After successfull predicting the subprime crisis and market crash along with Barack Obama being elected as president I have been getting droves of request for my 2009 predictions. Here they are:

1) Google will find another decent revenue stream besides Google Adsense. They have to. They are running out of properties to stick Google Adsense and more people are wising up to the contextual deception.

2) The FTC will start to investigate some of these fake weight loss blogs and grant websites and make examples out of people.

3) “Professional” SEO’s will overtake lawyers and used car salesman in 2009 as most hated and joked about profession.

4) The market will market will bounce back to 11k+ by the end of 2009.

5) Facebook will get 2x more users then it currently has by the end of 2009.

6) Google’s Andriod operating system will be regarded as a flop and I will never even get to try it.

7) Yahoo will continue to suck at everything but flickr and delicious. It doesn’t matter if Jesus Christ comes down to be their CEO.

Competition in the SEO/Affiliate conference space will continue to drive down prices making these conferences more affordable for those who could not before attend.

9) I predict a VERY litigious year for the affiliate marketing industry as a whole. Affiliate companies are out of control turning a blind eye to what affiliates are doing.

10) My book will finally come out after 2+ years in the making but nobody will buy it and I will be sad.

No sooner did we cover Offbeat Guides, with its professionally printed and personalized guidebooks for travellers, than one of our spotters alerted us to a similar offering out of Austria: Tripwolf, which offers free, customized travel guides in PDF format.

Like Offbeat Guides, Tripwolf combines professional editorial content with user-generated content from some 13,000 globetrotters worldwide. The ad-supported site focuses primarily on Europe and is backed by MairDumont, Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides (including the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands), which has put all of its high-quality content—covering more than 250,000 destinations and points of interest—online for free. Tripwolf also aggregates third-party content from sites like Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, and hotel price comparisons are powered by HotelsCombined.com. Community features include user-generated photos, travel blogs, ratings and advice as well as Facebook integration, with iPhone features and the ability to book flights or hotels coming soon. Once users have compiled all the information they need, they can build and print a personalized, free 10-to-20-page travel guide in PDF format to take along on their trips. Vienna-based Tripwolf was launched this summer with sites in German and English; a Spanish-language version is due next year.

As purse strings continue to tighten, it seems likely travellers will research trips ever more carefully to make sure their hard-earned travel dollars, euros and pesos don’t get misspent, making sites like Tripwolf and Offbeat Guides increasingly useful. Tripwolf’s next step? Team up with Blurb or Cafepress to offer consumers the option of bound books, too. A nicely bound travel guide in the hand is worth two in PDF… or something like that!