Seeing as everyone else is making a lot of positive predictions for 2008, I have a few of my own that are a little less blue-sky:

1. While the top global web apps begin to become more semantic, South Africa will see the launch of several social media apps that remain well and truly within the Web 1.0 development paradigm, particularly from big corporate and media players. The rationale, some will argue, is that the audience and browser is nowhere near ready for semantic applications and the developer base in SA is too small to warrant a semantic approach to applications. This will turn out to be a fatal error because atrophy will begin to set in in early 2009 and these apps will not have the backing for the redevelopment required to get them on the right level.
2. Blogging will become increasingly fragmented and the good old days where seventy or eighty bloggers rally together around an issue will be a thing of the past. It already is but as personal interests are put above group interests the strength of the community as a whole will be weakened.
3. Social media application developers will try to form an alliance to share knowledge and adopt a policy-level agreement to stop spam and network marketing form polluting their sites, but the importance of this will be lost and several applications will lose their credibility as a result, or get bogged down by internecine fighting within their respective communities
4. Someone is going to be sued for something they say on their blog, and lose. The case will run into 2009 but it will set the precedent that the blogger takes responsibility as an individual and the hosting platform is not liable.
5. RSS will not grow in consumer useage but will grow as a form of interoperability between applications
6. There will be two major investments in tech start-ups or products during the year, but VC will not be flowing freely and South African VCs will continue to invest in offline businesses and research
7. The traditional media will spend a lot of time navel-gazing and there will be murmurs that online newsrooms need to start cutting costs and becoming profit centers
8. The SABC will continue with a poor online presence but earmark budget for a big play in 2009. Web development companies will start licking their lips as the tender process nears and the quotes will be outrageous
9. Some web entrepenuers will feel the squeeze of cash-flow and move into a corporate or media environment
10. Programming skills will remain one of the most scarce and sought-after resources in the country, salaries will continue to rise and several programmers will leave the country, making the situation worse.
11. Online advertising will continue to grow but apathy and a lack of technical know-how in the agencies will stand in the way of a significant explosion in online ad-spend
12. Google will launch local street-level maps, which will prompt a mass of cheesy mash-up applications, few of which are marketed or implemented effectively.
13. Media companies will tighten their embrace of blogging as a story-telling medium and begin to offer payment for bloggers within their community. Rather than making bloggers happy, this will create unexpected tensions that end up in several bloggers seeking their fortunes elsewhere.
14. Jaxon Rice + partners will do something unexpected and very successful.
15. The current flock of Web 2 applications will try to make money and this will change the way the owners evaluate the success of their applications. Some applications will shut down despite having grown during the year because of the scarcity of revenues and the additional pressures of trying to find it. The blog entry will start like this “Today is [insert app name here]’s last day as I have decided to focus my energies on my job and my family”. This is the precise moment when local VCs will have failed our online entrepreneurs but they won’t take any notice.
16. The so-called A-list of SA bloggers is going to split down the middle on some issue and a long-term feud will start to erode the collegiality we saw in early 2007 to the extent that groups of bloggers start to see other groups as competition
17. Corporate involvement in blogging is going to increase then decrease when the novelty wears off and the audience don’t arrive. An ethical scandal may also surface that leaves a bad taste in the mouth for everyone involved.
18. Led Zeppelin will play in South Africa but no-one will remember Stairway to Heaven when they play it. This will lead to booing and spitting. The next day there will be one short blog entry by someone no-one knows. The blogger’s Amatomu ranking will climb from 2546 to 2332 in a day.

Okay, shoot me down.