Well it’s come to that time of year where we recap our top posts from 2010.  These posts were selected based on the subjects staying power in our media and it’s ability to make long lasting changes  to the way we interact with the world wide web.   So, let’s begin.

ad-ition Blog Top 10 for 2010

10. Personalized TV – going past PVR

What we mean by this is the arrival of things such as Google TV and Apple TV, which both allow users to stream not only movies or television shows, but also music and photos that they’ve stored.  Through getting a taste, in previous years, of Internet TV, the demand to push this experience further has been the topic of conversation for many, hence the birth of on demand services such as Apple TV and Google TV.  Although the two are quite similar, the way in which they get their content is different.  Apple already has known relationships with content providers, see iTunes, but Google on the other hand has spent the year forming relationships with networks and movie houses.

This on demand way of taking in media is still formulating in many ways and 2011 will bring to light who the more formidable adversary is, Apple or Google.  The suite of content options for viewers will be the ultimate deciding factor.

9. Newspaper Online Pay Walls

Now although this is a story we started to speak about in 2009, we were and still are, hearing publishers rambling about erecting pay walls.  Results to date however, have shown that many publishers who erected pay wall programs in late 2009,  took them down in 2010.  Moreover, the primary advocate, Rupert Murdoch, for this protectionist movement, has yet to move the majority of his titles to a pay wall system, as he had promised, proving to those publishers trying to follow in his footsteps, that even he thinks that pay walls, as he intended, are not a good idea.

8. News Aggregators and Readers

With the arrival of the iPad, publishers scurried to ensure they were quick to market with reader friendly content that could easily be served up on a tablet.  However, it was not just your traditional publishers who were looking for savvy ways to serve up news content in 2010, you found tech savvy groups aggregating content and serving them up in intuitive ways, especially on the iPad.  The transformation and innovation around aggregated news content continues, as we see apps like Flipboard grow and transform.

7. Location Based Services

Can you remember the last time you went out to a Starbucks, a restaurant or a bar and someone in your group wasn’t checking in on a Foursquare or Gowalla app?  Neither can I!  2010 not only saw user levels for location based services grow, but business aapplications related to these services also gained popularity.  Proprietors were finding ways to celebrate their ‘mayors’ and attract new ‘check-in’s’ in the meantime.

We are still watching this vertical of location based services apps grow, as we saw Gowalla come out with a 1 – 2 punch at the beginning of December, and other large players (Facebook) announce the arrival of their service apps.

6. Beauty in Information

I don’t know about you, but we used an unprecedented amount of info graphics to relay information in 2010.  For example, there was this one, and this, then this, then this one, and … well … you get the picture.

5. Smart Phone Adoption and Development

Yes, we know we’ve had the iPhone and Blackberry devices in play for a while, but 2010 saw publishers kick it up a notch when the Android phone sealed the deal on the forecasted growth trends in the smart phone arena.  It was this year that saw more content publishers release smart phone aapplications to market, then ever before, with the focus being on iPhone and Android OS’s.

The latter quarter of 2010 also showed tremendous changes in market share numbers, again reporting the Android as the fastest growing smart phone OS, faster growing even more so than Apple’s iPhone.

4. Privacy and Facebook

The topic of Privacy and the concern it raises for Facebook users is not a new one, but it was ever apparent in media this past year.  Concerns first became apparent when Facebook tweaked default privacy rules to make most of a users content public in December 2009, and in April they expanded the amount of defaulted public content available to all.  This brewed the ‘Quit Facebook‘ day initiative, which was scheduled for May 31st, 2010, in retaliation to what was deemed Facebooks negligence in protecting their users.  In the end we saw 14 privacy and consumer protection organizations, file complaints against Facebook because of the above.

3. Group Shopping

In our minds, this shopping phenom was fueled by the way users interacted with social networks.  Group buying sites simply combined our love of all things social and shopping to create swarm like mentalities around coupons and deals.  To date, there are an estimated 66 group buying sites in the US, with the majority of them coming to life at the beginning of Q1′ 2010.  The year 2010 even saw auction giant eBay get into the group buying game and many others attempt entry through a plain old purchase.

2. Memorable Parody’s

For good measure, we though we should include a link to  a video we posted this year that garnered a sizable amount of email response.  We are also including it here because we think it’s funny too.  The video comes to us courtesy of Fox News, which in itself breeds its own sense of comedy, without even trying.

1. Social Media and Small Business

In addition to seeing a rise in business awareness about location based services, the same could be said with business usage of social networks and social media, to spread the word on their deals, services and just plain old existence.  The heavy adoption also attributed to the increase in the number of third party applications that aid small business owners in understanding their customers, as they relate to the social sphere.  The growth in social networks and their natural data analytics, made social media a must do for business owners. As an aside, we’ve included a link to one of our webcasts on social media branding as reference here.