WebProNews

A forecast of doom and economic gloom encompassing the tech world may be more reality than nightmare this year.

We haven't broken this out in a while, but based on observations by a couple of notable techies, we'll say it: The Fear is back.

First, some preliminaries. The NASDAQ had its worst one-day drop in years. Unemployment hit five percent.

Google dropped 4.13 percent to $657 per share. Intel received a downgrade from JPMorgan.

Not good. It gets worse. Mashable editor Adam Ostrow noted the first three days of 2008 have been the worst start for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression. The Dow fell 256.54 today, to 12,800.18.

Feeling The Fear yet? Greg Linden might think you should. He has one prediction for 2008, and it's not a pretty one:

We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.

The crash will be driven by a recession and prolonged slow growth in the US.

Linden also thinks online advertising will go flat at best, or even decline. Google and Yahoo will suffer, and ads driven by spyware and malware will return in a big way, all over the Internet.

We're going to hope Linden's off the mark with his prediction. But the start of 2008 looks as joyless as an emo kid's Live Journal at the moment.