• Battelle Media et al., Monday, January 4, 2010 11:42 AM

On days when there are no big stories, such as when the entire world seems to have been asleep for the past two weeks, still in a food coma, still hungover from New Year's, etc, what news outlets like to do is make plenty of fancy lists. And of course the New Year lends itself to prognostications as well. With the added strain of this being the dawning of a new decade -- so we are obviously now living in the future -- the lists can get even more wind-y than usual.

But at least John Battelle has the decency to start his predictions list with a list of his past scorecards. This gives him a chance to laud himself for predicting the recession would be over and offer circuitous reasoning for why his claim that Google's search share would go down is, in fact, not wrong in spite of the hard evidence that Google's search share is higher this year than it was last.

Battelle makes some fairly safe bets, such as that Google will strive to position itself as more than a search engine (too bad this is not Jan. 4. 2006) and guessing we'll step in some privacy doo-doo this year, before risking ire by saying the Apple tablet will be a disappointment. Which, of course is diametrically opposed to most other folks' guestimates, summed up eruditely by the Times's David Carr, who calls the Applet tablet a "Savior."

Agency Spy gives a bulletin on a few things the Medibistro folks have picked up and offers "Advertisers will straight up skip over networks and create their own content for clients."

Looking forward, but not too far forward, there are a couple of lists that take their stab at predicting the trends that will come out of CES in Las Vegas. Among them is the prediction that less people will attend CES in Vegas this year, according to VentureBeat. Ad Age does a succinct job of running through the big interface buzz-bins, such as 3-D TVs, ereaders, and net books, and then cut to the crux in summing up that we're facing a tech conference fairly devoid of new tech -- with a day-long session devoted to content and the assumption that there will be much hand-wringing ad wishful thinking over the state of the economy.

Perhaps the most important list to social media experts is a list about Twitter. And has the Oatmeal (a purveyor of all sorts of fine lists) got the list for you. In fact, it is literally about you: Ten Thing You Need To Stop Tweeting About.

But a new year is also a time to look back, as well as forward, and there is also this terrific infograph on the New York Times Op-Ed page today, picturing the last decade.

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