Here are my completely baseless blogging/internet-related predictions for 2003:
- This year will sound the death knell for the Meme. All the cheap content creators (weekly impersonal questionaires and personality tests) will go out of style and people will be forced to actually post stuff that won’t be seen in a million other places.
- This year will see another giant explosion in the sheer number of people who blog. With the big ISP’s like AOL and MSN soon to be offering blogging platforms, there will be an exponential growth in daily content to read and/or ignore.
- As all these new folks come into the blogosphere (jeez, I hate that word), we’ll see a mass departure of the second and third generation bloggers who have now been blogging for a year or two now will either get bored or they’ll find they have nothing else to say.
- With all this new content, people will stop visiting sites directly. They’ll still go to the photoblogs, and design sites, but for text-only blogs, people will begin using an aggregator (like NetNewsWire). This will stymie the folks who want to start making money from their blogs as they’ll need to take into account the fact that people get to their content from another application.
- Major sites will start incorporating blogs as either an incentive for signing up, or as a way to build their brand (think Salon, only crappy – “Get Your Coke Blog Now!”). Oh, please spare us.
- Several high-profile bloggers will “sell out” and go corporate either through corporate sponsorship or incorporation into a larger site (like Slate or Salon), giving false hope to all of us marginally talented/interesting bloggers that someday we’ll hit it big through our blogs.