As the various predictions come out about people’s projections for 2007, I am beginning to see more and more impressive predictions about what will happen in the social media space.

Jacques Chirac isn’t experiencing a very good beginning to his new year. Data suggests that France is becoming even less relevant within the blogosphere, and now reports have surfaced that the nation’s joint search engine venture with Germany is about to go under.

As the year comes to a close, it’s time to look forwards to next year and what are shaping up to be some key trends for marketers to track through the year.

See the woman in the next cubicle, crunching hard on a spreadsheet? Don’t be fooled. She’s working the job search sites like a machine.

It is interesting that for all the charts and graphs displayed at meetings that you have attended t hat never once have you ever seen a graph of the true and major cost of “employee turnover”.

If you’re ever in India, steer clear of snide remarks about one Chhatrapati Shivaji. He’s been causing trouble for Google’s Orkut social networking site and Internet caf owners in India. And he’s been dead for three centuries.

The Dash Electronics booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas will have a dash of Yahoo in its product, thanks to their partnership on local search.

Google has clinched two significant patents this week. The first patent is related to methods for estimating similarity between web pages and documents.

There’s no doubt that email marketing has gotten a bum rap from abusive spammers. Several thoughts such as long prison sentences for wide scale spammers instantly come to mind in a vague jumble when this practice is mentioned.

Mobile Marketing is not something the majority of Americans are looking forward to. That is according to a new report from Forrester Research titled “Is the U.S. Ready for Mobile Marketing?” 79 percent of online users cannot abide the idea of ads on their mobile phones. Only 3 percent are willing to trust text ads on their mobile phone.

Companies are turning to automated testing tools more often than ever before to ensure that their applications are working properly prior to deployment.

Spammers rang in the New Year with a “Happy New Year!” e-mail virus attack. Israeli security company Commtouch reported that there were 3,262 variants in 65 hours. During that period the virus accounted for nearly 12 percent of all e-mail sent worldwide.

The New York Times takes a topic first covered by the Wall Street Journal back in October and asks us to suspend reality and believe it’s the first time it’s been discussed.

ColdFusion doesn’t seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I’d like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let’s not forget the most important of all…

Does using Google Search for malicious purposes affect the application of their “Don’t Be Evil” motto even if the negative activity isn’t actually their fault? Should Google restrict some of their search command capabilities if the results are being used …

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all have potential to experience vast success in the upcoming year. By the same token, a missed step here or there could be all that stands between any of these three companies and failure of a colossal magnitude.

Several years ago, I read an article (I can’t remember if it was in Forbes or Fortune) that featured Jacques Nasser.

Around the time the World Wide Web was being opened to users of AOL for the first time, and 9600 baud was a massive upgrade in speed for modems, some clever people made predictions about the future that held up pretty well over the years.

Second Life is the virtual world that’s getting all the attention these days, especially in the English-speaking world.

Every programmer loves to optimize, even when we know we shouldn’t.

The social media concept has been in full swing ever since the recent Las Vegas PubCon. While the search industry was well aware of its existence, the idea of leveraging social media for promotional reasons was recently acknowledged as a …

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s news analysis mockup, “The Colbert Report,” had a big year on the Internet. In addition to orchestrating a “wikiality” check for Wikipedia, Colbert attracted the second most number of links to a blog covering the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Globe and Mail journalist and author, Hal Niedzviecki, takes an interesting look at the impact bloggers are having on the lives of, wellnon-bloggers.

Video online is nothing new. In 2006 it was used mainly for entertainment purposes. Now more businesses are realizing the value of video to educate and inform customers, critics and shareholders. It is becoming an essential tool for companies to communicate their message.