2008: Anyone can make predictions!

I made a prediction earlier, saying that the city of Košice will blossom in 2008. The prediction brought me search engine traffic because people are starting to look for predictions for next year. Even Adwords advertisers have woken up with their predictions for 2008 (led by horoscopes and such).

Google Trends shows that the demand for new-year 2008 predictions online has grown over the last few years. Every year it starts earlier and peaks a little higher. The order of searches by countries is stable over time - Indians search for predictions the most.

A classmate of mine in primary school, Alexander, told me in 1988 that in 1999 we would be able to travel to neighbouring Austria on bicycle. To me that was unimaginable at the time: we were living in the depth of a Soviet-satellite Communist regime. In November 1989 suddenly we were walking across the border. His prediction simply turned out to be correct.

Now I feel like it may be fun to make a few predictions for 2008 - if I make 10 or 20 oredictions on random events there is a good chance a half of them may turn out right and having 5 or 10 correct prediction can be packaged as pretty good predictive success.

Anyway the purpose of this article is to motivate myself to make up a few predictions, write them up and drum them up.