Today was a good day for me in terms of predictions.

First, Prediction #1 for 2009 came true — that iTunes would go DRM-free — during the keynote at Macworld. Yes, that’s one prediction true, 6 days into the new year.

Then I also found out that I was Hubdub’s News Pundits Tech Pundit of the Year for 2008. The award, which yes, I get a inscribed trophy — a quaich — for, was given to me for my solid showing on predictions made last year on this blog. I beat out some pretty solid competition.

I plan on bringing the quaich to every party I go to from now on and drinking from it like the pompous ass that I am.

[photo: flickr/Stephen Downes]

The keynote address for Macworld is in a few hours. Despite the lack of Steve Jobs, I’m excited as it’s not only Apple’s last Macworld — the site of many big product launches — but also my first.

I’ll be there covering the event for VetureBeat. Live-blogging a keynote — especially an Apple keynote — isn’t easy. The information comes at your quickly and you usually have to be doing about four things at once. But I’m really excited to try out FriendFeed’s new real-time feature to pipe in updates both into the FriendFeed room we set up and back to VentureBeat itself via an embedded widget.

I tested out the widget tonight and it’s really great. It updates in real-time as you add things to the FriendFeed room, so there is no need for page reloads. Also great is that you can comment right from within the widget (assuming you have a FriendFeed account).

FriendFeed has been an awesome tool in the past for live-blogging, we’ve used it a few times now. But this real-time feature, assuming it’s able to handle the furious pace that we’ll be working at tomorrow, is a potential game changer for the live-blogging space. Other sites have told me that were wary to use something like FriendFeed in the past because it takes pageviews away from their sites, but with such a functional embedded widget, I expect to see a few of them change their minds.

I’ll embed it on this site below as well just for the few of you that may want to follow the action tomorrow morning here. Or you can find the FriendFeed room itself here. Or just watch VentureBeat.

Predictions? Okay fine. I could do a wish-washy list like I did on VentureBeat when a lot of rumors will still gray, but instead I’ll just break them into two lists — what we will see and what we won’t see — based mostly on best guesses.

What we will see

• Updated iMacs
• New Mac minis
• New 17-inch MacBook Pros
• DRM-free iTunes
• A first real look at Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)
• New iWork (and maybe iLife)

What we won’t see

• iPhone nano
• Apple netbook
• Apple home server thing
• Red iPhones
• New Mighty Mouse
• New Apple TV
• AT&T tethering plan

I’m probably leaving out a few rumored items that myself or others have written about in the past, but that breaks down pretty nicely. For what it’s worth, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber thinks there will be updates to the Apple TV and has a wildcard prediction that Apple shows off the iPhone OS 3.0. The latter would be pretty crazy, but he’s usually pretty good about predictions. Jason at Webomatica thinks the Apple TV could see an update as well. Perhaps me including it on the “won’t see” list is simply because I just bought one (and already almost need more than the 160GB).

[photo: flickr/Tom Coates]

“How do you make a hormone? You pinch her.” That’s a joke my grandfather used to love to tell and it’s all I can think about today after seeing Steve Jobs’ public letter explaining exactly why he isn’t going to be leading the keynote at Macworld tomorrow.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.

It’s kind of sad that Jobs had to write a letter on Apple’s website explaining that. But he and Apple finally realized that was necessary or else speculation would completely overshadow Phil Schiller’s keynote tomorrow and any product launches that may come with it.

Jobs is sick, yes, but millions of people around the world live life everyday with chronic ailments. Is this hormone imbalance related to the cancer he suffered from a few years back? Maybe. Is it related to diabetes? Who knows. The important thing is that Jobs isn’t dying and he stated for the record that he knows that if he were unable to run Apple, he would have to remove himself as CEO.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So can we shut up about it already? Of course we won’t. But we should.

Cult of Mac has a pretty funny “breakdown” of the letter.

I’ll be at the Macworld keynote tomorrow for the first time. It’s sad that Jobs won’t be leading it, but I’ll live, and it’s good to hear that so will he.

I finally did it. I figured the start of a new year was a good time to make the jump to WordPress from Blogger — so I did it — and all I can say is that it’s beautiful over here. I had been testing out WordPress 2.7 for the past few weeks on my Review In Haiku blog, and within about a day I knew I had to move ParisLemon off blogger. Sure, free is nice, and it was a little bit of a pain to move (I still need to re-tag and/or categorize some 1,500+ posts), but it was necessary.

Alongside the move you may notice a few things:

First, I am not a designer, so I just went for something very basic. I like basic anyway, but I’ll be tweaking and customizing several things over the new few weeks.

Second, with everyone doing cutbacks in this economy I feel like I should do some — so I think I’m going to kill ParisLime (my linkblog) and start adding some links on ParisLemon itself. Don’t worry, I won’t do it too often and will only do it when I have something to say about another story (but not enough for a full post). I think I’ll try to make a feed without the link posts for some of you who may not want that. I’m also going to make a feed of my posts added in with my VentureBeat posts, since many of you have asked for that. 

Third, if there are any broken links sorry about that and please let me know. I tried to do the best I could to migrate all my Blogger posts over while keeping the URL structure intact. I think I did a pretty good job, but I’m sure there are things I missed.

Fourth, hopefully all of this will lead to me blogging more here than I did in 2008.

Have I mentioned how much I like WordPress 2.7? It’s only about 15,000 times nicer than the Blogger interface — and obviously a lot more customizable.

Anyways, happy new year and thanks for reading.

It’s New Year’s Eve which means that once again it’s prediction time. Last year’s went pretty well with 17 of them, so I’ll go up to 20 this time. I think the following will happen in 2009:

1. iTunes goes DRM-free
Apple is clearly talking with the labels about this and I think it will happen sooner rather than later. The labels I’m sure want to keep this as leverage over Apple (they have their music DRM-free already on services like Amazon MP3), but I think Jobs & Co. will cut a deal to get it done. After all, Jobs said in 2007 that by the end of the year half of all songs on iTunes would be DRM-free — it’s now going to be 2009 and that still isn’t the case.

2. Apple enables certain third-party background tasks for the iPhone
Apple said we’d see its Push Notification system in September, and that never came. They’re still working on it, hoping to get it right, and I think they’ll launch it sometime in Q1 2009. But if it doesn’t do what it needs to do — make apps that need background location features like Loopt, useful — then I think we’ll see Apple eventually relent by the end of the year and let certain apps that can prove they won’t harm the device or the user, run in the background for certain tasks. Loopt already has a separate deal for this with AT&T (but as of right now not including the iPhone), so I expect it to be the first to get this done. Then everyone will go back to bitching about battery life.

3. Facebook enters the location-based servies game
I think they will enter the location-based service arena that others, like the aforementioned Loopt are in. Privacy concerns will make it slow to catch on though. But this could be very powerful if they do it right.

4. Twitter sells if its business model doesn’t work out
Twitter will try to launch some sort of business model in early 2009, probably based around coroporate accounts to shill stuff on Twitter. If that model doesn’t prove lucrative, expect them to sell to one of the big players for something in the 9-figure range.

5. Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search and advertising businesses
We all know Microsoft still wants at least this part of Yahoo. More importantly, it needs it — Microsoft is never going to catch Google in search and advertising without some outside help. It still won’t catch them with Yahoo, but at least they’ll be in a better position. The rest of Yahoo will focus on its core brand after they turn down an offer from Time Warner to merge with AOL.

6. FriendFeed launches a monetization strategy before Twitter
I write this mostly because FriendFeed seems to be able to launch most things before Twitter does. I’m not entirely confident here, since indications are that Twitter is close to the model it wants to go with, but FriendFeed has to eventually be thinking about making money too, and I expect them to delve into that in ‘09.

7. After Pink flops, Microsoft releases its own phone hardware
Pink will be unveiled at CES as some sort of media content for mobile device platform. It’ll likely tie in with Zune and maybe the Xbox, and will fail to take off. Towards the end of the year, Microsoft will shift to “plan B” and launch a phone to compete with the iPhone, but they’ll say it’s to compete with the BlackBerry for business users.

8. Sony cuts the price of the PS3 to $249
I’ve been talking about how big PS3 price cuts were needed to save the device for over 2 years now. Sony hasn’t listened, and so the PS3 is in trouble of being an after-thought to the Wii and Xbox 360 in this round of the gaming console wars. And remember, Blu-ray is at stake as well, if Sony can move PS3 units, it will only help the Blu-ray format which has not caught on yet despite beating out HD-DVD in the format wars. But even at $249, the Wii will outsell it.

9. The Beatles come to iTunes
Yes, it will finally happen this year. The hold up now is just a legal one, and with The Beatles music already coming to video games, it’d be silly if it wasn’t available to download (legally) on the Internet as well.

10. Once it launches on the Mac, Chrome gets double-digit market share
Chrome exploded out of the game in terms of usage, and for good reason: It’s awesome. But it’s also currently still only on Windows PC, and I’m not going to dual-boot just to use it. When it comes to the Mac — it is being built by Mike Pinkerton, the guy behind Mozilla’s Camino browser for the Mac (which I am using right now) — I suspect it will be the new browser of choice for myself and many others on the Mac.

11. Android phones outsell iPhones worldwide, but in the U.S., the iPhone is still king
There are many, maybe even dozens of phones running Google’s Android platform set to launch in 2009. While I have no doubt that worldwide sales will soon elipse the iPhone, which is just one device in two flavors (8GB and 16GB) after all, I think the iPhone will still hang onto a lead in the U.S. in 2009 simply because it’s better.

12. Apple creates a way to get apps running on the Apple TV
This may be done by linking up the iPhone or iPod touch with the Apple TV (which you can do already to use the Remote app), or it could be that Apple actually brings the App Store to the Apple TV, and you use your iPhone (or iPod touch) as the controller for it.

13. Apple unveils a multi-touch Mighty Mouse
I thought this would happen last year, but despite many patents suggesting such functionality being uncovered, this never came in 2008. I expect it to in 2009 because the Mighty Mouse still sucks and Apple continues to push forward its multi-touch agenda.

14. Windows 7 comes out at the end of the year and is better than Vista, but fails to dazzle
It will be launched towards the end of the year, will look just like Vista, but will perform better. Still, that won’t be enough for most people and the overall reception, while better, will be lukewarm at best.

15. One of the online movie distribution services will get a deal for movie rentals the same day they appear in stores
The most annoying thing about iTunes, Xbox Live and all the rest of the Internet rental services is that you can’t rent new releases the day they are available in the brick and mortar stores like Blockbuster to rent. Some, like iTunes let you buy them that day, but you have to wait weeks to rent them. I bet someone gets the movie studios to change this rule in 2009.

16. Blockbuster finds itself in trouble after its digital distribution model fails to catch on
Blockbuster has simply been too late to jump on the trends in the industry it once dominated. The only way I see them making a comeback is if they are the ones to pull off prediction #15.

17. Apple will stop updating the iPod classic
The device is slowly being put out to pasture. That process continues in 2009 with no updates to the hard drive-based version when Apple updates the rest of the iPod line. A de-facto death.

18. Transformers 2 will narrowly beat Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, Harry Potter, G.I. Joe and Angels & Demons as the biggest movie of the year
In terms of what I want to see the most, right now, I vote for Star Trek after that kick-ass trailer.

19. Google Reader launches a “Most Shared” area
A ‘most shared’ area, which services like ReadBurner and RSSmeme already do, could be very powerful. Google is slowing moving in that direction with its new “What’s Hot” area, this is the next step.

20. Blog commenting become hot again thanks to Facebook Connect
The integration is slick, and it makes comments useful since they’re tied to an actual person instead of some anonymous schmuck named masterchief4ever666.

Also see, 17 Predictions for 2008. Happy New Year everyone!

The Internet went crazy today with more rumors and questionable reports about Steve Jobs’ health. Let me start out by saying that I really don’t like writing stories which solely focus on anyone’s health. For the most part I’ve avoided it, except when trying to help debunk ridiculous rumors (yes, almost always about Jobs), or mentioning it in passing. But today I took a little bit different approach — and I thought I should explain.

First off, some people were outraged with my headline on VentureBeat, ‘Local yogurt store tells blogger that Steve Jobs is “in great health”.’ Some thought it was too much like a spoof, some found is distasteful, some just thought it was stupid. Here’s the deal, yes, I intended it to be goofy — it was almost much more goofy, believe me.

My reasoning for doing that — and for writing the whole story itself — is really that this whole thing with Jobs’ health has gotten out of hand. When I saw on FriendFeed that Scoble talked to someone who had actually seen — as in with their own eyes — Jobs recently, and that he looked healthy to them, at first I thought that was ridiculous — but then I stopped — why is that anymore ridiculous than any of the other speculation and half reports going around the Internet about the topic? If anything, it’s much less ridiculous. So I wrote it.

And that’s why I gave it the spoof title — it’s just as much a commentary about the whole situation, as it is about the actual story involved (which yes, was kind of silly). Sorry if that went over some people’s heads.

My actual feelings on all of this are pretty much in line with CNBC’s Jim Goldman, who, as far as I can tell remains the only one (besides Scoble in the yogurt store) doing any real reporting on this topic day in and day out. I recommend you read his second story on the topic today, in which he basically goes off on people for irresponible reporting on this issue.

Now, the Gizmodo rumor may be all true, somewhat true or not at all true. But that’s the problem — these same types of stories are getting thrown around on a weekly basis now citing either no one or one anonymous source. It’s affecting Apple’s stock price and creating a kind of hysteria. If Jobs really is sick — as in so sick that he can no longer run Apple — Apple would absolutely have to disclose it. And as Goldman says, they know it. They would get in a lot of trouble if they did not do that. They are not idiots, it would come out eventually.

So until Apple does disclose anything about Jobs’ health, why speculate on it? This is a human being after all, one who is still alive and has a family. The Times (which also didn’t get my humor in the headline apparently) says this is akin to the hoopla surrounding Princess Diana when she was still alive. That’s probably not such a ridiculous claim.

Has Apple been misleading on this topic in the past? You could argue that — but you could also argue the other way. One of those times didn’t involve a life-threatening illness, so what difference does that really make — and the other time, Apple consulted lawyers to see if it would have to disclose that Jobs had cancer (before he had surgery to remove his tumor), the lawyers determined they would not have to disclose it, so they did not.

Could Steve Jobs pass away tomorrow? Sure, but really we could all die tomorrow. The key is if Apple knows he’s going to pass away soon. And seeing as they haven’t said that, I have to believe they don’t know what, and that Jobs is fine.

Will that end the speculation? Of course not, and that’s why I’m hoping for a Jobs cameo at Macworld — even if it’s just by way of video iChat with Phil Schiller — to give a big “fuck you” to all those out there speculating about him being near death.

Wouldn’t that just be a classic “one more thing…”?

Yesterday’s Bitchmeme about Twitter authority searches has spilled over into today. I love Bitchmemes that can last a whole weekend, and Arrington, Le Meur and Scoble are doing their best to keep it going, bless their hearts.

Last night, Arrington wrote a post, Bloggers Lose The Plot Over Twitter Search, which called out me (among others) for getting too worked up over the issue. After all, he argues, you wouldn’t have to use Twitter authority search, it would just be an option. Eric Marcoullier of Gnip basically echoed that sentiment in a comment on my post yesterday as well.

Here’s my response to that, something which Arrington knows but probably can’t say too loudly on TechCrunch: Most of the people who use the Internet are idiots.

If you give them an option to search by “authority,” they will assume all the results returned are from the most authoritative people — even if that is just based on the number of followers they have and not really anything authoritative at all. They will continue to assume that WHEN the system is gamed and it’s all spammers who have the most followers. Let me re-emphasize WHEN.

Another TechCrunch writer, Jason Kincaid, has it right when he says, “as Google showed over a decade ago, popularity isn’t the best indicator of relevance. For that, you need an algorithm that can filter out spammy results (don’t be surprised if Twitter is already working on one in-house).” But with that, we’re getting into something that is way more complex than Twitter itself.

Which brings me back to my third point yesterday, that it should be some third party service which makes this functionality for those who really want it — and guess what, one did in a few hours: Twitority.

This made the agitator of this whole Bitchmeme, Loic Le Meur, very happy. And now, for his part, he says that “authority” was the wrong word for what he meant. That’s basically what I figured yesterday in saying “Now let me be clear, the most basic form of the idea isn’t an awful one — that it should be easier to search highly influential Twitter users’ thoughts on specific topics — but the way Loic Le Meur wants to do it is laughably bad,” and that gets to the heart of Bitchmeme itself.

For a Bitchmeme to be really great, it basically has to be an argument about nothing. If Le Meur had just said “Twitter needs more search options,” that would have been boring and no one would have gotten into a heated discussion about it. Instead, he adds authority to the mix and the blogosphere explodes.

Scoble is more or less saying that in his all-over-the-place post about idiots on the Internet today, but it’s something that The Joker says much more succinctly:

“If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger, will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one, little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!” 

Shameless last sentence plug to follow me on Twitter.

Update: And I’m glad to see my friend Sean Percival is on the case already with Twithority, which gives a side-by-side of time-based Twitter searches versus ones based on users with the most followers.

I’m so glad Bitchmeme is back, because it gives me the opportunity to weigh in on what is an awful idea: Authority search in Twitter.

Now let me be clear, the most basic form of the idea isn’t an awful one — that it should be easier to search highly influential Twitter users’ thoughts on specific topics — but the way Loic Le Meur wants to do it is laughably bad.

First of all, he wants this to be based on the number of followers you have. While for some people that’s a good indicator of importance, for others it means nothing. I have 3,600+ followers on Twitter right now, that’s a lot, but there are plenty of people with thousands more simply because they follow thousands of people and pull in the reciprocal follows. If I went out there and followed 15,000 people I’m sure I would get up to near that number of followers very quickly, instead I choose to keep the people I follow to a more manageable 700-ish.

But the problem isn’t me doing that to gain followers (at least I hope not), it’s that there are a ton of quasi-spam Twitter users who do that and many of them have thousands or tens of thousands of followers. They would show up on Le Meur’s “Authority Search.” And if they weren’t, they would start gaming the system to gain more followers so they would show up.

Second, this absolutely would ruin one of the most compelling things about Twitter: That it’s completely democratic. If you want to know what someone has to say on a topic, follow them, no need to have their opinions forced in everyone’s face because they are “more authoritative,” that’s subjective. Dave Winer and Jeremiah Owyang have the right idea for this: Make an option to search for topic within the people you follow.

Third, it’s fine if someone wants to filter out all the Twitter noise and use it to highlight key thoughts being formed by key people, but Twitter itself should not be doing this. Leave Twitter as an equal playing field, let some third party use the APIs to make this — some already have to some extent.

Back in Bitchmeme land, nearly everyone is jumping on this as a bad idea — because it is. But the reasons people are bitching about it so much is because Le Meur’s actually onto something that is in fact a growing problem on Twitter (too much noise), but he proposes a solution without thinking it through.

Find me on Twitter so you can “respect my authori-tay!”

Find more Bitchmemes here.

Well it’s that time of year again — the end of it. As such, it’s time to go over my predictions from last year and see how I did. Without further ado:

1) Google Drive aka ‘Gdrive’ or ‘Platypus’ will be released — Wrong
Platypus rumors crept up a few times throughout the year, but it remains an internal Google project that I’ve haven’t heard anyone talk about coming to the public since the economy took a turn for the worse. AOL is closing Xdrive, it’s online storage solution in a few days.

2) Microsoft and Google’s next big battle will be over who gets the rights to purchase at least part of Yahoo — Right
Arguably no story was bigger this year than Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo — which started just a couple months after my predictions. As I expected, Google got involved early, first with just words against such a deal, then actions, by offering Yahoo an out with a search advertising deal, which they eventually dropped amid pressure from the U.S. government. I still suspect we haven’t heard the end of all of this…

3) Blu-ray will finally defeat HD-DVD thus ending the format wars towards the end of the year — Right
I said “the end of the year” but it happened very early on in the year. Still, I’m going to give myself credit, because I wrote: “However if Blu-ray is able to woo Warner Brothers to their side exclusively, it will be all but over.” That happened, and then HD-DVD, as expected, died. Some analysts thought this war would go on for years — those analysts were stupid.

4) The Nintendo Wii will continue its dominance in videogame wars but Sony’s PS3 will outsell Microsoft’s Xbox 360 for the year — Half Right
The Nintendo Wii utterly dominated the game console space this year, even while some thought it would flop after initial success. But while the PS3 was outselling the Xbox 360 for much of the year after Sony finally cut the price, Microsoft came on very strong at the end with its own price cuts (and cool features like Netflix compatibility) to edge out the PS3 in sales for the year by what looking to be only about 600,000 units worldwide.

5) Flickr will launch its video service - but it won’t be meant to directly compete with YouTube – Right
While it was an easy call to say Flickr video would launch (even though it was several months after the company said it would), the company did make a definite decision not to have it compete with YouTube by limiting lengths to 90-seconds and giving it only to premium members.

6) Google’s OpenSocial will fail to capture the excitement that Facebook’s Platform did this year — Right
OpenSocial made some headlines this year for partnerships, but we have yet to really see anything of any significance come of it. Google is clearly working on it, but as I said in the prediction, rather than being like a “social blanket” that’s easy to spread, “this could turn out to be like painting an old brick wall - hard to get all the little spots.”

7) Social Network Aggregation is going to be huge — Right
This isn’t a slam dunk “right,” but I think it’s fair to say that FriendFeed has caught on much more than it was at this point last year. Also, we now see Facebook aggregating items from other sites like I predicted.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be the biggest film of the year — Wrong
When I said this, who knew that it would be a rather mediocre movie? Still, it was the number three movie of the year overall with $317 million at the box office — behind Iron Man by only $1 million. And who knew The Dark Knight would becomes the 2nd biggest box office money maker ever with over $530 million? I was more excited for it than any other movie, but I didn’t realize everyone else was — or that it would be that good.

9) Apple releases a new kind of mouse with multi-touch capabilities — Wrong (for this year)
Patents were unveiled that indicated that Apple was definitely working on something in this field (bonus points?). And this news recently blew up again when someone did a kick ass mock-up of what it could look like. The Mighty Mouse still sucks, I fully expect this new mouse in 2009.

10) NBC goes back to iTunes — Right
The two sides finally figured out that they need each other. It was meant to be.

11) Microsoft really starts hyping the idea of ‘Windows 7′ as Apple continues to grow more quickly and Vista continues to be an albatross — Right
This is probably my favorite prediction because I’d say this is completely what happened. I feel like I’ve hardly heard the word “Vista” in months, as all I hear now is “Windows 7″ — and a lot of it now is from Microsoft itself, which even gave out an early build this year!

12) Microsoft will enter the mobile phone market — Wrong (this year)
This is another one of those predictions that is wrong for 2008, but I think will be right in 2009. There is a lot of smoke out there about what exactly Microsoft is doing with the Zune, project “Pink,” and its purchase of Danger — the company that made the Sidekick. Additionally we have one source at VentureBeat that claims to have seen a prototype of a Microsoft-built phone — but perhaps that is just a prototype…for now. I still believe this is just a matter of time. Microsoft needs to make a move here.

13) Digg will finally be bought - by a major player — Wrong (but almost right)
Google was very, very close to acquiring Digg this year, but pulled out at the last minute. After that fell apart, the company raised a new large round of funding and is pushing for expansion in 2009 despite losing a bunch of money.

14) Blockbuster will make a last ditch effort to save itself via Movielink — Right
The company finally launched a website that could stream movies with Movielink’s technology, but the funnier stuff came when Blockbuster’s CEO said it was in no rush to make a set-top box — then came out with one a couple months later, after everyone else already had. I haven’t heard much about Blockbuster’s set-top box since its launch, but everyone sure seems to love their Netflix on the Roku, Xbox 360 and various other devices.

15) GPS will be all the rage in consumer goods — Half Right
The iPhone 3G has upped its popularity, and it is popping up in more cameras and I’m seeing more cars with it, but it’s not exactly everywhere — yet.

16) Yahoo makes a bid to buy Twitter — Half Wrong
So this is a tricky one. I’ve heard from two separate sources that Yahoo did in fact approach Twitter about an acqusition, but that is was before all of the Microsoft takeover stuff, so it very well could have been sometime in late 2007. Still, I’ll go with technically wrong until I find out more.

17) The Beatles will FINALLY be on iTunes — Wrong
Even Paul McCartney thought it would be a done deal in 2008, but alas, it wasn’t. Legal issues remain, but I’d definitely bet on 2009.

Overall, I came up with 9 for 17 as my total score. That includes the “half rights” as half points, but doesn’t include my “half wrong” for any points. I’m pleased with getting more than half right for such a long list, but I’m more pleased as how close I seemed on nearly all of them — even the ones that were wrong.

Watch for my 2009 list in the coming days.

It’s Christmas Eve, above is my most favorite holiday card of all.

Today, VentureBeat, the site I work for, secured the #3 spot on the Techmeme Leaderboard for the first time. Amazingly, one year ago, while the current #1 and #2 (TechCrunch and CNET, respectively) were in the exact same positions, VentureBeat was all the way down at #31.

So what does that mean? Well to a lot of you, probably nothing — it’s mostly insider baseball type stuff. Most tech writers and pundits watch Techmeme religiously — even if some claim they don’t like it. For a glimpse of what is going on in the world of tech, there is simply no better source.

Being on Techmeme’s leaderboard means that your site has contributed a lot of the Techmeme headlines in the past 30 days. Is a leaderboard for such things silly? Maybe, but it also serves as a type of validation for a job well done. There’s a lot that goes into Techmeme’s algorithms to determine what should be a headline (and some of it is now, and has always been human-picked), but the most important factor remains links. If you break a story or write about something in a provocative way, people link to you.

Being high up on the Techmeme Leaderboard to me means that people find what me and my colleagues at VentureBeat are writing to be useful, good or at least interesting. That validation is a nice holiday gift.