I can scarcely believe that a whole year has passed since I was sitting here writing the 2009 review, but 12 months to the day here we are, and it’s been another fascinating year in the digital world. Once again I have cherry picked the best blog posts from the year which have either received media attention or have prompted comment and debate online. Enjoy the pick of the crop.

January
We started the year with a look at the online dating industry and in particular the scandal caused by Beautifulpeople.com when it started axing members deemed too ugly for the website. The first snow of the year prompted some analysis on the rise in visits to weather websites (sound familiar?), whilst towards the end of January we were obsessed with rumours of a new Apple tablet – later to be revealed as the iPad.
February
In February the BBC broadcast their brilliant Internet documentary Virtual Revolution using Experian Hitwise data for some of the graphics. The month also saw the launch of Hitwise data in France and the explosion of interest in video chat site Chatroulette.
March
New coffee trends in the office led me to post about the rise of the Flat White in March and its effect on searches for cappuccinos. Facebook appears many times this year in the blog, having consolidated its position as the UK’s number one social network. We looked at the rivalry between Facebook and Google, before posting stats on the budget as Alistair Darling revealed his final Budget before the election.
April
The two main stories that dominated headlines in April were the lead up to the election and the eruption of the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. The impact of the ash cloud on travel was a major setback for the industry and caused huge spikes in visits to the Aviation industry. I wrote quite a lot on the elections, but the two most interesting posts were about Motorway Man, our catchphrase for a group of voters identified through Mosaic, and bigot-gate after Gordon Brown’s ill-timed faux pas.
May
After the election, May’s blog posts were quite retail focussed. There was some interesting insight into luxury brands, in particular luxury holidays after I attended the Luxury Interactive 2010 conference. Selfridges saw the benefit of making its website transactional rather than purely content-based, and Apple became the most searched for consumer electronics brand in the UK.
June
This was one of our busiest months of the year thanks to a number of key stories that we were able to comment on. For a start, social networks became more popular than search engines online – although there was some pretty heated debate about whether YouTube should be classified as a social network. The World Cup kicked off in South Africa which saw the start of our campaign monitoring the top World Cup brands over the course of the competition. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, The Times put its content behind a paywall, a story which provoked huge interest and still drives journalist queries six months down the line.
July
Harry Potter fever gripped the nation in July with announcements of a Harry Potter lego game, a trailer for the seventh film, and the opening of a new Harry Potter theme park. New Prime Minsiter David Cameron also announced his plans for the Big Society.
August
In August, with summer holidays still in full swing, we wrote about the increase in searches for all things related to skin cancer, and with the new football season kicking off we also covered the online trends around sports and TV deals. The big blog post of the month once again was Facebook related, with our stat of the year: “Facebook accounts for 1 in 6 page views in the UK“. The post caused some controversy online when I suggested that the site may have reached saturation point in the UK.
September
As summer slipped into September it wasn’t long before we started looking at the hot products we thought would be a big hit this Christmas. The release of the Amazon Kindle stole a lot of the early limelight. The unveiling of Google Instant started a lot of interesting conversations online about how this would affect SEO and in particular long-tail keywords. Meanwhile, social bookmarking site Digg.com underwent some radical site changes which caused a lot of fuss and severe drops in traffic.
October
With autumn in full swing it was X Factor time and so searches started cropping up for the latest contestants. We revealed that Cheryl Cole was the most searched for celebrity online, whilst Canterbury was announced as the top digital city in the UK. In the media the big news story of the month was the rescue of the Chilean Miners, and we had our own spin to add to this news story with insight into spikes in searches for Adidas Chile trainers.
November
Three big events in November captured the imaginations of the online audience: Take That’s reunion, the Royal engagement and The Beatles on iTunes. Take That concert tickets were so popular online that Ticketmaster became the 13th most popular website online. The announcement of Wills and Kate getting engaged caused huge spikes in wedding traffic, and Beatles search terms increased 30-fold once fans could download iconic songs from iTunes.
December
With Christmas looming we focussed this month on the top products that people were searching for, but not before a post on the hot news topic of the month – Wikileaks. With the snow and ice causing travel havoc there were a couple of posts on the impact the weather was having on Internet trends but this summary shows some nice insights into what has happened during the cold spell. Finally, apologies to anyone who lost money betting on our tip for the X Factor winner – I wasn’t the most popular man in the office the following Monday…
Thanks for reading, and for all the comments and tweets. Stay tuned for ongoing analysis of the retail landscape over the Christmas period.