Deep Jive Interests

So I didn’t think I would get into this kind of thing, but when Pete Cashmore of Mashable nominates you for a meme-ing game, who’s got the stones to say no? Without further ado, here are (some) of my predictions for 2007.

1. Pay Per Blogging Will Survive And Grow: As much as it churns some stomachs to think it, paying bloggers for their posts, opinions, or content will continue unabated throughout 2007. It took hold with deep grassroots in 2006, as marginalized d-list bloggers loved the idea of getting paid to blog. The entire category will, by the end of 2008, be a recognized and, amongst marketers, cheap and legitimate way of farming out grassroots buzz. As the category grows, we’ll see even more marketing companies try to grow a system like PayPerPost and ReviewMe; furthermore, A-list bloggers will continue to beat their chests over how wrong the idea is, not realizing that the reality is a foregone conclusion.

2. News aggregators will Thrive: With the idea that News-is-commodity as never more important, vertical algorithmic aggregators will continue to thrive, intermediating themselves between users and their news source. Although Google News heralded the way, sites like Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite will all survive and thrive in their respective areas. Their growth will be covered by the mainstream media (ironically), and somewhere in the middle of the year, the entire category will explode.

3. Traditional News Organizations, in all their forms, will begin their painful evolution into amedia, social, entity: Newspapers will continue to whither and die at a glacially slow pace; some pioneeres will strike out with interesting crowdsourcing experiments, but they will all find their salvation in embracing change, not fighting it. The next stage in evolution of the news is something that all news organizations will discover, in that it is almost entirely based on a unique voice and brand, that “news” is really a commodity, and that every news organization cannot be defined the original medium that they were born in to. The future of news, for those traditional news outlets, is not JUST blogs, forums, podcasting, crowdsourcing, television, or newspapers — it is, potentially, all of those things together.

4. The Marketing and Pr Industry Will Divide into the “Gets it” and “Doesn’t Get It”. Although marketing and PR textbooks will record Edelman’s historic Wal-Mart flogging gaffe as one of the most public “learning events” of nascent social media marketing, because of the wide disconnect in marketing executives KNOWING that blogging is important, and actually DOING blogging itself, 2007 will continue to see lesser gaffe’s of this kind. Marketers will be divided into two camps: those who still dont’ get it, and try to manipulate, control, and command the message … and a small minority who still try and manipulate social media for their own clients, but who have grown up with social media. As a result, they respect it, and allow a participatory atmostphere in their marketing strategies. Or at least, they will give the appearance of doing so to the point of being convincing enough, thereby avoiding blogospheric backlash.

5. Tagging Games Like This Will Continue: Blogging will continue in many forms; blog networks will quietly survive, more bloggers will wade out of the d-list pool by virtue of talent sometimes, and in others, by sheer persistence. And tagging games like this will help them along, by spreading the link love. And then, in about another few months, there will be a hew and cry about how “tired” these games are, and will die out amongst “a-listers”. Like blog carnivals, tagging games will continue amongst the lower strata of bloggers as they try and link themselves into a good Google Rank, but, like email “forwards”, will never entirely die.

And I guess here is where I nominate a few bloggers of my own, and I guess they’ll be Amit, Aaron, Stacy, and Lance.