After much research and crystal ball gazing, here are Syntagma’s tech predictions for 2007. They’re made on the premise that predictions are rarely right whatever we say :

1. Microsoft announces the next version of its Windows operating system will be named “Alpha Centauri” after a star situated 6 million light-years away. Following sporadic media hilarity, the company hastily changes it to, “Coming Soon”.

2. Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is appointed CEO of startup company, YoHoo. Speaking from Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, where he’s enjoying a freebie holiday with his wife and extended family, Blair says, “President Bush suggested it, so I could hardly refuse”.

3. The Blog Herald is sold again to website : www.@/#~35hgd+*g.blogspot.com, which turns out to be a splog owned by would-be Russian oligarch Oleg Splatovski, who once bid a non-existent oil well for Chelsea Football Club. The price paid for The Blog Herald is said to be one million barrels of Vladivostok crude.

4. Techmeme is bought by Disney Corp as part of its expansion into Web 2.0 cartoon inventory. Later, a red-faced spokesduck says, “We thought it was a Mickey Mouse website”.

5. Robert Scoble announces he’s running for President in 2008. John Edwards agrees to become his running mate saying, “I know a good thing when I see it.”

6. Martin Neumann publishes his first digital book under new imprint, kickstartpress : “How We Won the Ashes”. Withdrawing the title later, Neumann says he didn’t realize the book was more than a year old.

7. Google admits it made a mistake in purchasing YouTube and sells it on to b5media for $1.7 billion. A press release from b5 claims, “It’s a real bargain, especially as Rick Segal is paying for it out of his contingency fund”.

8. TechCrunch is bought by Kelloggs Corp for an undisclosed sum. An insider source says, “It’s a great name for our new, improved cornflakes recipe”.

9. Syntagma Media launches a new social network where users can post their worst ever mistakes. Called YouBoob, it’s quickly bought up by David Krug for $2.6 billion. Krug later laments, “We thought it was a porn site”.

You heard it here first. Mind how you go.

Syntagma Media is proud to announce the latest of our new book serializations, Steve Newman’s Victorian detective novel, The Crime of the Crimea, due for publication next September.

We begin, however, with a seasonal short story specially written for Syntagma readers, The Great Christmas Train Robbery.

Read it here.

The Great Christmas Train Robbery — Synopsis

Detective Inspector Herbert Merriman Swann hated falling asleep on trains. He also hated waking up on trains that were empty and abandoned in the middle of a snow storm late on Christmas Eve.

Something was wrong, badly wrong.

Can Detective Sergeant John Parker come to his boss’s rescue in time, and stop a heinous crime from taking place? …

The serialization of the novel will begin shortly after Christmas.

It’s not really a red rag to a bull, more a spinnaker in a field of Spanish fighting bovines. Joseph Rago (note the name) has a total pop at the blogocracy in today’s Wall Street Journal, and boy does he land some heft.

“Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

First into the ring to challenge raging Rago is former heavyweight champ, Duncan Riley, a blog evangelist of some years standing, but now reduced to a small outpost somewhere in Western Australia. I won’t quote Duncan because a lot of it is unprintable in a family publication like Syntagma.

What Rago is doing is to lament the “passing” — or imminent demise — of the words-on-paper publication. He believes the editorial expertise and fact-checking that underpins print media is being shredded by the instantaneous hullaballoo of the blog form.

He’s right on that, of course, but in the process he’s tarring everyone with a large, but broadly insignificant, brush. If anyone wants a considered, fact checked, intelligent opinion on events, they wouldn’t necessarily turn to blogs. They would probably still buy one of the weekly current affairs magazines, or read the op-ed pieces in the Times or indeed, the WSJ, possibly online. But there are blog-like alternatives emerging now.

In the world of “blogs” you can get finely written and expert articles on most topics if you know where to find them. At the higher end, blogs are not like newspapers, they are more like authored, opinion columns in newspapers, where a single, authoritative voice expounds on a topic of the moment. That the piece is self-edited is the real distinction. The voice is more able to be itself. If it’s a good one, that’s a real plus.

But this type of column is not really a blog in the commonly understood way. Bob Cringely’s weekly piece over at PBS.org, for example, is more a part of the mainstream than the blogosphere. Online content platforms shouldn’t all be rubbed with the ashes of MySpace. The top end is converging with the mainstream and morphing into it as papers and magazines get digital and learn the tricks of the trade from online journalists and technologists.

There’s no either/or here. Why should there be? Let’s welcome the craft of print to the internet, not forgetting its wealth, and develop our own native pixelcraft to help the mergers along. That’s happening already.

Ultimately, in any field, only 5% succeed, and they can usually do the job anywhere. Blog “culture” will quickly be submerged by the need to present top quality content to a discerning readership, as printed pamphlets were replaced by organized newspapers in the 17th/18th centuries. As more people read online, so will online content reach out to meet them.

Rago and Riley are opposite poles of the debate. As always, the future lies somewhere in between.