In the spirit of the holidays and new year, I decided that like many other bloggers I would offer my own predictions for 2007. Why are my predictions better than anybody else? Primarily because I have a keen sense of what is going on in the world. Additionally, I am often compared to Nostradamus since I have an amazing ability to see into the future. Anyways, let’s get started with my predictions for 2007:

1. Web analytics companies that monitor site traffic will begin adding an “Internal Clicks” monitoring feature. Internal clicks will monitor how many times a visitor to your site clicks on a link that results in another page or screen being displayed. This is going to be a result of the increasing buzz about the ineffectiveness of using page hits as a tool for monitoring traffic. There is an interesting article about the death of the page view on the commerce 360 blog, or the end of the page view by A VC. The argument is that the use of Ajax on sites is diluting the number of page views, leading to an ineffective measure of activity on a web page.
2. We will see a proliferation in personal web aggregation. As web surfers spread content across the internet, they will have an increasing need for aggregating their content in one location. Services such as CoComment and del.icio.us will become more popular as internet users divide their data across multiple computers.
3. Growth in general aggregation sites. While this is arguably something that occurred in 2006, I believe that there will be even more growth in web aggregation services such as Techmeme, Originalsignal, Digg, and Tailrank. Web developers will continue to find more creative means of organizing digital content.
4. Growth in creative search alternatives. This is a no-brainer. The search market is booming, and services such as Snap and the upcoming Wikia search will continue to appear. While Google has a great search system, there are definitely flaws. I doubt that we’ll see an effective natural language search engine next year, but there will definitely be a greater presences of search alternatives.
5. Creative RSS feed alternatives. Currently, it is mostly tech savvy individuals that take advantage of RSS feeds, and feed readers like Google reader. I think it is fairly questionable as to whether or not the general public will embrace RSS feeds as an alternative (or supplement) to their daily news resources, but I do believe that new services will be provided to create custom news results of readers. For example, Google could provide a services for Google News that tracks the articles you click on (as if they aren’t already tracking that). Over time, you will get targeted articles that are more to your liking. While services like this exist in one form or the other, I believe that there will be a proliferation of custom news resources that cater to the long-tail.