In his excellent book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a strong case that the changes that really matter come out of nowhere, like a black swan. You can’t predict them. They don’t result from several generations of white swans gradually turning gray until the black one appears. They always catch us by surprise.

That being the case, most forecasts are nothing more than a projection of trends. That virtually ensures that our correct predictions will be mostly useless and the rest will simply be wrong.

So with that buildup, here are my predictions of what we’ll see in 2010 in the world of communications. Just keep in mind that they’re really nothing more than wild ass guesses (WAGs). Here goes, with hopes that nobody drags these out a year from now:

1. Newspapers will stabilize. The drastic cutbacks and bankruptcies are re-creating the newspapers into an entirely different kind of business with much lower overhead. Some major media companies will emerge from Chapter 11 with owners whose investment is a small fraction of the former value.
2. Blogs will grow into serious niche-based news sites, as displaced journalists secure startup capital, assign beats and apply historic professional journalistic standards to the new environment.
3. A major new player will emerge to challenge Twitter as the social medium of choice for broad distribution. We all have to remember that Twitter still doesn’t even have a revenue stream, let alone something resembling profits. Until one appears, its days are numbered.
4. Facebook will settle into a “relationship” medium, as users realize that as currently structured, it has limited value for broad distribution. As increasing numbers of users leave the page itself and access it through third-party applications, it will have to address a problem with lost advertising revenues, just as newspapers are facing.
5. Loyalty to publication titles — already weak — will erode dramatically as readers access the news through aggregators, RSS feeds and handheld applications. This will pose yet another layer of revenue challenges for media, making it more difficult to obtain reliable revenue streams through either subscription or advertising.
6. Handheld devices will emerge as a dominant way in which people receive their news, as iPhones, Blackberries, Android and e-readers pass the desktop in use.
7. Handheld subscriptions — in which readers pay for the convenience of mobile reading — will emerge as a key revenue stream as publications sell subscriptions based on mobile hardware and software platforms.
8. Efforts to charge for online content will fail for live news coverage, because that would require virtual 100 percent cooperation, and media never cooperate on much of anything. They will succeed, however, for proprietary stories such as analysis, columns and investigative reporting.