It’s nice of Graham Holliday to include appearing on the Blog Relations Podcast in October as one of the highlights of his year.

Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed linking up over Skype to Graham who is based in Vietnam. His blog, Noodle Pie, is about the street food of Saigon, but also presents readers with lots of vibrant local colour and characters as well snippets of Graham’s life as a journalist. It’s one of the most interesting blogs around.

We are in good company. Noodle Pie has also received coverage this year form the BBC, The New York Times and many other media outlets.

Happy New Year to Graham! And to problogger Craig McGinty of This French Life who also took part in our France - Vietnam Podcast.

And of course, a Very Happy New Year to everyone who has taken part in our podcasts, dropped by to leave a comment, or just read our blog.

And A Special Happy New Year to our clients. May you go forth and multiply in 2006!

This is good news. A British Businessman has won £300 in damages from an email spam company. They settled out of court, the day before the case. It sounds like he wrote loads and loads of letters to the spammers during the dispute - gave them a dose of their own medicine.

The art of New Year’s predictions is to pick an existing trend from the past year and dress it up as clairvoyance. I’m not one to break with tradition….

1. Firefox will become a mainstream browser. As long ago as April, top blog Boing Boing reported that 38% of its readers were using Firefox. This seems rather extreme. Our own stats show 17%. At any rate, Firefox is catching on at the expense of Microsoft Explorer.

2. More people will jest about Bubble 2.0. Web 2.0 will be exciting but a bit frothy by the end of 2006. We’ve seen Yahoo! snap up some of the best start-ups, Flickr and del.icio.us - probably wise buys. ITV buying Friends united for £175 million was an interesting move. Skype sold for $3 billion or more to eBay was harder to justify. All this action will spur Venture Capitalists to back lots of start-ups with bright software ideas. Some of them will succeed, others will die.

3.As Google becomes more dominant, people will bitch about it more and more. Google will keep on coming out with new free services - and we will see the fruit of their cooperation with Sun Microsystems to distribute Star Office for free.

4. We will increasingly run software straight off the web, and not bother to install it on our computers - like a Wordpress blog, for instance.

5. Take points 1, 2,3 and 4 together, and Microsoft’s world domination starts to look vulnerable. It does already, but people will comment on it more. For years we have depended on Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and so forth. Now, who needs them? Firefox is sleek and fast. Star Office is good. And who uses MSN for search? Web 2.0 is death by a 1000 cuts for the old giant.

4. Traditional advertising will continue to die. Nobody believes it anymore. It’s moving online, but people screen banners and pop-ups out of their conscious vision. So advertising will be gradually be replaced with free services. Advertisers won’t think “how can we spend our mega-bucks to get the message out”. They will think, “What can we do for people so that they become engaged with us and become comfortable with us?” Internet Search is the ultimate advertising-service. Amazon is a brilliant service as well as a shop - it provides information and feedback on books and products. Businesses will have to gather and disseminate useful information rather than commercial messages - and blogs, wikis, and podcasts are an ideal way to do this.

5. The blight of Spam is on the way out. Everyone sees through it now, and nobody clicks on a spammed link - do they? Perhaps you have to be into Viagra and online strip poker to know the answer to this question.

6. Newspapers will continue to suffer from the trend to online advertising. Most of them will fail to respond intelligently, but will run around willy-nilly buying up internet companies that they don’t understand. They can’t understand the internet, because it’s driven so much by users, and newspapers have always secretly regarded their readers as lunatics and freaks. Now the freaks have taken over the asylum… no wonder the newspapers are bewildered.

7. The Financial Times will be sold. Its former Editor (Andew Gowers) left his post this year saying that the internet was a big threat to newspapers. No newspaper has spent so much money to so little effect online. They charge for content, but it’s so slow and clunky as to be useless. Meanwhile, everyone checks their share prices and reads the business news on the free internet. You hardly ever see a City commuter carrying the pink broadsheet. So the FT is in more trouble than any other newspaper, and badly needs some enlightened leadership.

8. Podcasting will come of age as the mobile internet becomes more prevalent. Once you have the always-on internet in your pocket, it’s just as easy to tune into a podcast as a radio programme. Your web browser will replace the dial on your radio and the remote on your television.

9. This takes us back to point 1. The web browser will become even more important and even more central to our lives. Your web browser will be the interface through which many every-day applications run - from word processing to radio receiving. Mozilla Firefox, which lends itself to extensions, will become more and more useful, and The Mozilla Foundation, a non-for-profit organisation headed by a trapeze artist will gain immense influence and power at the expense of Microsoft. Opera will do well too, as it is geared into the mobile internet.

10. This year will bring prosperity, happiness and health to all our readers.

Our thanks to our niche following that has put up with our flow of “wisdom” and gibberish, and corrected our worst errors. We know we haven’t been so productive recently, as we’ve turned attention to Storynory, but our New Year’s resolution is to keep posting away on this spot.

One of the hidden features of the new Wordpress 2.0 is that it is ready for Ajax plugins and development.

I’m always reading about Ajax and secretly wondering what the Hell is it? (I just hope that I’m not the only one). I dimly recall from my Classical education that Ajax was a hero in the Trojan War, and then he seemed to crop up as a chemical for cleaning the loo. I presume that the techies are not talking about either of these Ajaxes.

So I turn to the Wikipedia and learn that Ajax (programming) is based on Javascript. I am pleased to say that I already understand that Java is a language that works across all platforms, Apple, Windows, Linux etc. So far so good. (Wrong, Hugh! - see comment from Markus)

Now as far as I can understand, you will know an Ajax application when you see it in the following way. If you come across a webpage that interacts with you without reloading, then that’s probably Ajax. For example, it might be a search function that gives you results without taking you to another page. Ajax commenting might be possible on a blog, so that you are pretty much typing directly onto the page.

That’s my bluffer’s guide to Ajax. There’s going to be more of it about in 2006. You can see it in action on Wordpress blogs using the K2 theme. This is an example of a blog using K2. Try the Ajax search function, and you will see what it’s all about. And you can see the features list here . K2 seemed destined to become the new Wordpress Default, as it’s written by the same author. Ironcially, it turns out that K2 is not yet Wordpress 2.0 compatible, and is conspicious by its absence from the newly released package.

I’ve upgraded our blog to Wordpress. 2.0 without any apparent mishaps. The longest part was backing-up the old version, just in case…

Spot the difference ! You won’t see any, I suspect. The biggest innovation for an ordinary user is behind the scenes in the writing interface. Some say that the What-You-See is What-you-get post writer creates incorrect code - but you can turn it off. There is a separate and very nice feature that allows you to preview your post, exactly as it will look on the blog, including your own theme and design. I like that very much, because I always spot typos after I publish (use Save and Continue Editing).

There is a built-in anti-spam plugin called Akismet. You have to get a key to use it, but that’s simply done. Sign up for one at wordpress.com.

I’m not sure if all the plugins we use on our other Wordpress site, Storynory, will work in Wordpress. 2.0. This could be a nuisance. There’s a list of plugins that will and won’t work here but I see no mention of CG single-cat.

The main benefits, I understand, will follow in the months to come. There’s loads more scope for plugin editors to come up with new and exciting features.

I notice that the last version of Wordpress had almost a million downloads. I expect this one will have even more.

The latest edition of WordPress (2.0) has just been released. The upgrade process looks a bit scary, so take care!

Both the music and the film industries have been trying to use the law to clamp down on file-sharing. Both are quite rightly frightened that people will juts swap music and movies, and in effect their business model will be destroyed. Yet this week the French Parliament - against the advice of its government - voted to legalise file-sharing. It is the first country to do so, and the implications of the law are not yet completely clear. But it looks as if in France you’ll be able to swap what you like. If so, there will be little to stop people setting up databases in France, and making film and music files freely available to the world.

Maybe this is just a way of the French striking back at the Americans, since US corporations largely own both industries (although Vivendi controls one of the biggest record labels). What it tells us, however, is that both industries are far from convincing people that the law is the right way to defeat file-sharing. Perhaps they should be thinking of a different business model instead?

del.icio.us, the social bookmark service, has fallen off the internet (having just been bought by Yahoo!). They’ve taken all the bookmarks down while they rebuild the service.

Take a look at the del.icio.us blog. You will see that sympathetic comments are pouring in from del.ico.us users. Not a sarcy comment in sight. Now, I think that shows a relationship with their user base that most companies could only envy, including 6 Apart whose Typad blogs have been on the blink recently.

The lesson? Social projects create a good vibe.

Interesting to see that Reuters are using Feedburner RSS to distribute their newstories. Smart move. I think I might have worked in the past with the Guy at Reuters who is responsible for this.

I’ve been listening to Ron Bloom, co-founder of Podshow, the venture capital backed outfit that plans to bring podcasts to listeners, and sponsors to podcasters. His business partner, by the way, is Adam Curry, the “Podfather” - or perhaps “one of the Podfathers”, depending on whose history of podcasting you read.

Bloom was chatting on the Businessweek blogspotting podcast. Naturally I’m interested, as one day we hope to find sponsors for Storynory and some other podcasting ideas we have in mind.

Bloom has some good points, although he does go on a bit. He says that some podcaster presenters have a “special relationship” with their listeners. We definately agree there. Perhaps the relationship is even more special than radio, because of the feedback via the website, and because of the friendly and personal style of podcasts, which are rather like the blogs of the sound waves. I don’t really believe him when he says that Podshow can “measure” the relationship. That seems like Dr. Spock from Star Treck trying to measure humanoid emotions with a little bleeping box.

He also talks about creating “listener delight” by giving audiences better control over what they listen to. Well it’s true that none of the podcatchers or directories are ideal yet. Perhaps Podshow can make its Podcast Alley into the best. I don’t know. But I do know that over 80% of Storynory’s listeners use Apple’s iTunes. That makes Apple the gatekeeper of podcasting. I find the iTunes approach a bit clunky. It’s a pity that you have to open up the iTunes softwear application to cruise its directory of Podcasts. One day, I think, Apple will fix that so that you can access its directory straight from your browser .

What I’m driving at, is that Apple could easily dominate the market for driving sponsors to podcasts. It has the power in its hands, and it only has to find the will to do it. If podcasting continues to grow, Apple can eat Podshow’s lunch.

So if Podshow is going to fullfil its dreams, it had better come up with some very wonderful ways to “delight” listeners and capture the podcasting audience. It needs to be the “Google” of podcasting. It’s not impossible… but it’s certainly a long shot for its venture capital backers.

The Ricky Gervais Podcast has topped the iTunes charts in both the US and the UK.

The Guardian has outsmarted The Daily Telegraph in the podcasting stakes. The Telegraph has a professional voice-over person reading out stories and columns from the paper. Some of them just don’t translate into an audio style . The over all result lacks human interaction or warmth.

The Guardian has thought laterally, and found a talent that complements its brand. Businesses could think this way too. They could sponsor podcasts that are not directly about the business, but which have good associations for their brand.

Newspapers and publishers have a huge opportunity to get into radio very cheeply through podcasting. They are saving tons of money on licences, transmission, etc. They should not, however, cut back on production values. That means they need a creative person to produce the show. It’s not just about speaking into a tin can.