But don’t worry is isn’t some haughty predictions list, but merely a top 10 list of my hopes for marketing and technology in 2009. 

1. MySpace will die. Enough of the glitter backgrounds, 10 mintue page downloads and endless random friend requests from half naked teenagers. Most of the cool kids have left anyways. 

2. Everyone will stop hating on Twitter. You know you want to, like that one time in college. Get drunk and blame your experimental tweets on the booze. In four years if you’re not into it anymore you can just say you were going through a phase. Then you can follow me here. 

3. Spammers will learn correct grammar and proper English. Maybe more people would respond if they could read your spam emails or they contained plausable stories. Really I won the lottery in Nigeria, I didn’t even buy a lottery ticket?!

4. Mobile marketing will finally take off. The last few years have been predicted as The Year for mobile, please finally get big so the masses will figure out what the next big thing will be.

5. People will realize that it is not necessary to sign their names to posts on Facebook becasue FB shows your name and picture next to the comment. You are not drafting a letter when you post on someone’s wall so you really don’t need to sign it. 

6. Companies will realize that traditional marketing needs to be combined with new media and technologies just to stay relevant. Society is shifting and if you don’t change your business practices starting with how you interact with your consumer you will die out.  

7. Education Connection will hire a new agency. I can’t take their commercials any more. They are the absolute worst thing to have come out in 2008. And you will finally learn to integrate your TV spots with your online activites. Please stop using a different vanity URL in each spot and then  fail to buy any related keywords to those URLs (try buying class in PJS for ClassInMyPjs.com). Only bidding on “Education Connection” when it’s only mentioned once in each spot, is foolish. 

8. Online media distribution hubs will really take off. Rev3, Hulu and the like have grown in popularity this year and 2009 will be their year. Really I’d just love to save money on my monthly cable/internet bill.  

9. Music companies will have an epiphany and realize if their artists put out good music and put on a good show, they’ll make more money on concerts and shwag then they ever did on album sales. I hate the regret after you purchased an album, listen to it once and realize that  besides the one catchy single all the other tracks totally blow. Follow the consumers, stop suing your target audience and do something great again.  

10. Online advertisers will create a uniform system to buy and sell online placements. Start by creating a trusted leader in analytics for buyers to plan and buy off of and then websites should create creative standards for ads to be displayed (lower the clutter and make sure all creative is not going to annoy the hell out of your visitors). I don’t trust a good percentage of my online vendors stats, no one provides me with the same type of information and too many sites are concerned with quanity rather than quality. I want to spend my clients money, but you’re not making it easy.

Whats on your marketing/technology/media wish list for 2009? 

Oh and I want a robot and a time card that can fill in itself. Or maybe a robot to fill in my time card. And a helper monkey, I’ve always wanted a helper moneky, with a little green hat…. 

Happy New Year!

The only magazine subscription I have is to WIRED and its good to go for the next like 5 years.

While I can’t afford to support my complete geek out (read: no iphone), I do what I can to maintain it. I read TechCrunch in addition to my BBC news every morning. I download DiggNation from Revision3 every Friday and watch/vote on Current TV. I rushed to download the Mozilla 3.0 as soon as it was released. I’ve started to teach myself some basic coding so I can know basic HTML for all those occasions when it’s needed.

Despite all that geekiness, I will never understand Comic-Con.