John Battelle Assesses His 2004 Predictions

Going back a year John Battelle, author of The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, made some predictions for 2005. Here is a brief list:

1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004.

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools.

6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.

7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel.

9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it's not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8.

10. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind, and has everyone buzzing about how it redefines what's possible in search.

14. All year, Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won't - it's still too early. By the end of 2005, we will just be starting to see traction in the video over IP market and its connection to search. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.

16. Perhaps most recklessly...I will finish my book

John Battelle was pretty close to the mark on most of his predictions. Take a look at how he fared in his article So, One Year Later, How'd I Do?