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LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals, recently issued a major upgrade to its iPhone app.

If you are looking for the top internet 2010 predictions, anticipations and trends from the top bloggers, the tech thought leaders and the top new media sites out there, you have landed in the right place. In part 2 of this MasterNewMedia guide to the top Internet trends for 2010 (Part 1), you will find indeed some of the most interesting and provocative anticipations about new media, and about the future of online marketing and communications on the Internet.

Photo credit: Katrina Brown

Here some of the top 2010 trends and highlights emerging from this Internet predictions roundup:

• Content formats: One of the main difficulties of the web is being able to really track a story as it develops and creating engaging formats for long-form articles. In 2010, news organizations and publishers will design stories that are more suited to the way readers consume online content. As a result, other formats that are either engaging and eye-catching will gain momentum in 2010, like the blogozine.
• Content nesting: In 2010 your own content will spread on multiple locations more rapidly than you can imagine. That is why your website content needs to be nested in as many content aggregation sites as possible. Social media, RSS / blog directories and influential websites should be your main target. Why is this really important? Picture this: If you have a video on your website that is not on YouTube, people on YouTube will not bother searching for your website, because they simply do not need to go elsewhere. For them, YouTube already represents the total number of videos available on their topic of interest. Got it?
• Social media marketing: A survey by VerticalResponse, Inc. shows that 68% of small businesses plan to increase social media marketing. Social media will indeed continue to be a great way for marketers and brands to create conversations with customers. So, be sure to make 2010 your year to test content that attracts repeat and referral business. Customers are more likely to respond to social media marketing because they already know you and trust you based on feedback from other people or their prior purchases.
• Online reputation: With more and more consumers making decisions based on what they find online, small business owners will have to pay greater attention to track the buzz around their brands. As consumers prove to be highly influenced by online reviews and comments, business owners that do not monitor their brand mentions may have a hard time to prevent negative word of mouth. In 2010 expect those that will invest time protecting their online identities to succeed, and others to fail.
• Paid / free content: A recent Forrester report stated that 80% of U.S. consumers will not pay for online content. Another survey by BCG showed that most people will pay a maximum of $3 per month for online paid subscriptions. What this means is that brands of 2010 are going to be built through a different model, based on consumer demand, the endless supply of content and the free distribution systems we all have.
• Online video: In 2010, online video will keep growing, keeping pace with the good trends of this year. Online video is interactive, memorable, widely accessible, cheap to create and highly shareable, that is why entrepreneurs and business owners are willing to invest even more on video. It is crucial though, that you do not overlook your text content for video. As powerful as video can be, it can be more cumbersome than text because you cannot scan a video as quickly as you can scan a page of headlines, links and text to quickly find the exact information you need.
• Online video advertising: Pre-roll ads will continue to dominate online video advertising. No innovation from Hulu, YouTube or Vivaki will prove as effective as a 0:15 or 0:30 coupled with a companion ad (here IAB video ad formats). YouTube only gains massive market share with its abundance of pre-roll and unless a brand new alternative is developed in the coming months, expect pre-roll to stay.
• Business models: Expect new business models to emerge clearly in 2010. While alternative monetization opportunities have already sprung in 2009, it is next year that new business models will reach maturity and become a serious option for Internet entrepreneurs. Whatever you may choose, your main goal should be to increase, extend and diversify the range of your revenue-making channels. Entrepreneurs that have bet all their horses on a single business model may find unpleasant surprises, so start acting now.
• Hyper niches: As already written, in 2010 content will be more and more ubiquitous and accessible. Those that will have the best content next year will float to the top, while everyone else will make less money and have fewer opportunities. It will be much harder to compete with big brands, which means next year the focus will be on niches and what John Arnold of Entrepreneur defines “hyper-niches.” People will have to really narrow down their market niche in order to stand out and succeed.
• SEO: Conversion rate optimization will dominate SEO next year. Still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, conversion rate optimization will reach more awareness and brands will focus on improving conversion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. 2010 will establish this trend.

In part 2 (part 1) of this guide to the top Internet predictions and trends for 2010, you can have a peek at what these coming months may indeed have in store for you.

If you are into exploring what’s coming up next before it hits you unprepared this is a perfect place to start.

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Facebook on Ulitzer I really don’t have any problems with Facebook whatsoever since I don’t really use it in any meaningful way .

Police are investigating a complaint from ex-pop star Kerry Katona that she was stalked by a woman she befriended on Facebook.

What are going to be the top Internet trends of 2010? As every end of the year, influential bloggers, opinion leaders and media experts look inside their crystal balls to foresee what will be hot and where the market is headed in the following year. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best 2010 predictions from the web.

Photo credit: Katrina Brown

While obviously no one can guarantee her predictions will be right on the money, there are some key points that do emerge as prominent in 2010 and can significantly change the way you and I use and live the web:

• Media consumption: Due to increasingly empowered consumers and further advances in technology, media will become more:
  • Distributed: the same content will pop up in multiple locations, formats and channels
  • Personalized: media will be tailored to reflect what consumers have watched, read, experienced and shared.
  • Contextualized: when and where consumers get their information will dictate its content and format, and that, in turn, will shape how they interact with and share it.
• Advertising: eMarketer estimates social network advertising will grow only 7% next year to $1.3 billion, accounting for a mere 5.5% of total online ad dollars. And while ad spending on these sites will never represent a significant share of total online ad dollars, spending on non-advertising forms of social marketing will rise significantly next year and beyond.
• Media engagement: Media portals will need to figure out how to engage the community at a grass roots level so they have drivers and participants pushing the conversations and attracting peers. Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals are not entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community.
• Social Media: As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent “Tribalization of Business” study released by Deloitte, 94 percent of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment.
• Webinars: Webinars are already changing the landscape on how people meet for business on the cheap, and worry the airlines. However, current webinar systems like WebEx, GoToWebinar or others are still either too difficult to use at full. Within 2010, some company will develop a simple to launch, one-click web meeting system that can broadcast live discussions across ad hoc participant groups.
• Mobile: Smartphone usage will continue to increase and mobile payments will become one of the preferred venues for payments. The iTunes Store has lead the way with interesting services like Square surfacing to redefine how you and I can utilize our phones to pay for stuff while. on the move.
• Real-time: The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive… it is a sense of living in the now and that is why you should expect to see more real-time in the coming months as Google Wave reaches its maturity, Facebook tries real advantage from the acquisition of FriendFeed and real-time protocols like PubSubHubbub become really top-notch.
• Content curation: In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of web pages vying for your time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? Mass media used to rule syndication, but now anybody can curate and present content across a plethora of social media platforms. Curating breaking news is key to readership – it’s the reason why people follow CNN, Marketwatch or Engadget. Twitter has distinguished itself as the forefront application for breaking news, and anybody can use Twitter Lists to curate Twitter feeds by topic, geography and industry.
• Cloud computing: This trend, boomed back in 2008 and persistently growing in 2009, will shift even more data and applications from your desktops to servers elsewhere (”the cloud“), making data accessible from anywhere and enabling collaboration with distributed teams. Giants like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are already moving in this direction.
• Open source: Open source software projects, typically for the purview of programmers or at least technophiles, will be available to the masses and will also generate revenues thanks to a simple infrastructure that can live in the cloud and offer services for small subscription fees (think of Beanstalk).

Are you starting to taste the future? In part 1 (part 2 available tomorrow) of this guide on top Internet trends of 2010, you can glimpse what the media realm holds for Internet professionals and consumers in the upcoming months.

Here all the details :

Adobe Systems’ Flash and Acrobat Reader products will become the preferred targets for criminal hackers in 2010, surpassing Microsoft Office applications, a security vendor predicted this week.

With more than 350 million active users worldwide, the social networking site Facebook has become a household name.

The Wichita Police Department is using social networking tools to catch criminals and recruit new members.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Brad Spirrison

It’s telling that the biggest story impacting Chicago tech in 2009 occurred in late November and centered around a young company that didn’t have a business model 18 months ago.

While it got off to a rocky start with the overhyped Y2K bug and dotcom bubble, the era dubbed the “Digital Decade” by Microsoft’s Bill Gates has turned out to be a dizzying period of innovation.

But some say that social networking at work has become too costly in terms of lost productivity and too risky from a security standpoint.

A body found in a river is believed to be that of a 13-year-old boy who went missing on Christmas Eve.

It’s tough finding a job. There are so many people looking at a limited number of openings.

LONDON: The Queen paid tribute to the Armed Forces serving in Afghanistan in her annual Christmas message Friday.

ST. PETER - Ellis Jones extols a key merit of the Christmas card: This form of social networking doesn’t disappear into the digital ether like a Facebook update or an e-mail. You can keep your letters as permanent records of the year’s high points and maybe pass them on to later generations as a historical record.