are seeing it, but 2007 will accelerate TV shifting its focus to the internet ten times faster then it did this past year.

My Review: Finally got one right! This is happening, and the writer’s strike has really accelerated this movement.

8. John Edwards. You don’t think other candidates will follow the leader? If they don’t, they will be forgotten before the fires in Iowa even start.

My Review: Another one right. I think we all saw the movement online for this election. Don’t need to look any further than Ron Paul’s campaign to find out the reason why the internet is going to soon take over mainstream media for all elections. Raising the amount of money his campaign has says one thing – He has support, and a lot of it.

9. Amanda Congdon was not a fluke. There will be more internet personality’s hitting the mainstream with nice old world contracts in 2007. Maybe Rex Dixon? Hey, I have to dream!

My Review: 50/50 on this. Amanda was a fluke sort of, as now the shift and focus is off the mainstream. There were a lot of YouTube/video stars this year. Amanda was a fluke in the sense that no other blogger or vlogger has been signed to a major network. The thing is, the major networks are in trouble unless they focus online. As far as myself, January 15th on the local news; never saw that one coming! It was a one time shot, and for something that I never thought I’d have to talk about on local news 10pm top story news.

10. The catch all – there will be one or two items that we NEVER saw coming. You can count that if none of the above 9 predictions for 2007 come true; I at least covered “my you know what” with this last one!

My Review: I should have just said that for the first 6 items!

11. Search and Aggregators – such as Megite, Techmeme, Tailrank, and search as in Collarity, Snap, Wikiasari, and even Google search will become bigger forces in 2007.

My Review: Search is still big, and other aggregators have come on the scene. I think this is ongoing as we go into 2008.

I also had 3 personal predictions or goals for 2007.

1. Connected more – as in starting yesterday, whenever I can, I will be available via Meebo for chat. If I post myself as “busy” or “msg me” – I’m serious. I will respond when I can. That’s what the status thing is for!

My Review: I ditched the Meebo widget in a few months, but you can still find me on Meebo as well as Skype daily. So yes, I’m available.

2. More focused on getting new items when at all possible. If I can’t get it new, I will still try to put a better spin on it.

My Review: At the start of the year, I think I did pretty well. As I started to gravitate more towards #3 below, I started to fail.

3. I truly am hoping 2007 will be the end of the day gig for Rex Dixon. That remains to be seen, but as I stated above (sort of) “Is it time to invest in Rex Dixon while I’m still cheap?”

My Review: All I can say is Lookery and Lending Club. Both jobs beat any day gig I ever had.

Technically Speaking, I’ll try to throw some darts at the wall and do some predictions for 2008 in a bit. senior living

I know that many of you have already seen this on TC. The one thing that TC forgot to promote was the fact that this girl is trying to make it to the Super Bowl. So take a listen, and log on to your MySpace account and vote for her. Kina does a fine job on this song as well as a few other ones she has.

Here are the lyrics to follow along:

When I’m feeling lazy, at school or when I work
I sneak to my computer, and then I like to shirk
I don’t go online shopping, I don’t email with my mom
I open up my browser, and go to digg-dot-com

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

I always dig up Apple, and I bury Microsoft
But when I said I was a girl, all the diggers scoffed
And when I see those stories about Senator Ron Paul
I don’t even RTFA; I just digg them all!

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

The fanboys can be tiresome, they always are outspoken
And if you’re listening Kevin Rose, the comment system’s broken!
I know digg isn’t perfect, but be thankful for what we’ve got
It’s just like daddy always says: “At least it’s not Slashdot!!!”

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

Technically Speaking, a good song is not rocket science, it’s a hook that stays with you. This one has for the past hour.

CenterNetworks has always been a favorite blog to read. Their topics are diverse, and he still breaks the big story that everyone else seemingly ignores sometimes.

On the heels of the fact that Compete.com passed Alexa, I decided to check some facts out via Compete. I think the people are in agreement. CN has now overtaken some major players; up 19xxx% this year.

RWW earlier this year scored a major coup by hiring outgoing SplashCast Director of Social Media Marshall Kirkpatrick, and you can see that their stats are also climbing. RWW also recently updated their look.

Of course CN is still screaming like a supersonic jet over the top of RWW and the blog empire GigaOm. Very interesting indeed. Now of course I figured to check the heavyweight class out, shown below, and while TechCrunch still has a sizable lead, CN is east coast stylin’ in the west coast blogosphere over VentureBeat.

What I hope this all means for CN is that they grab some of those millions that are projected for next year’s advertisement dollar. Allen’s blog deserves it as he is like James Brown, the hardest working blogger in the blogosphere today. It shows. The numbers don’t lie.

Technically Speaking, using Alexa or hearing about Alexa being the “defacto standard” or the “pulse” has always had me wondering about stats online.

Full Disclosure: Rex Dixon currently works at Lookery with the former CTO of Compete.com. With that being said, I still give CN big thumbs up for entering 2008 on a high note! Chrysler 300 accessories

The truth is starting to be revealed over on the primaries that TC is hosting. Quite interesting to see that the readers of TechCrunch would have Dennis Kucinich as the Democratic nominee and Ron Paul as the Republican nominee.

I guess the real question of the moment is: How much pull will TechCrunch have on the actual voting public of America? Will TechCrunch, which is still just a blog for those not paying attention, sway the American people to vote what the tech community feels is the valid candidate of our time?

Another interesting point so far is: Why is it becoming apparent (to me at least) that the majority of the mainstream media seems to ignore any coverage of Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul? The only coverage seems to be of Obama, Hillary on the Democratic side and Giuliani, Romney, McCain on the Republican side. It’s almost as if the media is trying to pick who we have next November. The media is trying to have a circus of power over the will of the people.

Now I’m not saying that the will of the people is truly reflected in this TechCrunch experiment, but I am saying that I find it very interesting to see how really uninformed the offline public is. It’s almost like an education on our education system we have here in America. I can bet that a good majority of the people I went to Jr. High and High School with think that the only people running for President (and making it their only choices) are the above handpicked mainstream media darlings on both sides of the political aisle.

Even though I am still lacking my bank card at this time, I’ll keep an eye on this to see if the TC candidates that TC ultimately endorses has any reflection on reality. An interesting experiment so far. I’m more interested in seeing the final results, but what is a bit concerning (to me at least) is that I don’t see as many politically motivated TC readers at this time.

I watched Mike’s ABC news live interview, and with him asserting himself (and rightly so) to tell the uninformed mainstream reporter that he has millions of readers vs 100’s of thousands, I just don’t see the equivalent number of TechCrunch votes/voters. Another lesson in voter apathy perhaps? That could very well be.

Technically Speaking, waiting on FedEx today. home theater

Yes, unbelievable as it sounds, I lost my bank card (ATM) card today. Where else? But at the bank ATM machine! Even this Director of Social Media Content is not perfect. Ironic yes, fun – no. I may be able to juggle publishers, but I can’t remember to hit the “return card” prompt.

So much for my days failures. Now let’s move on to something more important, something that everyone needs to take interest in. While failing to retrieve my ATM card, yes, I at least took the time to take a stab at the vote over on TC.

Politics has always been an interest of mine, and I was actually glad to see Mike take the lead in getting out there and finding out more about these candidates from them directly. It’s just like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. In this case, one of these players will win and be elected on that Tuesday in November 2008.

Which one is the question at hand. As we wind down the 2007 year, it would be a good time to study up the people running as well as how they are going to affect this old thing called the internet. Technology is the only thing going at this time, and we as citizens need to make an informed choice.

Technically Speaking, I hope Mike keeps doing the seesmic, love seeing talent evolve; it’s that musician in me. oxygen concentrators