Twitter: Here's a picture of Stephen Fry. Photograph: Vivan Jayant, via Flickr & Creative Commons

It’s a little known fact* that, to save money, all top ten lists are derived from the same memo of half-formed thoughts from a senior, pooled, global futurologist. This list is distributed via “email” by the futurologist’s faithful assistant, known only as Bev, and then honed by talented editors into the pieces we enjoy and link to between Christmas and New Year.

This centralized process ensures a credible, core uniformity to all predictions, with eccentric twists in presentation and tone.*

Completetosh.com has had this year’s master list leaked to it by an insider.* After careful consideration of our public service duties, we’ve decided to publish it all, thus saving you, the jaded reader, from having to read all the finished pieces. You can thank us later.

Speaking of which, a commenting facility is also available for those of you who, still fired up on too much festive mulled wine and the irritation of visiting family, want to have an ill-considered rant. Or a festive unmulled whine, as it were. Help yourself. Put the cork back in when you’re done.

* Not true.

2011 Predictions List

From: [Name redacted]
To: Predictions List Subscribers
Date: 24/12/10 19:43

Greetings from the future, friends. This year’s list is truly a paradigm shifting re-think of the global er… ah.. zeitgeist [Actually: Bev - could you fill this in? Usual stuff.]

1. The desperate-attempt-at-a-newsy-angle Wikileaks prediction: Ah – changes everything, end of the journalistic middleman except for now, new era of openness, impossible now to keep secrets secret, geeks inherit the earth, what about that guy Assange though, &tc.

2. The wild extrapolation from a single fact prediction: The end of social media! A newspaper got rid of its social media editor, so that’s that then. Death to social media consultants!

3. The last-year’s-facts-as-next-year’s-trend prediction: The rise of social media! Twitter huge valuation it’s all on the up never so big. Hire a social media consultant / poet / facilitator today. [Note to ed: 2 and 3 may appear to contradict. You just don't get it! Keep them apart in the final list.]

4. Location! Location! Location!: [Bev: Can we get a picture of Kirstie Alsopp here? Thanks.] Something about Foursquare, right? Or Facebook. Check in, check it out. Brilliant.

5. Death of… the foreign correspondent / sub editor / web editor / news editor: cuts, cuts, cuts. Recession. Chill of the austerity era. Or mainstreaming of the future. I forget.

Tablets: huge this year (Subs: pls check tks). Photograph: Mark Ramsay, via Flickr & Creative Commons

6. Tablets: just huge. Massive. Truly. Or quite small – Apple’s bound to do a 7″ one. And didn’t Samsung do one as well? Or was it Sony? They made my hifi, you know. Very nice. Apps make people appy. And they’ll buy them! With money! Which reminds me:

7. Paywalls: Ah yes, money. [Bev: can we just take last year's one again? Something about the WSJ and FT? I'm sure I did something on it for the Business Models Of The Future Convention in Cancun in '08.]

8. Curation: it’s all about the social curation of the news graph. And weaving. Definitely weaving. People. Into the fabric of news itself.

9. It’s the Year of Mobile! Yes, definitely this year. It’s going to come to the fore, take center stage, step on to the front foot. Apple dominant, Android invasion, HTC? Nokia – hmm, huge but flawed, hmm. They should give up / use Andriod! / go it alone. And definitely do it decisively.

10. Death of the blog: It’s all the Twitter, now, which is microblogging [can we get a picture of Stephen Fry? With a scarf on?], but nobody wants to read long pieces now. Or did we do this in 2006? I forget. Or maybe this one should be the far out prediction about telling news through social gaming or somesuch? Or TVs? With the Internet on, not actual telly? Whatever.

End with cliched, Private Eye-style…

[That's enough predictions -- Ed]

Our new blog Tech Europe has been running for the last month under the guidance of new WSJ Europe tech editor Ben Rooney. Backing him up, I got to commit a few acts of journalism this week (whisper it) with some blog posts and even a little video.

• Nokia’s Meego Will Bet On Differences to iOS and Android
• Online Gamers Want… Higher Price Points?
• (Video) Checking In With Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley

Our team did a fantastic job of covering the event, including a live link with the Digits video show out of New York and coverage across print and web. Ben rounded up the event today, and you can also see all our Le Web blog coverage, or our European Technology page.

• Demand Media – selling working for a content factory as a lifestyle choice…
• Wired — The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model. Good overview of Demand Media from Wired magazine.
• WSJ.com — Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones – the huge hit story I was talking about.
• That Facebook vs Google News research from Hitwise, in full.
• The Source – europe.wsj.com’s blog, which aims to get breaking analysis on the site within hours of the story breaking.

Jeff makes this assertion about the role of journalists, and whether or not they deserve to be regarded as expert in a subject (bold emphasis is mine):

“[T]he press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness. But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said. This is why I always cringe when reporters call themselves experts. No, reporters are expert only at finding experts.”

Let me start disagreeing by agreeing. Jeff is right on this, in a historical sense. Many reporters are not experts about what they report on. Indeed, it’s probably accurate to say most stories are written by journalists who have only just come to the matter in question. They enter the scene – a motorway crash, a political dispute, a murder investigation, whatever – find the principle figures, ask questions and write up the answers. That’s their job.

But away from those staples, there’s a strong argument for journalists in the future to be experts in what they write about, especially when they cover complex fields. Experts make fewer mistakes, and say fewer sillier things. Read Ben Goldacre’s summary of The Year In Bad Science to see what a potent mix of innumeracy, scientific ignorance and bad reporting can bring readers over 12 months. Or, another way: anyone who has been the subject of much press coverage, or read much coverage of a subject they really know about, will know that journalists often make mistakes.

Sometimes it’s a simple error of fact, but a common transgression is the error of interpretation; the facts are all there, and correct, but presented in such a way as to introduce an inaccuracy. It’s like reading a Google Translate version of a bit of writing; the words are all there, but the translation doesn’t necessarily make any sense to a native speaker.

This kind of error creeps in because that interpretation only comes with deep knowledge and experience, and a journalists can’t get that deep understanding by writing just a single story.

Sometimes, specialism isn’t possible. And this inefficiency has been the case for as long as journalism has existed – part of the trade-off needed to allow an affordable mass media (you lose economies of scale if you have an expert on staff for every occasion, and a specialist write-up of every niche story. Staff, ink and paper cost money).

But that trade-off is also at the heart of what is changing today in journalism, because in some cases staff, ink and paper costs are falling to zero. True experts – often non-journalists – can find a mass media voice too, without journalism having to be their job. Someone can live the story – but they can also blog, tweet, podcast and vidcast about it. They’ll find an audience if they’re any good, and anyone’s interested.

Having insiders cover a story they are also part of presents an obvious ethical challenge, but a concern has to be readers may not care, valuing insider access over ethics (they may figure they can figure out biases for themselves). And in this world, the old journalism – the old, generalist, non-expert just-ask-the-questions-ma’am journalism – doesn’t work any more. Across specialisms, there will be people who know more, doing a better job of explaining what’s going on than the pros.

How does journalism react? Well, as Jeff says, by doing what we do best and linking to the rest. But it would also be very limiting to reduce journalists to simply making calls to bring the right people together (although that must be part of their role too, of course). Expert knowledge injects passion, lets us ask better, harder, fairer questions, lets us call bullshit where we see it, enables a view of their bit of the world that goes beyond he-said-she-said. Where editors believe particular stories are core to their journalistic mission, we need to employ the experts – or encourage journalists to become expert in their subject.

A rise in specialism in journalism – and more true experts working in journalism – is going to be a central plank in journalism’s recovery from the hole it’s in. It’ll keep it relevant, and make it better.

Maybe many journalists haven’t made great gurus to date. But, in the future, cringe at the thought of journalists as experts? Nah – celebrate them. They’ll be some of our profession’s saviours.

It’s been a nostalgic few days, what with the Guardian leaving its old home, and me leaving the Guardian at the end of the week. Adding to the sense of change is the news Steve Jobs isn’t going to be doing his traditional keynote speech at San Francisco MacWorld Expo in January. Indeed, Apple says this will be the last time it attends the show. It’s the end of something; those keynotes were among the more entertaining episodes of my early career at the Guardian.

During my years on the paper I saw several of those “Stevenotes“, all of which were brilliant acts of salesmanship. They followed a pattern; wait to be let in, wait more, stare at a bare stage framed by vaguely sinister banners, listen to classic pop music, then more, then Jobs arriving – late and unheralded – on stage in jeans and black top. Then he’d do a presentation for two hours, his audience rapt. You could argue that his brilliance on stage was reinforced by an utterly adoring crowd, especially when he was speaking on his home turf in California. Once, a chap sat next to me (in the press seats) was apparently moved to heartfelt tears during Jobs’ launch of the new iPhoto application. Sobbing, he was, dabbing at his eyes with an old hankie.

But Jobs is, even under colder assessment, quite a draw, and ultimately his staying away will spell the death of the show and the quaint circus that surrounds it. That will be a bit of a shame. People will be sad that their post-holiday treat is gone, for the event is more of a festival than a trade show. Around it is, in essence, a fringe programme of launches, dinners, receptions and briefings to alternately report, book, blag and avoid, hosted by Mac vendors and Apple itself.

A personal highlight – and this perhaps is a measure of my inner geekery – was attending the Netters Dinner back in 2001. I was rather thrilled to meet its host Adam Engst, who wrote the manual to getting your Mac online in the early 1990s (even with his excellent book, it took me two weeks to work it all out) and I rather enjoyed the gathering’s computer club camaraderie. That year, Jobs took the wraps off the new titanium PowerBook, and launched a bit of software called iTunes. We all thought it cute, but around the table at Netters couldn’t really imagine digitising all our CDs.

More broadly, it was possible to gauge the health of the Mac economy through judging the size of the show, although most old-timers seemed to think things were on the slide. For the company, it really wasn’t – it was just that Apple’s morph into a consumer electronics company selling to a mass market, rather than a computer company selling into a tiny niche, meant the geek-packed show became less relevant.

With the paying attendees, frankly, mattering less to Apple, and we in the press ready to turn up to a special event at the merest hint of something shiny, even in my final year (2004) there were rumours swirling that Apple wanted its product release schedule to break free of the show dates.

And now, it appears, they’ve finally done it. The move has prompted a rush of stories that Jobs is, again, unwell, and even if there’s nothing particularly badly wrong it may be that – post cancer treatment – he’s simply not up to the intensive prep and physical ordeal of delivering the two hour SteveNote.

But Apple’s wanted out of MacWorld for years, we know. And it may also be that Jobs has realised – through December, traditionally the time when he starts pulling things together for the show – that he’s not got much to say. [Read more about Jobs' pre-keynote prep in this fascinating piece from back in 2006]

Speculation this year is that Apple won’t have a new product line to unveil, and it might just be that Jobs doesn’t fancy the usual build-up of hype, followed by post-keynote deflation among the fanboys and – new since this year – frenzied speculation about his health, gauntness and weight. (It’s tempting to think that, really, as Silicon Valley’s computer heroes enter middle and older age, the Valley ecosystem is going to have to deal with their mortality a little more maturely than it does at the moment. But that’s maybe another post.)

Like us all, Jobs and Apple is changing and moving on, and all we can do is look back and say it was fun while it lasted.

[Plus: an entertaining photogallery from the Guardian of Steve Jobs through the ages]

How curious. Yes, it appears I’ve been ranked one of the 20 most visible web people in the country, in a bit of work by NowPublic, the social media website. The BBC’s Rory Clellan-Jones comes top of their list, along with a bunch of BBC folk and Guardian colleagues, plus Tom Coates, Stephen Fry and – infuriatingly – my wee brother, who has entered the list three places above me at number seven, and is now crowing.

The rather odd list appears to be driven by some kind of tallying of digital media output. Quoth the press release:

“The goal of NowPublic’s MostPublic Index is to measure—on a completely transparent, metric-driven basis—who has the greatest digital reach and is most effectively broadcasting their own personal brand online,” said Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic.

“Broadcasting” my “own personal brand online”? It all sounds a little vulgar. And there are some names from the UK I’m surprised to see are missing. I mean – surely Paul Carr doesn’t break wind these days without it being catalogued, photographed (drink in hand), measured and fired out across an RSS feed? [Later: Charles Arthur, also on the list, points out it's crazy that colleague Jemima Kiss isn't on there. She really should be.] And are we really saying the BBC’s Robert Peston – Britain’s blog sensation this year, having broken significant stories on his through the financial crisis – should be a place below yours truly?

Ah, feck it. The form would say maybe we are. It does seem I gained this distinction for this semi-opaque goldfish bowl of my own making – blogging, Twittering and Flickring, and doing so in such a way as to be read by you, gentle reader. I’d suggest NowPublic perhaps put too much weight on leftfield metrics and totting up what means of communication we use, rather than the content (and audience) itself, but let’s not look this one too closely in the mouth, eh?

So, rather than say anything more that is, by turn, curmudgeonly or egocentric, let me simply say something insincere and demonstrably untrue. Something like “this is as much an honour for you as it is for me”… and then I’ll leave it there.

“Blogging, above all else, is conversational. It is social. It is networked. There are two key features to the blog: links, and comments. Fail to include either, and you’re talking to yourself.”

I agree with Paul that blogging is social. But, by failing to include links and comments, are we really “talking to yourself”?

Nah. This seems a very technocratic definition. After all, journalist Paul Carr’s blog is undoubtedly a blog, but has no comments (for reasons he explained here). Marketing guru and author Seth Godin only does trackbacks, not comments, on his very popular (and influential) blog for reasons he explained here. One of the fathers of blogging, Dave Winer, hasn’t had didn’t have comments on his main blog for years. Winer, an often hectoring voice online, was left open to accusations of not taking what he dished out. [Update: as pointed out in a comment here, Dave does now have comments. Mea culpa.]

So what’s missing?

I’ve long said, without really explaining myself, that often blogging is, really, the first form of journalism born of the web. Blogging has changed both the way we think about creating a piece of digital journalism, and the way that piece of work is digested after we’ve clicked “publish”.

It’s probably time to explain myself.

You see, when we decide to use facts to describe or discuss an event, issue or idea, it’s reasonable to say we’re producing journalism. And I’d contend that bloggers often do just this. And I’d further contend that the best bloggers are going into this with their eyes open; they have a keen awareness of at least four factors (I’m sure you can think of more) which make their kind of work different from, say, print journalism, or broadcast, or anything else.

Let’s take a quick look at the four factors, and how they change the end product.

• A story will be commented on. Journalism has always been discussed, if it had any importance at all. But the internet brings together people who really know what they’re talking about, wherever they are. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, their thoughts will appear in comments under your article. And, if they do, you may be reminded of what Dan Gillmor said, five years ago, about readers knowing more than you.
If you’ve done well, they’ll only be debating finer points or offering more information or context. Even praise. But if you’ve written rubbish, they’ll be there to put you right.
You can turn the comments off, but you cannot stop that informed discussion taking place. It will simply move elsewhere. I think Paul and Seth, from my examples earlier, realise that.
The impact of this: stories may be more fair and less conversational (to avoid needless confrontation), may be more solidly researched (to avoid embarrassment), may be better sourced (to support an argument). Everything is written with an important truth in mind: the subjects of a story and the expert readers may bite back, and have the best tools in history to do so.

• A story sits within an ecosystem. Stories don’t live by themselves any more. There’s little excuse not to link to online sources, but even if content fails to include links it is not immune from links’ power. The best blogging shows us how links increase transparency and build trust by showing where a fact came from.
Linking confers authority on the linked-to – we all know how Google works, right? – but it’s less often noted that the linker gains authority too, in a less direct way. Example: not all readers will follow the link, but more savvy readers might simply be reassured it is there (and mouseover it, to see where it leads).
Linking out can also win new readers looking for a trusted guide to take them through the welter of information out there. This is as predicted in 1995 in what, as my regular reader knows, is my favourite digital journalism essay.
The impact of this: journalism becomes more accountable, as readers start to expect – and get – more precise attribution of facts and quotes. It’s no longer enough to tell us what you know; ideally, you show us how you know. Meanwhile, a new form of almost entirely link-based digital journalism, as energetically evangelised by Jeff Jarvis, Scott Karp and others, gains currency and audience. Link journalism should also be cheaper than other kinds. This may be a growth area through the credit-crunched journalism world in 2009.

• A good story will be debated elsewhere. Partly related to the ecosystem point above; bloggers know their best work will be the work that gets dissected across the web, point by point. That provides a strong incentive to make sure it’s correct or, at least, well-argued. It’s hard to retract, clarify or say sorry once your work has gone viral.
Blogging brought about the interest in tracking that conversation, and spawned some of the tools to help do so – for instance, Technorati and trackbacks. Two imperfect technologies, I know, but influential I’m sure – we can now see exactly what people are saying about our work, and gauge its reach.
The impact of this: stories have always had a life beyond initial publication, but that life has now become much bigger in scale and over time. It’s also more trackable even if we, in publishing, are still struggling to properly document it. But that’s another blog post, I think. For now, we need to be aware of that afterlife stories now have, intervene in debates hosted in places not our own, and on occasion use it to inform our work next time.

• Debate is imperfect. I’m being polite – rather than saying blogging brings a sudden awareness that some people are halfwits, or bullies who deliberately and dishonestly look to distort what you say. Let’s just say grand, open, public debate is sometimes an inefficient way to get to the truth of a matter.
The people brought together to comment on your work may not, of course, really know what they’re talking about at all. Indeed, they may be the least qualified buffoons ever to have opined on your given subject.
‘Twas ever thus, down the pub at least; it’s just that the web makes it very obvious to see all these imperfections, and that can appall those who have, somehow, managed to live in more civilised worlds until now. But there’s still an impact here; trolls have a chilling effect. Unregulated, this distortion can distract and dissuade people with interesting things to say. It remains a challenge to create troll-proof online spaces. We need to work out better ways to deny the halfwits a platform, while maintaining and enhancing that platform for the best voices.

There; four factors. But the real legacy of blogging is that we now understand that when publishing online – blogging or not – we have no choice as to how social, how “webby” our work becomes. As long as we publish digitally, we will be discussed. Our work will always be social, unless what we produce is so narrow or lacking in interest nobody gives a damn. The platform doesn’t matter. Comments on or off, links out or not, trackbacks enabled or not, Vignette or WordPress or Tumblr or Twitter or handcoded, hardcore HTML… none of that matters.

Soon, we’ll always have the blogging mindset when we’re working online. The market will demand it; readers will be baffled if we don’t link to our sources, and view us as one would a screaming lunatic in the street if, online, we preach or hector without – at least – a very precise understanding of what we’re talking about.

It’s a world that calls into question lots of journalistic givens – not least the value of being a non-specialist journalist. It’s tougher to be a columnist, too, unless you are capable of game-changing arguments supported by your reporting prowess, wide access and deep knowledge. It’s a world which may accord trust more on individual rather than institutional reputation. It’s a world that favours quality – although quality may mean many different things. It will be a world in which, praise be, we can probably drop the word “blog”.

In short, this is the assimilation of blogging into the mainstream, and is what some of us have been expecting, even hoping for, since we first posted.

I can’t get enough of it. The whole grand circus – the big themes and the strategies being played out by both camps – makes this the most interesting campaign I’ve ever seen, and I’m glued to it. I’ll probably stay up tonight for the debate, now we know Sen. McCain is going to turn up.

Aside from Twitter’s effort, which m’colleague Meg Pickard writes about in detail at her place, another wheeze that has caught my eye is the Economist’s Global Electoral College. It’s pretty much as it says on the tin; a worldwide electoral college where countries have their votes allocated based on their population. Like Twitter, it’s a way of reflecting the opinion of lots of people who don’t have a formal say in this hugely significant election.

“The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world’s countries (including the United States) a say in the election’s outcome,” explains the magazine, making its allocation of votes to the US sound like an act of largess, and also suggesting the poll will have an impact on the actual outcome, rather than it all being make-believe. I think most US voters would have a problem with a system that handed them only gets 432 college votes out of the total 9,875, while India gets 1,588 and China 1,900.

Globally, It’s safe to say the race is not quite as close as it is in the US; no countries are red so far – not even China – and most of the world is blue. McCain, it appears, has yet to convince the world, or at least the Economist-reading bit of it, and if Rest Of World had a vote this would be a landslide for Obama.

There are a number of countries which are still white, or haven’t passed the threshold of 10 votes. Iran, interestingly, is undeclared – we can only assume this state of affairs reflects a lack of Adam Smith-admiring Economist readers in the country, rather than genuine indecision.

Not that we know, of course, if the country’s endorsment would play well among those who actually do have a vote in 39 days…

Well, the chain has finally responded, and has done so very firmly indeed. Best Western doesn’t admit to any data loss, saying only that the Herald “brought to our attention the possible compromise of a select portion of data at a single hotel”.

Best Western says it has “found no evidence to support the sensational claims ultimately made by the reporter and newspaper.” They also describe the steps they take to keep data secure, and say “we have no evidence to suggest that there is need for widespread concern”.

Given the strength of Best Western’s denials, the ball appears to be back in the Herald’s court. More evidence would be interesting to see now, especially as the chatter continues around the web; Slashdot has a thread while the Information Week blog asks some questions about Best Western’s statement. There’s clearly a million miles between the Herald’s story and the chain’s retort.