Six (Mostly) Safe Tech Bets for 2006

So, for a few more years, the media we download will be the same stuff you see or hear on old media. The masses will have to wait for cheap, yet sophisticated production technology in order to win a wider audience. Until then, the quickest route to fame will remain reality TV.

An Internet backlash will dampen stock prices for a while.

This is an easy call because it's already under way on a small scale: Grumblings about Google, the brouhaha over defamatory entries in Wikipedia, the concerns about middle-age predators prowling for teens on MySpace, and so on.

A decade ago, the Internet brought us email, instant news and cheap communication. Then, it became clear, it also had brought spam, bogus facts and deadly viruses. The new innovations that have emerged over the past couple of years -- social networking, user-generated content, do-it-yourself publishing -- are giving birth to new problems.

It's a matter of time before an incident causes things to boil over. My guess is things will come to a head over privacy concerns, whether through the amount of personal data we've been seduced into posting on sites or through data-mining that can reveal to companies things about ourselves that companies don't have a right to know. Some bad news will dim the blush that has returned to Internet highfliers.

Companies will get better at profiting from the open-sourcing of the U.S.

Back in 2001, who would have figured Red Hat would be actively traded, let alone added to the Nasdaq 100? The stock had sunk below $4 after a few sunny months in the triple-digits. It's now around $28 after posting a profit that more than doubled in its third quarter. That prompted three analysts last week raised their outlook, thanks to demand for Linux open-source software.