What Others Predict for 2006 - and Beyond
In 2006...
"2006 is the year when blogging moves from novelty into the 'utility' phase, where the mere act of blogging is subsumed by what is being published, as well as how to find, use and participate in that information."
Gary Goldhammer, president of Marcom: Interactive
and author of Below the Fold blog
"In 2006, the number of bloggers worldwide will exceed 150 million. The areas of greatest growth in new blogs with large followings will be business and elected political officials."
Robert Scoble, author of the Naked Conversation blog
"[In 2006] we'll see Internet video finally start to gain some serious traction, especially user-generated video."
Erick Schonfeld, editor-at-large at Business 2.0 magazine
"Podcasting will keep growing at a fast rate [in 2006] and it will provide lots of interesting and valuable content to all those connected. A killer tool will become available that will allow podcasts to be easily annotated, referenced and automatically transcribed into text at the click of a button. Also the number of search engines and tools enabling search within the audio portion of any podcast will see major growth."
Robin Good of MasterNewMedia Network News
"Media Communications will continue to evolve and base more on honesty. Look at some of the major news stories of the past year – presidential cabinet members spinning the news, outing CIA agents, the Lincoln Group planting stories in Iraqi papers. People and clients are going to demand a shade more openness and awareness of what agencies are doing on their behalf. We will see one of the last few independents acquired by a global, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for the little guys, the one- and two-person shops. That's because smaller companies will realize it's not about retaining the multi-billion-dollar PR agency unless you're a multi-billion dollar company yourself. The smaller, more-boutique agencies will truly grow and shine in '06."
Peter Shankman, CEO of The Geek Factory and author of the blog PR. Differently
"With the upcoming release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Live, the vast majority of consumers will have an RSS reader for the very first time (in 2006)."
Jason Heller and Paul DeBraccio, Online Media Daily
"Blogs will continue to grow, not just in numbers, but in significance. In many cases in the legal field, bloggers are becoming as trusted as traditional media sources. In 2006, I believe, blogs will also make significant headway in figuring out business models."
Stacey Artandi, vice president, online publishing, at ALM Media
"We'll stop pitching blogs and podcasts and start talking about 'media channels' to clients [in 2006]. The channels can be internal or external. The idea of having your own media channel has got to be appealing to a wide range of organizations that currently have to fight for media space. I think NGOs in Australia will really start to understand the potential during 2006."
Trevor Cook, whose Australian Web log is at Trevorcook.typepad.com/weblog/
"Spending for online video advertising will triple in 2006. Research by the Online Publishers' Association indicates that the appetite for online video content is growing faster than other Internet media, such as podcasts and blogs."
Kevin Normandeau, executive vice president and general manager, online,
at International Data Group's Network World
...And Beyond
"Tens of millions of Americans now have the choice of either fetching that [news]paper – if they can find it – or simply clicking the mouse on their home or office computer and getting most of the same information free." This shift doesn't mean newspapers will disappear overnight. That might take 10 years; it might take 25. But traditional newspapers increasingly will become niche products for the shrinking number of older readers who cling to the pleasure of sitting with a cup of coffee on the back deck on Sunday morning and perusing five to 10 sections of a newspaper.
Don Campbell, lecturer in journalism at Emory University
and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors
"Five years from now, advertisers will be shifting significant amounts of money out of broadcast and into online. It will require much less effort for broadcasters to change their course today by small increments, as opposed to playing catch up five years from now."
Gordon Borrell, chairman, Borrell Communications,
media-strategy firm
