Fuat Kircaali, the founder and CEO of

Sys-Con Media, has been outlandish in his predictions for the success of his latest venture, a self-publishing site called Ulitzer. (That’s “Pulitzer” without the “P.” Get it?)

How great does Kircaali think the prospects are for the site? “Within the next five years, Time Magazine, the Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, Conde Nast Traveler, and Wikipedia will be replaced by Ulitzer.”

The toppling of Wikipedia is inevitable, Kircaali maintains, just as Facebook overtook MySpace’s lead. In fact, in another post Kircaali claims Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will all be proven useless before the end of this year; Kircaali believes they’ll never “pass the stage of mass spam tools.” More on that other post in a bit.

If ever I wished I were a bookie…

The site has so far attracted about 7,000 authors and about a million articles, far short of Wikipedia, but then again it has only been around since it launched in beta on March 29. Still, according to Alexa, Ulitzer has attracted a whopping .0025% of the global Internet population, with only a 470% growth curve since the site launched.

Once you’re approved as an author, you can launch a magazine, a subject-based portal, or a new topic category, then populate these with any of those million articles in the Ulitzer database. You can also import your own blog feed to add your posts to the mix. You earn money through Google ads and there are editors for each Ulitzer site providing some kind of editorial control.

From a PR perspective, there’s also a “News Desk” where you can post press releases and other content on behalf of your company or client. This content then gets distributed into revelant topics. Presumably, this works as Google juice, since the item will appear in multiple places on Ulitzer. As you’ll see in a minute, Kircaali believes the only PR agencies that will survive are those that will publish client content this way.

The launch hasn’t been without controversy. Kircaali felt compelled to write a post defending Ulitzer against claims that articles had to be removed for copyright violation (Kircaali asserts none were) and that only four authors have asked to have their profile pages turned off (there were allegations, apparently, that a lot of authors wanted to back out but couldn’t).

Kircaali’s more recent post offers the provocative headline, “Is the PR business extinct? Yes.”

The post is as preposterous as a lot of Kircaali’s other assertions. For example, he suggests that 70% of today’s PR agencies won’t survive the “fast approaching media avalanche” because 90% of today’s PR firms are still in business because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow companies to communicate material information on websites.

I’d pay real money to know where Kircaali gets his statistic. I could have sworn all those agencies were out there helping organizations build and maintain positive relationships with constituent publics. How silly of me.

Further, Kircaali says there are only three kinds of agencies. Those using Ulitzer every day as a channel for their clients’ news, those who are using Ulitzer to publish bylined articles and tapping into its syndication features (these are the agencies, of course, that will survive), and those who are “horrified by the idea that their clients may actually find out about (Ulitzer).” Those must be the doomed 70%.

But wait. There’s more. Kircaali asserts—in bold face, no less—that “the companies with the largest number of professional bloggers will win:”

Tomorrow’s (and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be played onprofessional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will win the marketing and propaganda games. Larger companies will need larger armies of corporate bloggers. the new job description of “professional corporate blogger” will be a very popular one.

To be or not to be, that is the question for the PR firms that will hit the wall at this stage. The ones who are equipped to provide those services whose job description are not yet defined will be tomorrow’s brave new PR companies.

Kircaali doesn’t see actual employees doing real work who engage their communities through social media channels including blogs. No, he sees companies hiring people who will just blog.

I have to admit the Ulitzer model looks interesting (with a design that looks dangerously similar to ZD’s online prescence), although nowhere does it provide encyclopedic listings, leading me to wonder how Kircaali envisions Ulitzer driving Wikipedia to an early digital grave. As for Kircaali, I’ll be monitoring him closely, waiting for more brash and unsuportable predictions to lighten up my day.