2008 Predictions

Non-technology blogs will experience their biggest year of growth yet. Both readers and writers are participating more in the blog community. It is now easier than ever to start up a blog. The word blog is becoming mainstream, and the general public is becoming more aware of what a blog is and how they can interact with them. Technorati claims that there are 175,000 new blogs created every day. This number seems pretty high to me (it adds up to 63 million a year), but nonetheless, the blog community is rapidly growing.

2008 will be a breakthrough year for RSS advertising. With the inclusion of RSS readers built into most browsers, people who don’t even know what a feed is are subscribing to feeds. Also, ads do much better when they are fed to a less tech-savy audience.

eBay’s downfall will continue. eBay used to be the goto site when selling or buying an item online. Currently, with the abundance of scams, I feel that eBay is hardly worth the hastle. Here is a great example of one of the problems with eBay. Right now, if I was going to sell an item, Craigslist would be my first option.

Google will be THE website for one stop shopping. Personally I have used google search and mail for a long time and have started to use reader, bookmarks and most recently gears, within the last year. Originally, google competed against all in one portals like yahoo by offering superior search results. Now, they are one themselves but have added more features than any of its competitors, while still having better search results.