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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 :