Early in 2004, I was starting to think that the Web was becoming rather boring. But as the year rolled on, it became a more interesting place again thanks to events like Google’s IPO and all the new competitive energies growing out of Web search, desktop search, weblog’s, podcasting and digital online media.

I have thought all along that the Internet would come back with renewed energy. Indeed, it has done so with energy to spare. Even the 9th Annual Webby Awards for 2005 are going to have a physical awards ceremony again in San Francisco in May. The term Web 2.0 was coined late in 2004 by a successful conference by the same name to describe the Web’s turnaround. Even bloggers are making money blogging and have an awards event. The Web is maturing into a stable platform for its vast future as the home of all human knowledge and communications. The best example of this is Google’s effort in indexing the full text of library books and the Internet Archive. I believe that the Internet of today at the end of 2004 is just a tip of the iceberg for how important the Internet will become to the world in 2005 and beyond.

The predictions that I made in January 2004 largely occurred; most of them were multi-year trends that are continuing into 2005.

Here are my 2005 Global Internet Trend Predictions:

1. MOBILE DIGITAL MEDIA EXPLODES

The growth in the availability of wired and wireless broadband connectivity has really driven the availability of MP3 and Windows Media video and audio file formats. This availability of cheap bandwidth has triggered the rapid growth in content creation and transition of analog content over to digital media formats. The other two factors to impact the rapid growth of available digital content is the recent improvement in media file compression codec’s that have enabled small file sizes for very high quality playback and the rapid release of many inexpensive digital media playback devices. Smart phones and other portable media devices with large SD Cards, micro-hard drive memory and integrated Wi-Fi and high speed cellular data networks will become the primary way people view and listen to digital media in 2005 and beyond.

2. WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY GROWS FASTER

Wireless connectivity in 2005 will continue to grow in ubiquity and speed. Technologies like WiFi and WiMax rapidly evolve and get cheaper and more widely available. WiMax standards are still being established and will offer 30 mile wireless broadband range at double digit megabit speed. 2005 will see WiMax as an established technology standard that we will start to see in the market in 2006 with WiMax Mobile coming in 2007. Cellular data network technologies like CDMA; EDGE/GSM in combination with DSP has the potential to bring ubiquity to wireless data plans for cell phones and smart phones in 2005 and beyond. This is the most significant evolving development in my list of predictions.

3. MOST NETIZENS BECOME DIGITAL CONTENT CREATORS

We are currently seeing an explosion of new content creation going on online from the rapid growth of weblogs and citizen journalism. The New Year will see individuals and companies of all kinds view points and expertise create content online. This content will take the form of audio, video and the written word. The availability of inexpensive content creation and editing software and digital recording hardware will drive this content creation. We will see whole new online media entities formed in 2005 that will make citizen journalism opportunities available to all online citizens. Recommended reading: We The Media by Dan Gillmor.

4. MOBLOGS BECOME ALL THE RAGE

Mobile weblogs really are enabled by my third trend prediction for 2005. Mobile smart phones with powerful processors, memory and wireless broadband will enable digital photos to be taken, digital videos to be made and sent to weblogs and citizen journalism sites for real-time news and event coverage. For more information, visit Moblog Wikipeda Area.

5. MEDIA SEARCH & ELECTRONIC IPTV PROGRAM GUIDES CONVERGE

The New Year will bring us all access to true media search online as digital media finally gets searchable through work being done by Google and other search engines. The indexing will not initially be of the total content, but of extensive metadata and closed caption data. With the recent expansion of metadata via ID3v2, content producers will see increased attention given to encouraging the inclusion of more extensive metadata in media files like mp3’s. Many companies like Google and TIVO will integrate media search with extensive EPG’s or Electronic Program Guides which will finally give us the software tools to intelligently search and find digital media.

6. LOCAL / GEOGRAPHICAL WEB SEARCH

The promise and opportunity of locality-based search has been talked about for years with many companies starting up and then going out of business. The year 2005 will start to bring geo-based search into the range of real usability and value. While we will still be at the very beginning of the growth and development of location based search tools. I believe that 2005 will start to bring together all the features that will make local search valuable to everyday searches. Major brand search resources will rapidly fill out with local resources. In 2005, people learn of the value local search sites. The rapidly growing numbers of small business websites will propel free and paid location-based search listings.

See Yahoo’s Local Search beta, Google Local Search beta and Microsoft’s MSN City Search-based local search service.

7. WEBLOGS BECOME SPONSOR SUPPORTED MAJOR MEDIA SOURCES

The traffic to weblogs is growing as mainstream media draws attention to the importance and profound impact of grassroots weblog journalism. This boom of traffic to weblogs is drawing on the general distrust of the major media and the increasing quality of the people who are blogging online. In 2005, major media reporters and anchors become webloggers. See examples of media related weblogs with sponsors: MSNBC HardBlogger, PaidContent.org, LostRemote.com and AutoBlog.com.

8. EMAIL MAINTAINS “KILLER APPLICATION” STATUS AGAINST INSTANT MESSENGER FOR NOW

It is my prediction that in 2005 the Spam email problem will diminish and netizens rediscover email as the most important way of personal electronic communication. Spam filters will continue to get better at filtering spam and important messages will start getting into the inbox and read again. Many will get tired of and grow impatient with the constant interruptions that occur when using Instant Messenger services.

9. MOBILE WEB AND MOBILE STREAMING MEDIA GROWS

In 2005 we will see continuing growth of the smart phone OS platforms like Windows Mobile, Symbian and PalmSource. These smart phone platform devices are integrating faster processors, more memory, faster Internet connections and web browsers that enable access to the world wide web from millions of smaller color screens. The fast growth in the numbers of small screen smart phones with web access will push the website owners around the world to develop small screen website versions (see WebTalk Mobile Edition). We will also see an accelerated growth in streaming media on smart phones globally as high speed wireless data technologies mature and get greater integration into smart phone devices.

10. EMERGENCE OF UNLIKELY GEEK MEDIA STARS ONLINE

2005 will see the continued emergence of unlikely geek webloggers that gain national and international fame from being a well known blogger. While some of the names I am about to list maybe be unknown. Here are a few like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, and Doc Searls. You can rest assured that these names are not unknown to people who are really into following technology. Here is a list of the Top 100 Weblogs.

Technorati Profile

Yahoo’s online video search offering is very much different than Google. Yahoo is actually searching for current streaming video online and actually linking to the media streams. The big three search companies Google, Yahoo and MSN have all taken quite different paths with video search. All three have mirrored each other up to this point. Video search has some very tough issue around rights that these companies must deal with in providing links to the video content. Google is only looking at broadcast TV content and Yahoo is looking at online video. Microsoft’s MSN is event taking another path. MSN Video is becoming a content aggregator and streamer of major content providers. Also see the MSN Video Download service.

While video is very exciting to search, we are still very early in getting a complete video search engine. I think we are years away from really having a worthy search tool. The big missing piece of the online media pie is audio search.

Technorati Profile

Google Video Search has launched and is another Google Labs Beta project. It is based on keyword search of closed caption data for each TV show. Search results display without links to the actual video segments it is really worthless at getting to actual video. It appears that the only content in the database is major network or cable TV shows. This is not an Internet search of online video content.

You do a search for any keyword and it shows a list of TV programs that had that keyword used in the closed caption feed and then also displays a screenshot from that program. The screen shots are not always consistent with the closed caption text displayed on the right.

It does appear Google wants to get approval to provide a link to the actual video stream, but they are not offering video links at all from what I am seeing in search results.

This is a strong example of how important metadata in media files will become. It is interesting that Google has not launched any audio search product beta yet. Audio is actually harder to index then video. Funny though that may seem, but audio typically does not have much metadata inside the media file to index. This is why podcasters and audio broadcasters need to place metadata (ID3v2 tags) in mp3 files so it is searchable in the future.