2009 - The Year in Review

At the start of 2009 we made ten predictions for the year ahead. Join us for the final podcast of the year, where we look back at our predictions and report on how well - or badly! - we did.



MP3 File

Here are the ten predictions we made, with additional reference links for some of them.

1. Blogging will become more common
   More about blogging in Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009 report
2. Strong growth in (on-line) games industry
   Revenue from games sales in Australia were up 8% at the end of Q3 2009.
3. There'll be even more free stuff, and businesses will have to monetize through advertising, subscriptions or premium services
   Past podcast: Free is the new business model
   Past podcast: New media vs news media - will the Internet kill journalism?
4. On-line advertising revenues will fall
5. Everything will accessible via your phone
   BNET panel "2009: The Year of the Smart Phone"
   Mobile Internet to dominate within 5 years
6. Everything will be in The Cloud
   Past podcast: Cloud computing
   Gihan's new Boot Camp www.BuildYourWebSiteInTwoDays.com uses 100% cloud-based software.
7. There'll be more crowdsourcing and collaboration
   Yvonne Adele (one of Gihan's colleagues in Thought Leaders and the National Speakers Association of Australia) is using Twitter for crowdsourcing
8. Continued strong growth in Internet population mainly from developing nations.
   Definitely true in the USA, according to Nielsen Reports
   Smart Company cites a report with some Australian stats
   ComScore reported that the number of Internet users in the Asia-Pacific grew 22% to 484M.
9. We'll have tools to serve lots of social networks at once
10. Social Networking web-sites will become more popular

And we both predicted that Australia won't censor the Internet! But we might get a face-saving watered-down version. This might be the one that we get most wrong! We underestimated the pig-headedness of politicians. The first results of the Internet filtering tests are now in - and, not surprisingly, it hasn't been a big success. But KRudd's government is still going to push ahead with its legislation. Even Google, who is outspoken neutral with its views on content, has weighed in with its opposition to the plan.