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Sick of 2011 predictions yet? We've got just a few more. Analyst firm IDC released its 2011 predictions report this week, too late to be included in our earlier analyst firms predictions round-up. "Transformation" is IDC's watchword for next year. According to the firm, transformation driven by the cloud, mobility and analytics. "In addition to creating new markets and opportunities, this restructuring will overthrow nearly every assumption about who the industry's leaders will be and how they establish and maintain leadership," says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

It's prediction season on the Internet, and today's dose of futurism comes from security firm Imperva. The company just released its Security Trends for 2011 paper. Among other things, Imperva predicts consolidation of the cyber-crime industry, convergence in international privacy and data security laws, and more state-sponsored cyber-attacks targeted at private industry.

Researchers from Indiana University have devised a method for predicting changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average through the analysis of Twitter updates. Using two mood-recording algorithms, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) and OpinionFinder, the team analyzed 9.7 million tweets posted between March and December 2008. They found that correlations between the calmness index, one of the six "moods" measured by GPOMS, could be used to predict whether or not the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up or down between two and six days later.

Welcome to the first Weekly Wrapup of 2009 - and a very happy new year to all of our readers! First up we look back at our top web products of 2008, then we look forward to 2009 with our annual Web Predictions. In product news this week, Apple announced it will remove DRM from iTunes, Twitter had a major security scare, and we spotted some Semantic Web technology in Google search results. In the first RWW Live of 2009 we discussed how startups can survive in a down economy, Alex Iskold wrote about the growing importance of the digital world, and we looked at a report showing Apple's dominance of the Mobile Web. Also check the latest in our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

It's time for our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media.

Looking back at our 2008 Web predictions, we got some of them right! "The big Internet companies will [embrace] open standards" (Google, Yahoo and others did this); "Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008" (check!); "Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground" (Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine were released and AWS grew). We also got some wrong, including most of our acquisition picks! Digg, Twitter, Zoho, Tumblr - all remain independent. Not to be deterred, we've made new acquisition predictions for '09... although the names will be familiar ;-)

Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation - perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we've embedded below, but we thought we'd pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.

In an effort to monetize YouTube, the video giant will start experimenting with full-length TV shows that include embedded ads. Upcoming video service Hulu offers similar content on its site and is giving Youtube stiff competition. Help us in predicting the following: with this new offering from YouTube, what will Hulu's traffic growth be for November 2008 according to Compete?

Just last year, Microsoft snagged a $240 million stake in Facebook in a bidding war against Google. However nothing but speculation has resulted since that stake was won. This week we saw the first steps of integration of Microsoft Live Search on Facebook. Microsoft is promising to improve the user experience on Facebook with the addition of Live Search functionality and advertisements.

We'd like your help in predicting what the percentage of Microsoft's share of searches will be by December of 2008 following the integration of Live Search on Facebook. Will it increase or decrease and by how much? Click here to cast your prediction.

Last week rumors were swirling that eBay was looking to sell StumbleUpon. eBay purchased StumbleUpon in early 2007 for a bargain price of $75 million.

We've still yet to have these rumors confirmed, but what if eBay were to actually sell StumbleUpon? Help us predict whether eBay will sell the service by the end of this year and if so, the price tag that it might fetch.

Yesterday, Google released Lively, a browser based virtual world somewhat reminiscent of The Palace from the mid-90s. A lot of people have been wondering why Google would be interested in entering this market, but according to Hitwise, it seems Google is looking at all the major categories its search engine is sending traffic to and then tries to develop a product for that category.