Calacanis makes his predictions for 2006

Weblogs Inc’s Jason Calacanis has posted his predictions for 2006 and there are a couple of interesting ones:

2. 30 of the 50 blog networks will fizzle out and/or die. Only one or two (other than Gawker) will break 20M pages a month. The blog network space is just way too crowded, and if you can’t go big at this point you’re gonna have a real hard time doing a *real* network (say 20 blogs or more). Now, you’ll do just fine if you stay focused on a narrow niche that you can own.

I don’t think b5 will get to 20 million page views a month, but I’d think 10 million is a reasonable goal. He’s right in that there are far too many blog networks in the marketplace at the moment, its one of the main reasons I folded Weblog Empire into the bigger, joint effort of b5media, which I’d note now has 60+ blogs and at least another 20ish in development at the moment, 95% of which are being updated daily.

3. Metblogs and Gothamist will both raise venture or seed capital.

I don’t know enough about Metblogs but I think is right on track with the Gothamist crowd. Great group of people doing great things.

9. Google Adsense for Podcasts and/or Video will debut in Q2/Q3 of 2006–Yahoo and Microsoft will follow shortly after that.

Interesting concept worth noting. How they implement this though will be a technological marvel.

10. Half of the indie blog search engines will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space.

I was taking a look at submitting some blogs to blog search engines/ directory yesterday and I was amazed at how many their are now. Not sustainable.

10.B No blog search engines will be bought in 2006 because every major buyer has already built one.

I don’t know. Technorati now it works again (and works really well) has got to be appealling to someone, and it would fit in really, really well at Yahoo.

11. Half of the indie RSS readers will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space.

Agreed. Already there are 3-4 market leaders. Although the long tail is very long and the use of RSS is still fairly immature and small in comparison. We’ll see.

16. Gawker will hit 20 blogs and get bought by Newscorp–Nick Denton will keep Fleshbot and retire for the third time before spinning the Fleshbot into an ipod video service claiming all the while that “there’s no business in it.”

Everyone has a price, even Nick Denton.