Tis the season to get the mystic prediction kit out and do some predictions. As part of this, here are my ones for this year in traditional blog manner. It’s like putting up tinsel for blogs, hang your predictions for the year as you shake the web like some magic 8 ball.

1. Blog networks will continue to grow, but have some serious pruning leaving some strong both in niche and non-niche markets.
2. Web 2.0 will stop being used and we’ll all just realise it is hype.
3. People who have blogs that say web 2.0 anything will have to change their names.
4. CSS will become the industry standard completely - this really isn’t so much a prediction as I see it is really occuring already. There will also be a lot of talk about dynamic css and other interesting techniques. If ie 7 does get released this year expect a lot of sites to break as not compatable to the CSS parsing.
5. Web professional will start to be used to describe web designers and web developers.
6. Web colours will intensify.
7. The use of large text will be refined rather than the copy nature it is happening at currently.
8. There will be a surge in the use of ajax - dear santa, please send me a ajax book.
9. If you aren’t using web standards you will be laughed at and made to stand in the corner.
10. Yahoo will continue to buy up everything - including digg.
11. E-shots will have a resurgence in use which seemed to flag this year slightly.
12. RSS will become main stream and the standard way of getting information such as news. More and more sites will start asking for RSS as standard as big and small companies catch onto it.
13. Del.icio.us will probably release a desktop application enabling access to your bookmarks from your desktop in windows.
14. Mobile web will continue to grow and infact with the new blackberry’s and other devices see a serious upturn in 2006.
15. Forums will become less and less as blogs create communities through commenting.
16. Flock will stop becoming the butt of everyone’s joke and actually become something a few people use once they get beyond the blog dissing.
17. More and more blogs will open and close in under a week.

Wired runs an article today about the top tech trends that futurists pick. So, what is in the futurist’s crystal ball? It seems to boil down to some very forceable things - possibly a little too obvious too. This column focuses on the positive elements with the negative coming in a later column. The outlined predictions fall into the following 4 categories :