It’s that time of the year again, the stockings have been torn down, the snow is falling gently over a pile of used wrapping paper, and we are all digging in for the last leg of the journey from the end of one year to the beginning of the next.

As a blogger, I only have one choice at times like these, I’m forced, by my code and credo to give you some “predictions” about the coming year.

I decided to do it differently this time around. Instead of making up new and exciting pontifications, I’m going to take this time to review my list from the end of 2007 and see how it went. Enjoy!

Number Eight

One last hurrah for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg will ignite a blogstorm when he launches his next “game changing” attempt to monetize Facebook. Objectively speaking, it will have little to no real chance of justifying 1/10th of Facebook’s purported valuation but for about a week we’ll think it does.

It took almost a year and still I would only call this one marginally accurate. Facebook hasn’t launched any code complete monetization ploys, but it does look like they are heading down that path with Friend Connect.

It doesn’t take a leap from Techcrunch’s assertion about Google Friend Connect to see Facebook could try a similar trick. The problem is that no matter how you slice it, it’s still an advertising play in a down economy, the question I ask is if they do bring on a pile of new ad impressions — where do they sell them all?

Number Seven

Blogebrity. The talk of the town will be whether a tech entrepreneur can parlay internet fame into mainstream success. Expect at least one blog network (or else a major player like Kevin Rose) to try to make the jump.

This one was dead on, this year CBS acquired CNET, Guardian Media Group acquired PaidContent after it partnered with the Washington Post, and Conde Nast acquired ArsTechnica. Some of the largest networks in the blogging world seem to be primping for big, media aquesitions. The only question that remains is what will these media brands really do with their shiny, new blog toys.

Number Six

There will be a breakout vlogging sensation that finally manages to hit the right buttons by attracting the three major pillars of the internet: MySpace, Facebook and the Blogosphere. As usual, this success will be followed up by dozens of copy cat attempts that mostly miss the point.

There is no clear evidence that this happened. iJustine is still capitalizing on her growing mainstream relevance, and the guard has changed hands a few times over the last twelve months, but there have been no obvious vlogger to media darling conversions.

Number Five

The writers strike will get us all to question the relevance of broadcast media. A startup will be born that takes this imagined hole in the landscape and tries to plug it. Since it will likely not be put together by people who understand both the web and broadcast media, it will die spectacularly.

Who would have guessed that the economy would have tanked, which left a number of large media endeavors in the lurch. As it stands, nothing has come along to do this unless you count the rebranding of Joost. The second part is a little more on mark, the relevance of old media is being questioned time and time again, and for good reason — this year saw a continuation of newspapers death spiral. Then again, we’ve been doing that for the last four years. Search “Newspapers Are Dead” for some fun reading.

Number Four

A few more mainstream media alumni will jump onto the blogging train. Chances are we still won’t notice how closely “citizen journalists” are beginning to resemble to real thing.

Once again, marginally true. Quite a few big names have jumped on the blogging train — the roster includes Billionaires like Carl Icahn, Khalaf Al Habtoor, and eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar. I can’t point to a mainstream media star who has made a show of turning to blogging.

Number Three

The rich will get richer. For the first time, we will notice that the barriers to entry for a blogger who wants to break into “the club” are getting extremely high. Expect an array of “A-list” debates, culminating with the realization that this argument happens every year.

This was dead on. If you take a look around you, you’ll notice the number of “break out” blogging sensations (Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan) this year have be few to none. This is not necessarily a bad thing, attention is shifting away from the blog as the primary mode of Internet communication and falling on a laundry list of other services — video and microblogging among them. More importantly, greater emphasis is being placed on creating content rather than “blogging,” and I think we’ll all be better for it.

Number Two

Expect a few new buzzwords to take the place of Crowdsource and Social Graph.

New buzzwords ran rampant this year, most of them were political (lipstick on a pig) but we got a few gems — Fail and Rickroll among them. Not too many marketing terms of art added to the roster, I guess that just shows where our attention is turning.

Number One

Ted of Uncov joins Valleywag, or at least becomes a part time contributor.

This one was absolutely off base, but in other news Ted did start blogging at Uncov again, and Valleywag is shutting down so I guess everything worked out.

Everything did work out.

I was “sort of” right on a few things, really wrong on a couple and absolutely, unequivocally correct on nothing. That’s the nature of these sorts of predictions. There was no way to tell how deeply our culture would be effected by the election, the credit crisis, the VC crunch and the general economic malaise. Let’s face it, it’s hard to predict how a moving target will move. The best we can do is hope for is that the best of what we wish for ends up happening. Despite it all, as the year closes out I’d say that 2008 wasn’t so bad.

Here’s to hoping for a better 2009.

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