2006 predictions

1. Apple will ship two generations of iPods. The first new generation, released in April, will have a satellite receiver built-in. The second will have a low-power FM transmitter built-in.

2. Jason Calacanis will stay at AOL though Easter 2006, and then will resign to spend more time with his family. They are good people, but Jason is an entrepreneur, and AOL is a really big BigCo. After leaving, he’ll continue to blog. Engadget will become a Time-Warner print publication. They’ll briefly use Buzz Bruggeman as a stand-in for Calacanis, and then Chris Pirillo. None of them will have the charisma that Calacanis had. Pirillo will leave AOL to sub for Adam Curry on Sirius, who will take more and more time off from his podcast, and Pirillo’s ratings will eclipse the Podfather’s, who will retire to invent the next media revolution, in obscurity, all by himself.

3. SixApart’s servers will melt down in the first two weeks of the new year, and many times after that in 2006. WordPress.com will implement a one-click import of a TypePad site, just enter your username and password and click Submit. Come back in a few hours and your whole site will be there. Under tremendous pressure from users, SixApart will implement a one-click redirect of your old URL to the new site.

4. Google will make a deal with the Time-Warner movie companies, and start movies.google.com for on-demand distribution over the Internet. Google will learn to live with DRM. Their answer to iTunes will involve loose-coupled relationships with content companies, and a new product called Google Money, basically their version of Paypal with a twist, they will also invent a new currency called The Google, which trades against the dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan. Many small countries in Africa, Latin America and south Asia adopt the Google as their national currency. The Google money website, money.google.com, will list the current Google stock price expressed in googles, of course. They will stop reporting sales and earnings, instead reporting Gross National Product and trade surpluses and deficits. When all this rolls out, Google’s share price crashes, and takes the real estate market in Santa Clara County with it. All of a sudden Dan Gillmor can afford a mansion in Atherton on his teacher’s salary at UC-Berkeley. He becomes Mike Arrington’s neighbor and starts a new subsidiary of TechCrunch.

5. RSS will continue on the growth vector it has been on for the last six years. There will be new applications for RSS as reading lists become widely supported in aggregators, and directories like Technorati produce content in readling list form. Podcasting will be a factor in the 2006 congressional elections in the US, the Democrats will use this medium more effectively than the Republicans at first, but it will quickly even out. There will be moves in Congress to pass laws viewing the use of podcasts as equivalent to commercials, but it will be impossible to place a monetary value on it. More and more RSS will be seen as an advertising medium in itself, like catalogs, newsletters and fact sheets; and less as an advertising-supported medium. The advertising networks that formed in 2005 will wither in 2006, and completely go away by 2007.

6. As 2006 draws to a close, for a fraction of an instant the attention of the entire web will focus on my Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz. The attention will quickly dissipate as we realize that the blogging world wins by default because the archive of the New York Times is not accessible on Google.

7. The New York Times, Harvard University and Yahoo form the new World Outline Foundation, to create an upgrade for the Yahoo directory, with a permanent model of the knowledge of the human species, accessible openly in OPML format. Yahoo modifies their search engine to understand OPML as a native format. When the Times publishes an in-depth article on a subject, the reporter’s notes are organized as an outline and linked into the accumulated knowledge. An ambitious project among universities worldwide is launched, with Harvard’s leadership, to organize scholarly information in publicly accessible OPML. I draft a new coalesced specification for OPML and contribute it without compensation to the WOF.

8. Scoble will appear on Oprah. His book on corporate blogging will top all the best seller lists, his royalties will eclipse his Microsoft salary, but he’ll stay there, because it’s in his blood. Guy Kawasaki bleeds in six colors; in his heart Scoble wants to know where you want to go today. Scoble’s next book, for which he will receive a $2 million advance, will be a collaboration with Douglas Coupland entitled Blogserfs, about the blogging community at Microsoft. Shel Israel will collaborate on a book with Vint Cerf about the downfall of Google.