THIS is the time of the year when many industry experts gaze into their crystal balls to predict what's coming up in technology.
A few weeks ago, the research company Gartner jumped the gun on everyone and offered its 10 top predictions for the years ahead.
Blogging, Gartner said, would peak at 100 million Web journals this year then level off.
The company also predicted that Vista would be the last major version of Microsoft's Windows operating system and that by 2010, the cost of owning a personal computer would drop by 50 percent.
The numbers tend to bear Gartner out, at least on the number of blogs. By the end of 2006, blog watcher Technorati was tracking 63.2 million Web journals. Since about 175,000 new blogs are created every day, some 5.25 million are added to this figure every month. At this rate, we ought to hit 100 million blogs by July 2007.
Gartner's prediction that these numbers will taper off is a bit trickier, as it assumes that the number of blogs dying off will reach or exceed 175,000 a day after July.
I was surprised to read Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer explain it this way: most people who would ever start a Web log have already done so. Those who love blogging and are committed to keeping it up, while other have become bored and moved on.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer told the BBC. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."
The explanation is facile, and the suggestion that very few new Internet users would want to start a blog seems ridiculous.
As with all such predictions, only time will tell. But soothsayers work at an advantage. Few people bother to come back later to check if they were right. If their prognostication proves accurate, they can beat their own drums. If not, they can just keep quiet about it, and usually, nobody will notice.
Some predictions, however, come back to haunt the people who made them.
For example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicted that spam or unwanted commercial e-mail would be a thing of the past in two years.
Now we all know that's just not true, but what do the figures say$%: Commtouch, an e-mail security company, reports that spam accounted for 87 percent of all e-mail traffic in 2006, a 30 percent increase over 2005. In other words, spam hasn't gone away; it's become worse. Oops.
Here's another example.
In 1995, Oracle Corp. head honcho Larry Ellison predicted the death of the PC and the rise of cheap Network Computers that would draw applications and data from the Internet. Today, 12 years later, people are finally delivering some software as services over the Internet--but they're doing so onto PCs, not Ellison's stripped-down, disk-less machines. In fact, Ellison's Network Computer company tanked.
But probably one of the least successful prognosticators was Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and one-time columnist of InfoWorld. In 1995, he predicted the Internet would collapse catastrophically in 1996 as too many people tried to connect to it. In an act of public contrition when his prediction didn't come true, Metcalf put his column and some water into a blender and literally ate his own words.
Four years later, Metcalf was still at it. In his InfoWorld column, he predicted Linux would soon be killed off by Windows 2000. His reasons: "The Open Source Movement's ideology is Utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology." He must have known something Microsoft didn't. In 2003, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer fired off a memo to employees clearly identifying Linux and open source as a growing threat to the company.
Back when Metcalf predicted its decline, Linux was primarily seen as a server operating system. These days, more and more people, especially in developing countries, see it as a viable alternative to expensive, proprietary operating systems on desktop PCs and notebooks.
Predicting the future is a tricky business. Maybe that's why Metcalf stopped writing his column--and became a venture capitalist.