Here is Part 2 of my New Media Trends and Predictions for 2009. In this report I look at major trends while I try to anticipate key changes and the type of innovation taking place around the world of new media communication and professional web publishing.

While yesterday I have covered web and video publishing, content creation, newsmastering, online advertising, internet marketing, in Part 2 my focus is on social media tools, technologies and trends, X-events, online collaboration, P2P and Open Source, learning and education.

I have also reserved a little section to share some of my personal and editorial plans for 2009 as some of you have been asking me about them.

I hope you will enjoy what I am seeing.

Here all the details:

2009 Media Predictions – Part 2

(Part 1)
by Robin Good

Social Media and Social Media Marketing

In 2009 social media will keep thriving. Innovation will come in the form of further opening up of the existing major social destinations to gather and aggregate any and every aspect of your digital presence.

The Open Stack, OpenSocial, OpenID, and a few other tech acronyms characterize within social media a strong trend toward adopting and using open standards. For example, OpenID is a profile identifying web address that can be used to login to any site that supports it. OpenSocial instead solves the need to utilize any application on any site on the Web, while keeping the same people relationships and profile data you already own elsewhere.

For some indication of where this is heading you may want to look into the Open Social session moderated that Marc Canter that took place at the recent LeWeb08 in Paris.

My take on this front is that what you will see happening is the de-centralization of most social destinations. The new open social applications and features you will see in 2009 will allow you to make them local to your own site and community, while remaining internetworked with all social profiles on the many social networks out there.

“Even if Facebook is currently the shiny place, if developers can write and application once and put it loads of places, Facebook will be marginalised.“

(Source: LeWeb08 The Social Stack – Computer Weekly)

Instead of having to go to Facebook or Linkedin to talk to your network of contacts and communities of interest, you will be able to bring all of this on your own site and blog.

Ning

To those pointing to Ning as the already existing example of such an approach, I reply that while certainly a useful community building tool, Ning still lacks the features and traits that would make my ideal community platform. Despite all of the reasonable excitement around it for being the first distributed community building platform, I find its content organization, navigation and content accessibility very poor, as much as its search function, discussion capabilities and blog functionality. Ning insists on being a hosted solution and unlike WordPress, it doesn’t get the support of a large community of developers in getting new features and extensions to its users. I need something much better than that. And in 2009 you will see exactly this.

Google itself, with the recent launch of its FriendConnect social application may be the one introducing some very innovative services and features in the next few months. The MyBlogLog-like interface you can already activate on your site, may likely be the gateway to a new way to participate and join in with people of your similar interests through grassroots, web site-bound but also highly portable, distributed and de-centralized communities.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the powerhouses of such profound new changes in the way we will use social media, and if you are serious about leveraging the opportunities that the social network can open up for you, if you haven’t yet, you will need to start using it and discover its huge potential.

Make no mistake though, like many have done. Social media does NOT mean that all conversations now need to be in the open and that you need to tell everyone what you are up to drink at your next stop in your nightly wonderings. That is one way to use it, but not the only one. Twitter and other similar emerging social communication and conversational tools provide the opportunity to create trusted networks that can enable the fastest and most effective way to share interesting news and stories, light years ahead of any other traditional news service.

I myself have a problem with the shallow conversations. I steer away from them as much in real life as in the virtual one. They consume me lots of time and often I find them inconsequential, preposterous and characteristic of the lazy man’s approach to getting noticed in public. On the other hand I am thankful to these tools when they help me be in touch and virtually side-by-side with my real friends and contacts, the ones I really care about. I like to know what some of them are up to, I enjoy reading a bit of their private life and I run to check the references and article suggestions they put out. I am not there for the conversation per se or for having a conversation with anyone who jumps at me with a questions. I am there mostly to learn and pick up rare gems, tech gossip, insider buzz and tips from all of my networks. I am there to help out those asking questions I am passionate about and to reach out for ideas and suggestions from people who think differently than I do.

Problem is people have taken this social media game as a competition for who has the most followers and in the rush many have not really made sense of what they are using this tool for. My take is that, depending on who you follow, going to 200-300 people you follow is the present limit, especially if you want to be able to really follow what these individuals have to say.

If you look at my Twitter channel you will see that I have about ten times more people than follow me than the people I have chosen to follow. This is only because, differently than what I do on Facebook for example, where I like to be open and friendly with anyone who wants to do so, I select very carefully who I chose to follow. I frankly don’t buy into this idea that if you follow me I have to follow you back, and therefore I make no difference whether you have got 6500 followers or 24. What I look at is what kind of things and information you are sharing with me and how valuable for me these are. The more useful and interesting stuff you have to share the more likely it is that I will follow you. And, given the above, if you are small and unknown with very few followers, it is even more likely that I will follow you as I don’t like to get tips and breaking news from the same circle of insiders, who just pass around the same stories over and over again.

So 2009 will be definitely be a year of maturation for both Twitter as a service as well as for its users who will grow a lot in understanding its best uses and applications. In this direction, in 2009 you will see some truly amazing services built on top of Twitter which will help you manage more effectively the stream of twits coming from your different networks and relationships.

Social Media Marketing

The big discovery in 2009 for many companies will be that you cannot really engineer social media use inside an organization. You can facilitate it, support it, make it emerge, but you fundamentally need to let your own most passionate people find their own best ways to make use of this new conversational tools.

Private social networks, vertical communities, decentralized and portal social media solutions are the keywords for 2009. You will see a lot of new names in this space.

Better metrics. Everyone is talking about them, and there is indeed a wealth of valuable information to extract from the metadata available around your social activity. It is not so much how many followers, friends or contacts you have, but what these people do with the news and stories you share with them. Do they follow your tips and click on them? Do they pass those items on to their trusted friends? or… what kind of people are those following your friends? Who do they influence? What types of information topics characterizes your listeners? And your sources? How good are you at breaking news early for your network of followers?

Finding the best questions and creating tools that enable you to see the big picture under this social media universe could prove extremely valuable in understanding influencers and opinion leaders beyond mere popularity numbers.

Social Shopping

2009 marks the first large scale entry of the social shopping metaphor into the mainstream online eCommerce. Beyond what Amazon and eBay have long shown to be the value of recommendations and customer feedback, we are now moving into a year in which you will start benefiting more directly from the advice and recommendations of your own very network.

If until today you have relied on the opinions of some unknown guy posting in a forum or commenting under a blog post, in 2009, you will start to see that your own network of contacts can actually help you find a trusted solution to your plumbing needs as well as recommending you the next camcorder you may want to buy, with much greater effectiveness and reliability than any other traditional approach.

Two are the key things happening here:

1. New services and eCommerce features will further facilitate your ability to rate, provide feedback, review and recommend any product or service you purchase online.
2. The integration of your social network and presence with many of the online eCommerce destinations will allow you to get advice and recommendations from the people you know and trust rather than from just another user.

“Although customer reviews are nothing new on popular eCommerce sites like eBay and Amazon, in most cases, consumers use the critiques from people they don’t know. Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust.

As a result, expect to see eCommerce widgets and applications appear in popular social networks, as well as when visiting existing eCommerce sites the ability to login with your Facebook or Google identity. As an example, next time I’m shopping for a laptop, not only will I see reviews from editors and consumers, I will now know which one of my friends uses an Apple computer, and what they think of it.”
(Source: Jeremyah Oywang)

Social Reputation

Of all things social, social reputation is going to be the one having the most impact on your personal life and on your opportunities to access new project and work offers. In very simple words, what it is going to happen, is a strong shift from personal credentials based on certifications and tests to the emergence of personal reputation profiles built around the spontaneous comments, evaluations and reference comments of your previous team-mates, co-workers, customers and employers.

I see individual persons going around unchecked and deeply lying about their experiences, references and career, to get where they would like to be. How can you still trust a CV or resume and not find out directly by those who met and worked with that person who that person really is. How can you trust that someone mischivious, lazy or outright dishonest will list such personal traits in his CV presentation and why would you trust unchecked credentials when you have the opportunity to spend a little time to find out the truth?

Habit… and misunderstanding that the world is rapidly becoming a different place when it comes to evaluating people. Just like for technology products and services, you don’t go to check the official marketing leaflet of a new camcorder to find out whether it is the one you are looking for. You research, compare models and you ask lots of questions to your friends and competent contacts. You search on Google for your camcorder model and see what others have been saying about it. You go to your friend at the corner electronics store and you ask him what his experience and advice is based on his customers feedback and store sales. That’s how you chose and select people.

Why shouldn’t it be the same for such critical choices as selecting your partner or new executive marketing manager?

This is why getting your hands dirty now with social media, living the idiosyncracies of this new universe, and exposing yourself to the many conversations that the Web provides is a good path to prepare yourself for the future.

As your certificates and diplomas will lose more and more of their value what will count most is what people out there think of you and what they are willing to say about you when asked to. This is why is increasingly less important to have a degree or master in a discipline, and it is much more important WHO you have been working, interacting and exposing yourself to and WHAT kinds of things you have produced that others can see.

If you say you have been here and there, have done this and that, but then the digital tracks say something different, you suddenly become a self-referential puppet that can survive and get work only within protected circles of friends and allies.

Until today, if you lied, misrepresented or concealed something about your past experiences and credentials, it would be only you and someone else to be sharing that information. Now if you do this in public, by replying to public questions in videos and interviews by hiding or misrepresenting facts to your advantage, not only you run a much bigger risk of losing your credibility but this possible discovery, will not remain a private matter that you can easily forget about.

To gain solid social reputation you need to transparent and accessible. The more you hide or cover up who you really are, to defend or protect your ideal projected persona (who you think you would like to be) the more this will show true, and while your friends and close mates may keep smiling at you, the opportunities to become a respected reference and a trusted source to those beyond it will likely dwindle.

For companies, 2009 will mean the year in which they can start to have a meaningful social media presence. For the most part, companies who have embraced social media so far have done so in a very conservative and somewhat incorrect way. They have landed into social media land bringing in their traditional approaches and behaviours to communications, PR and marketing, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do to be effective inside social media.

The wrong strategy approach to use in such situations is the one of placing your best PR and marketing people on these tasks, while who should really ride this opportunity are your best and most passionate workers in the operating lines. These are the people that your customers and suppliers want to see and become friends to.

Online Identity and Your Distributed Social Profile

The emergence of a centralized Personal Social Identity Profile.

2009 should also rescue us from the bad situation we have fallen in when it comes to our profiles on social networks and the need to maintain and create separate ones for each new place you sign-up to, with the same frustrating issue affecting also our network of contacts which we have to slowly rebuild across each and every new social community we enter.

What you are likely going to see happen this year is the advent of a new tools and features which will allow you to create a centralized and very comprehensive social profile of yourself and of your network contacts and which will then allow you to share and submit selected parts of it to each of the new web communities and social services you will later join.

This will save you a ton of time and frustration, while reducing friction in adopting or testing out new services and tools.

X-Events

In 2009 you will see some of my original ideas BOUT X-Events become reality. In 2008 already a handful of companies has started to challenge the X-event puzzle by developing tools and projects around the fundamental idea of creating resources to facilitate the creation and realization of events that went beyond their physical occurrence.

X-events are strongly tied to social media development and the ability of individuals to meet and exchange openly across multiple and diverse communities and social networks. X-events (extended events) can provide an ideal platform to extend the relationship building process that live events are built for as well as to fuel a much larger and lasting conversations.

Bantora, is one such company, which working and extending the original X-events paradigm is trying to build the first true X-Event platform.

The trend toward extended type of events will give way also to a new approach to virtual conferences: the distributed event. Who said that to have a powerful and memorable event we all need to go to one site or location and do everything there? Can’t it be that the event organizers launch a theme, or a set of topics, and then aggregate and list distributed events taking place at this or that site or blog as components of the actual event?

Say for example that an organization has organized an event that you are very interested in, but it is on the other side of the world and you have not been invited to speak. Organizers could set up an extended event section where they list and aggregate distributed events and presentations complementing the event, that either take place on a platform provided to all those uninvited presents who want to contribute their ideas, or which take place directly on the site and presentation locations chosen by the presenter. Such setup would allow for much greater participation and contributions from any people, while clearly requiring a small dedicated team to manage and organize the output generated by the extended event.

Open Source

It is the first time I am including “open source” as a relevant new media theme to be included in these new media trends and predictions. From WordPress to BlogBridge, open source tools and applications are increasingly part of my work life and I am increasingly strong supporter of their benefits and advantages over traditional commercial applications.

A full professional web publisher toolkit could be made entirely of open source tools like these:

• CMS – WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle
• Audio production – Audacity
• Multimedia playback - VLC, Miro
• Recording, conversion and streaming solution for audio and video – FFmpeg
• RSS Aggregation and NewsMastering – Blogbridge
• File Sharing – Limewire and Shareaza
• Video Sharing – Ourmedia – Internet Archive
• Screencasting – CamStudio
• Image editing – Gimp
• Multimedia presentations – Impress
• Instant Messaging - Audium, GAIM, Miranda
• Online Collaboration (real-time) – DimDim
• Operating System – VirtualBox (makes you run a Windows PC inside your Mac)

and the list could go on.

If you believe that Free Software and Open Source ideas can help you create better foundations for the future, adopting, contributing to and promoting the use of such technologies can give some tangible force to your ideals.

While this isn’t a prediction at all, I expect to see a growing trend of open-source supporters become more vocal in evangelizing the true benefits of their tools, rather than isolating and separating themselves from the open conversation. Just like for the Linux world, I see a need for less self-referential preaching and for a more humble, open and friendly attitude toward popularizing all of the benefits of this great co-operative approach to life and work.

P2P Peer to Peer

2009 will be the year in which new P2P tools and applications will be released. P2P will keep growing and getting more traction and adoption. From file sharing, to content distribution P2P technologies offer a wealth of benefits and opportunities that have not yet been understood and used by those commercial entities who would most benefit from them.

Peer to peer technologies are also a natural extension of social collaborative networks and of the need to de-centralize from big corporate hands the monopoly of publishing and sharing information.

I also predict that new attempts at creating parallel P2P internets, or alternative support networks that would connect individuals even if and when the established Internet would not be in the position to respond as needed. There are already working examples of such parallel networks in existence and there are bright individuals studying and working on ways to make this possible.

Online Collaboration

Online collaboration technologies from web conferencing to persistent collaborative spaces have yet a long way to go to reach some kind of maturity and 2009 will offer once again an opportunity for new ones to jump in and for many of the established players to deeply innovate and improve on their existing good work.

The classic, all-round web conferencing platforms have been given lots of way to new, smaller, faster and easier to use collaboration tools. The past trend has been from large and complex to small, modular and easy to use solutions. Prices for big, top brand web conferencing and collaboration services have been dropping all along, and, from what I see, will need to drop some more to be able to compete with this growing group of smaller and highly performing collaboration tools. If you have no idea of who I am talking about give a look to the over 200 collaboration tools that have been mapped by over 150 participants at my live session at LearningTrends 2008.

I am not expecting to see a decrease in the number of tools listed in that collaboration map 12 months from now.

You are indeed going to see more and better conferencing, collaboration and live presentation tools come to market, as there is a growing demand for such tools, and existing solutions are often still too clunky, unreliable or difficult to be used by non-technical people.

Innovation and new collaboration tools you will see in 2009 will include:

• One-click screen-sharing with people in your social network
• One-click voice chatting with anyone in your social network
• Powerful dedicated online web seminar services
• Free multi-party videoconferencing
• New very innovative presentation tools
• Audio-casting technology allowing anyone to hold an online audio conference
  (Skypecasts has closed and existing solutions are somewhat clunky and not so reliable)
• Visual presentation and whiteboarding tools
• Integration of mind-mapping as standard tools inside typical whiteboards
• Recording and sharing / republishing features of your collaboration sessions
• Much greater usability and very cool and easy to use interfaces

The ideal collaboration architecture is modular and highly flexible. You subscribe to a service and activate the collaboration features you need on-demand. Such architecture is embedded and contextual to the production and office tools you use daily, much like Google will be doing in 2009 thanks to its integrated web-based approach.

The winning business model is free basic services, with premium paid accounts getting advanced, business-oriented features. Period. Free trials are a thing of the past. Instead now collaboration providers will move to proactively reward customers who will invite and extend the customer base by providing them with free or extended account plans. This also is a winning strategy.

Technology-wise Adobe Flash is going to be the fundamental technology behind many of these new tools. Whether you like it or not Flash is now the best portable multimedia publishing technology out there, supporting text, audio, video and interactive collaboration right from within its basic engine. Its upcoming and announced capabilities in managing different bandwidth streams requests intelligently as well as its promising auto text transcription abilities may prove to provide huge benefits for anyone using them.

The Ongoing Virtual Conference Project

In 2009 an ongoing virtual conference venue will open in hundreds of speakers and topics will be explored both live and in a recorded format. This will be kind of a YouTube of live powerful presentations, and while anyone can sign-up to present in the available slots, it is the public who decides who is featured and who should get the most promotion and visibility.

This non-stop conferencing stage will likely offer multiple thematic channels, and the opportunity for anyone with good ideas and an ability for presenting them to do so in front of a potentially unlimited audience. Just like on YouTube.

Adobe or Microsoft could be ideal sponsors of such an idea but it may be that a small company with a quicker ability to move could steal this opportunity from the one of these big names. Better yet an academic institution could have its way in organizing this idea, with the sponsorship of one of those big names providing the basic platform and with the public goal of creating a unique venue for cultivating knowledge, culture and ideas of all kinds.

I am confident also that in 2009 online collaborative approaches and new tools will keep showing up also in other important areas of the media universe such as music production and performance, live video / television production and film-making, news reporting, news investigation, news production and newsroom teamwork.

Education and Learning

As I have written elsewhere, 2009 will see the raise of independent professional educator. This is the individual, who without the requirement of having an official certification, is willing to share his know-how or skills with others according to the terms and conditions sHe establishes.

There have been many people doing this on the Web already, either moved by genuine educational motives, by marketing approaches or by the desire to simply share what they had just discovered for themselves. What changes now is a rapidly increasing awareness that those capable of doing this, whatever the real of their knowledge is, will become increasingly useful and in-demand by others.

So, it is not so much what you know, but how much of what you know can you actually share and teach to others effectively?

Knowing things per se, having lots of information in your head without having the ability to put it into useful practice is going to have less and less value in most professional endeavours. What will be increasingly valued instead will be your ability to search and find resources, tools and relevant information on any topic just-in-time, when you will need it.

New tools and services to support such emerging new role are going to appear in 2009. Good initial examples of these are new web services like Wiziq and BuddySchool which provide anyone with a platform for sharing, presenting and teaching to others with their preferred method and approach.

Certifications and Tests

Certification and tests are going to lose value progressively. What will increasingly count is what you have done and what other people say of you in one way or another.

What university you have attended and what score you have graduated with are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as the ability to be able to confront brand new problems and issues, being able to collaborate efficiently with peers, having the skill to communicate clearly and effectively your ideas have become much more important assets than the number of years you have spent studying.

Who you know, who you have worked with, and who is willing to recommend and reference your skills are the strategic assets you should start cultivating more in 2009.

Test and certifications measure your ability to answer pre-determined questions and to see whether you have properly memorized information about something.

Tests are very bad at measuring how well you will perform in a real-life situation and this is why i think they are a fundamentally bad strategy to build our future. By training our kids not to learn how to manage complexity and issues but to guess well in advance of time what the questions at the exam are going to be we dumb down all of their creative possibilities and we certify well ahead of time their inability to be able to cope with the world of complexity and fast change we live in.

What I Will Do in 2009

For one, I have decided that in 2009 I will want to make greater sense of where things are going by video interviewing those that see a bit ahead of everyone else – lots of video interviews and analysis of how others are doing things is going to be a central theme of MasterNewMedia in 2009. Be your own boss and how others have been successful at achieving it is going to be the underlying theme driving this extended video series.

As already announced in the first part of this report I am launching a new MasterNewMedia design right this month (a small preview was showcased yesterday as well) while still engineering the best way to bring Robin Good’s international community of followers and fans to life. Unhappy with existing traditional forum solutions and with the first community building tools available now. I am pretty sure though that soon enough I will be provided with the technology I need to realize this ideal.

As I see it this would be a mashup between what I can do via blog comments, a forum, a community platform like Ning, a localized Seesmic, a community oriented version of Twitter, all packaged as a portable, distributed Facebook-like service to create a rich, and well organized community space that can exist both on my site as well as any other place where I or others will want to replicate it.

On the video front I am going again to bring a live video show to everyone, and focusing on web publishing as my key focus area.

In the last year I haven’t been able to do as much as I had desired on this front due to many technical connectivity issues at my studio location here in Rome. I need a fast and reliable connection no matter what it costs, and I need someone that is properly skilled to reconfigure and upgrade my small studio network so that there are no bottlenecks or data loss. My bet is that we kill the bull right away and that this will give me some too long awaiting opportunities for sharing and helping other online publishers out.

In 2009 I will also experiment with the launch of some information products and learning services again connected to my professional web publishing focus and I will keep myself on the lookout for new candidates to my new media publisher internship program (for more info see here).

I guess there would be a lot more to talk and say about what is coming next… but for the time being I leave it here.

Your feedback, comments, tips and suggestions are always welcome.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 1st, 2009 as “New Media Trends And Predictions 2009: What Independent Web Publishers Should Expect – Part 2“.

Here my new media predictions for 2009: what to expect when it comes to new media, professional web publishing and learning, collaboration and social media? Find out everything I see coming across these key areas in this two-part report opening today.

Photo credit: Giancarlo Mazzaro – 7th Floor

I have prepared this report, which gets published every year end (here my 2008 new media predictions Part1 and Part 2), by focusing on what I think you, my reader, are most interested in knowing: what a professional new media publisher needs to know.

The contents and topic areas I have decided to include are particularly interesting to those who are involved in media, communication, marketing or education and it is directed primarily at non-technical individuals who are passionate about communicating effectively with new media and who want to know ahead of time what awaits them next.

My look at future trends on these fronts is a personal one. I don’t claim to be an expert in these fields, but I spend loads of time experimenting and working in them, and therefore I develop my own opinions about what is going to be happening next.

These below are the new media areas I will analyze for my 2009 predictions which I have divided into two parts. Part 1, the one you are reading now, which is devoted to online publishing, marketing and advertising, video and net television, digital imaging, visual communication and site design, and Part 2, tomorrow, dedicated instead to social networks and social media, identity, future events strategy, learning, education, online collaboration.:

Here all the details… and have a great 2009!

2009 Media Predictions – Part 1

If you are an online web publisher, a pro, or a would-be one, what I am covering here below are the areas that I believe you should pay most attention to in the upcoming 12 months. I expect again all of these areas to show lots of activity, announcements and the release of new tools. Since there are over twenty web publishing publishing-related areas I personally follow, I am structuring these 2009 trends and predictions reports in two parts.

The first part today covers essentially web and video publishing, visual communication and site design, marketing and advertising trends, while Part 2, to be published tomorrow, January 1st, will cover social networks and social media, the future of events, learning, education, online collaboration.

As in most of the areas I analyze here, while I am not an insider in any, my position of online publisher and external observer allows me at times to notice things that may not be so obvious and evident to those working in my same direction.

These are the ones that I feel are going to be most interesting for online web publishers in 2009:

Online Advertising

1) Average online ad prices will be falling. Here’s why:

“The Internet advertising market, like all markets, responds to changes in supply and demand. In the current recession, demand for advertising is likely to decrease. At the same time, supply of online inventory, page views, is continuing to increase.

Social networks and other social media sites in particular are creating masses of new inventory.

As a result, the price of online advertising will continue to fall in 2009.“

2) Advertising markets are expanding

“The US market represents about half of all online advertising, which is partly what makes monetizing international traffic so difficult.

Building up direct ad sales teams (and networks) internationally will partially help to bridge the gap, but this will not be enough.

….in Asia direct monetization models (i.e. selling things directly to users) have proven to be a better business model than advertising.

U.S. companies will need to understand and embrace the direct monetization models that have worked well overseas, principally mobile monetization, premium subscriptions models and digital goods models based on selling greater functionality, scarcity or status.”

(Source: Consumer Internet Predictions 2009 – by Lightspeed Venture Partners)

Check out also this recent video in which Google’s Vint Cerf explains how informational advertising meets the social network in 2009:

When writing about online advertising future it is a little harder for me to separate what I would want to see from what it’s going to take place. As many others, I personally feel that traditional advertising is losing more and more ground in terms of effectiveness and that the winning new front is the one of highly targeted, contextual advertising both via established media venues, but more and more via smaller and highly targeted content outlets (blogs) and via communities, forums and social media venues.

If online advertising prices keep going down like they have in the last few months, a few good things are likely going to happen:

1) Those that will keep spending will try to target their marketing messages in the most effective way possible.

2) Banner-like CPM advertising will be increasingly ineffective and albeit inexpensive it will not provide tangible benefits to neither advertisers nor publishers.

Monetization via Google AdSense

I know you will think I am crazy, but I really think that in 2009, AdSense will become a superperforming money making machine for a good number of online web publishers.

Thanks to the long-awaited marriage between AdSense and Analytics now web publishers can dip into the hard data they were looking for to understand what their readers click that makes them money. This is pretty revolutionary from my personal viewpoint and I would expect that for those who have enough skill or resources to study and analyze in depth the wealth of this data there will be an ocean of opportunities to improve their AdSense-based revenue stream.

Under these circumstances, the use of heavy A/B testing to find best placement and ad style as well as the optimization of targeted ad placement opportunities for advertisers interested in specific pages or sections of your site are likely the two most valuable strategic actions you can plan on taking during the coming year.

Search-SEO

What to expect?

The world of search is under heavy transformation and 2009 will positively be bringing new surprises, features and new search tools. What appears as irreversible is the fact that search engines, Google first, are going to increasingly value your choices and clicks as a reference value to serve relevant results for your queries.

After links and PageRank, your actual attention and behaviour patterns are going to increasingly influence the results that Google and others are going to serve you. This is especially true for Google, who, by monitoring via Analytics, Adsense and AdWords can now see your site behaviour from all of the most critical viewpoints, and is therefore in the ideal position to decide whether and when your content is relevant as a reading and / or advertising destination.

What SEO strategies to put in place for 2009?

Video and conversational media marketing, via forums and social communities will be among the most effective ways to keep your content visible inside major search engine result pages.
That is: if you want to populate search results for your specific niche your presence must be solid and well spread across diverse media outlets.

Adding therefore the likes of Twitter, Friendfeed or of a dedicated Facebook group or Knol page are going to be fundamental requirements for all professional web publishers.

The rest, what you should know already quite well, remains all valid and useful: titling, linking, quality content, avoiding bad practices and so on.

The new interesting thing about link juice and PageRank, is that now you can be a lot more efficient about where and how you hand out PageRank to others even if, like me, you like to heavily promote other sites and news and offer plenty of reference links inside your articles. By utilizing tools like Apture, you can now provide valuable links and multimedia references, that keep your reader on your site and do not dilute your link juice across too many different sites. This by itself, especially if the Apture model catches on and other competitors move into this area, is a major shift for SEO and for delivery additional value while improving SEO benefits to any site.

Ad Management and Optimization

Ad optimization and ad management platforms will increase in number and featrures offered. This is a fast growing area for online independent publishers and the need to manage and coordinate in an easy and efficient way all of your advertising inventory, from AdSense to your personal direct advertisers is increasingly felt.

2009 may actually see the crowning of OpenX as one of the best solutions in this area for independent web publishers, with many other contenders, including YieldBuild, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project as well as Google own not so easy to use powerful Ad Manager fighting for a piece of this pie.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing tactics get wide adoption.

2009, at least in my eyes, may be the year in which businesses of all kinds, not just how-to-make-money-on-the-internet guys, will start leveraging many online marketing tactics and strategies while extracting the best parts of these and making them less extreme and artificially hyped.

As a matter of fact, sales letters, squeeze pages, scarcity triggers, identification and social proof are all great marketing components that deserve to be popularized and put to use by a much larger number of online businesses. The key difference we will see is how effective these marketing techniques can be even when used in a more sober, credible and professional looking fashion, and how much more they can outperform their traditional counterparts when mixed in with the right doses of common sense web 2.0 and social media marketing savvy.

New Advertising Agencies?

I don’t know whether 2009 will be the year that this happens, but I know it is about time that it does. Independent web publishers need a new kind of small advertising agency that leverages groups of high quality, tight focus, strong community building blogs to sell highly targeted advertising opportunities to small and medium sized advertisers that match their ideal audiences.

Outside of a very few and rare exceptions I am increasingly amazed at the size of the untapped market for direct advertisers that high quality small sites and independent blogs are leaving on the table for lack of resources and time. We have web-based self-service advertising outlets, we have auction-style ad clearinghouses, we have AdSense-AdWords and its many counterparts, but we do not have a group of small advertising agencies willing to sell marketing, branding and sponsorhsip to specific sectors.

The Google competition is too strong and it is very hard to go and convince traditional advertisers of the benefits of new media marketing.

Then it may very well be that this is the wrong way to look at things and that the future is all about small publishers rolling up their sleeves and setting up their own personal ad management system and small direct marketing team. Given the economic times, this may the very best way to go for independent publishers in the next 12 months, next to their already established revenue channels.

Professional Web Publishing

2009 will see the establishment of automatic web site builders that go, in terms of usability, features and cost of maintenance well beyond blogs and personal publishing tools we have seen so far. There have been a number that have already surfaced in 2008 but given the premises I think we are going to see a lot more interesting ones coming out this year.

Most of the existing solutions are fully hosted services and based on the past approach to publishing, this would normally appear as something reserved only for the novice and beginners. But as we move more and more to a cloud-based access to all of our services and data it makes sense that we may be looking at a lot more hosted professional solutions, than do away with the classical equation, professional site requires dedicated server and publishing software running on it. 2009 may likely bring the confirmation signs that this is indeed the road we are headed to.

At LeWeb08 I was truly impressed with the work of Czech automatic site builder webnode.com, one of the winners of the startup competition, and I can’t wait to experiment using it as an affiliate partner in 2009 to give voice and a publishing platform to those people in my community network who are not geeks.

Content Creation

Content creation and syndication tools will keep increasing in variety and use and adding content of whatever kind to your blog page will become as easy as clicking and dragging stuff over your desired page destination.

Automatic website builders will give a hard time to WordPress and other traditional blog publishing platforms.

A serious quality service that will provide automatic WordPress site installation and customization will become available. This is the single most frequent request that would be pro web publishers have. Who can install and customize me my WordPress site.

New tools that will pull in different types of content from multiple sources, allowing you to create related stuff boxes or complementary info sections, will become more sophisticated and will allow even small individual bloggers to add lots of quality content to their articles.

External content gets to be visited in place. That’s right, differently than what it used to be until now, you are not going to be sending as much people around the web by providing great links to content destinations not on your own pages, as new technologies provide increasingly the ability for that external content and resources to be displayed right within your content pages via pop-up windows and other effective on-the-page visual solutions.

(for some great examples please see MasterNewMedia review of Apture)

They key point to pay attention to on this front, is that the new content creation, aggregation and referencing tools that will have the most appeal will be the ones which will allow for the editor to play a strategic role in selecting, sorting, and cleverly juxtaposing and grouping content units contextually and according to the editorial focus of their site.

Therefore I am calling 2009 the year that will see the birth of content creation and publishing tools that will be at the intersection of where Apture, Splashcast, Iterasi and Mixwit/Muxtape are and have been.

It is not just the ability to aggregate, find and republish that interests online media publishers but specifically the ability to add editorial value to existing content out there, by acting as curators, compilation masters, news djs or content mash-uppers, something that has been too often dismissed in the past as having no value.

The opposite is becoming true. To create extreme value you need not create new content. Greatest value sits in having the ability to find great, unknown, disconnected, content pearls and to bring together in editorially effective ways.

Beyond the sheer quantity of content published, differences between popular independent sites and traditional media web outlets will sharply decrease, with each side increasingly borrowing ideas and solutions from the other part.

As a matter of fact I dare to say that some of the most successful blogs and independent sites will be those that will most effectively mix-in big online media solutions into their approach, while traditional media web sites who will integrate typical blog and social media solutions may also see a greater appreciation by those already fluent in the digital universe.

News Aggregation and Newsmastering

I was extremely happy to attend the Gillmor Gang session at LeWeb08, as it was rich of insightful exchanges. Among these, Gabe Rivera, the wizard of Oz behind technology news aggregator Techmeme, stated something I have been vouching for much before Techmeme even existed: newsmastering, that is the work of aggregating and republishing selected news according to a specific theme / focus or topic must be the fruit of human editor. Yes, you can definitely take advantage of automated news aggregation and filtering technologies but the last vote on which stories should go up on your newsradar should be reserved only to the newsmaster. Yes, crowdsourcing and bottom up network votes and suggestion can further help uncover gems, but to me, nothing beats the result one skilled one human editor can produce, when not delegating to algorithms or followers their ability to choose what is really worth looking at.

Here is Gabe Rivera from LeWeb08 stating exactly this when asked if the perfect algorithm for a news aggregation service could ever be found.

NewsMastering: Gabe Rivera On Why A Human Editor Is Better from RobinGood on Vimeo.

Morale of the story: the art of newsmastering has yet to catch on with greater strength and 2009 will keep seeing growth of evangelism, tools and adoption of this content filtering and republication approach. By all means this will become integral part of news making for both mainstream media and small independent publishers everywhere.

Extend now the same concept to any other digital media format beyond news: video, social bookmarking, clippings, audio, presentations, social conversations and so on. The more content gets to be produced in any of these formats the larger the need for someone to search, aggregate and select the most relevant items. Obviously this can be done in an infinite number of ways depending on what is the community focus you are doing this for and the editorial style you want to maintain.

The role of the DD digital distiller, or CC content curator is a natural conseuqence of the above, and while these terms may not be the best ones to capture the idea they are for me now the simplest way to describe this new emergent media producer role.

There have been a few services bringing forward this idea (Splashcast.net and Magnify.net for video, Mixwit / Muxtape – now dead – for music) but they have either not yet provided users with the right tools and approach or have been crunched by legal pressures from traditional media who are yet coming to grasps with such unstoppable free flow of content. Without a shadow of doubt these early services show tremendous potential both in creating strong spontaneous communities of passionate fans as well as in generating loads of truly valuable content. This is why content licensing schemes limiting such approaches should rapidly fall and let more innovative monetization opportunities to fluorish “around” the content and not by selling it directly.

• WordPress

  

  For everyone else with some geekiness inside her DNA, WordPress remains the reference platform especially for those who want to start their own blogs while feeling free to experiment and change with literally thousands of different design templates (themes) and plugins available. WordPress, which is an open-source product, has also on its side a powerful distributed community of fans and supporters who openly share great little tools and contribute to improve and refine the existing infrastructure. What may fall into place for the multitude of those who would want to use WordPress but are too busy or too little tech savvy to spend time installing and configuring, is the launch of a few services / tools that will provide seamless WordPress installation on your server, either by doing manually for you, or by offering pre-configured and easily upgradeable solutions. I, for one, would have a ton of customers to refer to it.

• Live Blogging

  

  Live Blogging will increasingly be a growing trend of independent news publishing and 2009 will see further synergies between real-time reporting tools, such as real-time blogging, chat-IRC-IM, live mobile video streaming, multi-cam reporting, audio streaming, twittering and other social media. Providing a dashboard of such tools to leverage the potential reporting fire-power of a small team of distributed reporters at an event is the next frontier to be challenged by players in this field.

Web Video – Online Video Publishing

More web publishers will start using video in 2009.

Driving forces behind this are going to lower prices for high-quality camcorders which have become very simple to operate and much better video sharing services accomodating all kinds of original video formats, resolutions and even HD video at no cost to the video publisher.

At the end of the equation, there is more video content available on the Internet and therefore a greater need for effective video search engines as well as sites or blogs that make sense of all of these content by letting the most interesting content emerge through various means and approaches. Expect 2009 to see the announcement of new services and tools dedicated to video search as well as to aggregating, filtering and assembling topic and theme-specific video playlists.

In 2009 you will also see the first group of automatic video to text transcription services and tools. This is a very hot area because as soon as there is some reliable solution to automatically transcribe audio inside video clips into text format, a universe of new content becomes accessible to everyone via traditional search engines. So, video to text transcription and innovative video search engines go hand in hand.

Other video publishing features that will need to move to mainstream status in 2009 are:

• deep linking as well as
• captioning / annotating,
• direct linking from any video frame to any specific URL and
• personalized – user controlled ad overlay space
• hot video spots (a visual indicator of the hot / most viewed points in the video) which will have all to become part of the basic video publishing feature set for any video sharing site.

Strong competition from early adopters and power users will drive adoption by more mainstream publishers and bloggers as well.

On the live video streaming front Ustream and Mogulus will consolidate their leading position and may be likely acquisition targets by anyone of the large players being among the most popular and feature-rich video streaming services available.

Kyte, Qik, Stickam, Flyxwagon and many of the more recent entries in the mobile live video streaming arena, like Finnish startup Floobs which I recenty discovered at LeWeb08, will see several new entries with some quite innovative features. Multicam / multi-view reporting of events will take off in 2009.

Conversational social video platforms like Seesmic have a more uncertain future due to their tendency of trying be too many things to too many different audiences. Seesmic as a video commenting and Twitter-like conversational platform is not bad at all, and as I have suggested to Loic in the past, having the opportunity to de-centralize its deployment, by having the opportunity to create Seesmic-enabled communities (what I called MySeesmic) would be great motivators for wider adoption.

I see such tools having a much easier business life if they were targeted to specific uses and markets rather than as a final destinations a-la Facebook, Myspace or Twitter are. 2009 will likely tell, before it is over, whether I am right or wrong on this one.

In 2009 we’ll also witness a growing number of video sharing and publishing services going the Pro route. That is: either you have a professional, commercial use for publishing your videos, and therefore appreciate having specific advanced features like video analytics and ad management, or you can go to any of the free and open video sharing sites.

Brightcove has been among the first to make a distinct move in this direction, but I think you will see more soon.

YouTube itself may actually be the one that will surprise everyone by releasing a number of truly powerful tools to empower new and more effective ways to create highly distributable video playlists on specific topics and themes.

• HD Video

  HD video is the new wave to ride.
  If you are already into video publishing online this is definitely the year to step into HD. The new high definition format is increasingly supported by major video sharing sites and the prices for a decent HD camcorder have dropped down to $150 or less.

  2009 will see all video sharing sites embracing the new standard with the best ones integrating encoding and distribution of your video at the most appropriate bitrate for each viewer.

• Video Distribution

  Video, like any other content, wants to be as findable as possible.

  Until now there have been a handful of web services and software tools that have taken your video to as many video sharing sites as you desired. End result your video is duplicated across 10 or 20 video sharing sites and supposedly this gives you some extra exposure and visibility. In reality what you want to achieve to get greater findability via the search engines is diversification of keywords by which your title and key meta-data are found. By having multiple video destinations you are in the ideal position to diversify your title, description and tags multiple times to serve different but complementary target audiences. In 2009 you should see video distribution services like Tubemogul and Heyspread add these new features alongside lots of new and highly detailed metrics.

• Internet TV

  More and more traditional television channels will be broadcasting also to the web. The sooner they will do so, the better.

  P2P distribution offers extreme cost advantages to any media publisher interested in international distribution (read live sports) and the ability to gain orders of magnitude of more data about who is watching what and where. Isn’t that what advertisers and sponsors are looking for?

  In 2009 you should not expect any major moves by traditional media channels on this front as it will take them longer to resolve the licensing issues involved in distributing content across such new unexplored channels. In the meanwhile a small army of minuscule companies and small borderline publishers are generating millions of extended video views daily via the use of mostly unathourized P2P television sharing platforms.

  As a matter of fact I would expect some harsher rules and restrictions to be implemented against users in 2009 when it comes to P2P TV in some Western countries. Asian companies manufacturing such tools and users in those regions will likely increase their mastery of the technology and business opportunities and will likely be among the emerging new players in this sector in a year or more.

  One thing stands clear in my mind: whichever mainstream TV channels will embrace soonest open P2P distribution will have tremendous audience and business oppurtunities advantages relative to their over-the-air- and cable-only counterparts.

• Video Related Services

  In 2009 a tremendous market opportunity will present itself to those able to organize and deliver good quality video stock footage for the typical web video publisher. There is a total scarcity of this kind of resources and the few out there charge outrageous prices for 5 to 10 seconds video clips.

  Also in the realm of visual effects for creating video titles and other opening sequences are in very high demand with very little available on the market. It will not take but a few months before you should see some really interesting services pop-up on this front.

• Video Shooting Equipment

  When it comes to video hardware for online video publishing work, my basic advice remains the same: go for good brands that provide you with recording on solid state memory cards (hard disk is second choice), a microphone input jack and a wide lens adapter. These are the three things that can make a huge difference in the quality of your video.

  Camcorders with such characteristics are available from several brands and start from prices as low as $150 (Kodak Z6). My favorite ones remain the Canon models of the series FS and HF (Vixia) which start at around $350. If you buy a camcorder in 2009 make sure it is an HD (high definition) model.

Mobile

In 2009 it will be a must for any serious web publisher to have a mobile version of their site. While there are already a number of services providing free mobilization of your site, they mostly rely on creating a portable device compatible version of your RSS feed while integrating some kind of advertising into it.

Since I hate being bombarded by ads when looking at my mobile phone I am not yet sold on any of these early solutions, but I am pretty sure that in 2009 I will find a new service, maybe from Google or maybe from my blog publishing platform provider, that will allow me to easily publish a mobile phone optimized version of my site contents automatically.

Web Site Design Trends

Web site design will keep evolving in 2009 as well. My personal preferences in the coming year are for:

• three or four column designs that has a fixed body width,
• footer area to provide additional information and resources,
• clear separation of traditional display advertising from content, as well as
• greater integration of highly contextual and relevant ads (a-la AdSense) with the content,
• mean and lean mastheads saving lots of vertical space for above the fold content and premium ad
  spaces,
• larger-sized font size inside body text to provide less coolness factor and more legibility
• use of tabbed interfaces for main navigation as well as for information boxes
• better integration of video and other multimedia links inside text content

In January 2009 MasterNewMedia will launch a new design characterized by all of these traits. Stay tuned. Here is a small preview of what we are working on.

Design credit: Matteo Wikimaki – Metaline

Visual Communication and Presentation Tools

This is a time of profound progress in the area of visual communication. In no more than two or three years we will look back at PowerPoint presentations with the contempt we reserve today for those old, static, institutional web sites.

The tools that will make this possible are all to be invented and the innovative web presentation tools we have seen emerge in these last two years are good indication that 2009 will bring more of these tools and with greater innovative metaphors for their use.

If you take as an example the area of live annotation and whiteboarding, most of tools available out there still reflect the original paradigm developed by Microsoft Netmeeting and its original basic toolset. End result is that when we attend live web seminars, the artwork created with the existing whiteboarding tools looks always something like a first grader first attempts at drawing. Instead of making us look more professional these annotation tools make us look more amateurish than we really are.

Very few companies so far have ventured in studying and analyzing which would be the tools and features users really need when it comes to communicate clearly and in a visual way a specific idea, and given the fast increasing need for tools that help us communicate more clearly our ideas, I really see plenty of opportunities in this area.

Online Digital Image Editing

The coming change here is: Your complete digital imaging workflow will soon be all online.

Capturing offline, editing, uploading, redownloading, editing, re-uploading is time consuming and inefficient from many standpoints. If our digital cameras started to capture directly in the cloud, and if stock and image sharing libraries started to integrate more image editing tools in their basic feture-set we would be moving in the right direction.

In 2009 you will see exactly some of these innovations and improvements materialize, while making the use of Photoshop and other complex and sophisticated image editing tools obsolete for most web publishers.

Legal issues – bureaucracy -censorship

2009 will likely bring new rules and restrictions independent publishers will have to comply with. This will vary from country to country but it is apparent that the trend is clearly headed in this direction.

As I see it, such issues may actually be a great medicine for independent publishers as it will require for all of them to get more involved in lobbying for their rights and to start getting involved in the debating of new legislation that will impact the publishing universe they operate in.

Those proposing and introducing conservative, restrictive legislation seem more concerned with extending the commercial lifetime of existing media rather than providing the fertile grounds in which new media can truly flourish. Providing research, examples and data that proves how suicidal this can be is really a responsibility for all web publishers to take on.

End of Part 1 – Part 2 tomorrow

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 31, 2008 as “New Media Trends And Predictions 2009: What Independent Web Publishers Should Expect – Part 1“.