This post can double as a farewell to delicious and a breakdown of what people in the industry were talking about in 2010. Plus some stuff I was into last year. I went through a million of my bookmarks that I saved over the course of the last 12 months, and here is the hand-picked result. Prominent topics (and this should come as no surprise) were: geo-location, mobile, gaming, social retail, virtual goods, and a few really really dumb initiatives. If you missed any of these articles, have a look.
My fav topic of digital creativity
Creativity in digital goes way beyond advertising
Words, pictures, and everything else.
Digital may be everyday, but it's not effortless
Brands & Branding
Nike Write the Future social media strategy
Google hasn't built anything interesting in over a decade
Competing with heroes: Domino's case study
Coke drops campaign sites in favor of social media strategy
Starbuck's formula for social media success
A big picture look at google, microsoft, apple, and yahoo
Brands' social media casestudies
Do brand loyalty, commitment, and engagement metrics work
Kickpatrick Talks about Zuckerberg's World
P&G Pushes Design in Brand-Building Strategy
Digital Storytelling
Use social media to tell interactive stories
Geo-location and its discontents
Foursquare, Gowalla, stop pretending it's fun
Marketing experiments emerge using Facebook places
Foursquare fatigue and how to fix it
5 ways Foursquare is changing the world
Check-in royalty, customer loyalty, and Foursquare evolving strategy
Facebook vs. Foursquare: It's game time
Beyond Foursquare: The next generation of customer loyalty
Foursquare marketing hits and misses case studies
Location: How check-ins speak louder than words
Foursquare, Gowalla, Whirrl and MyTown case studies
Gaming
Achievement, Game Mechanics, and Social Software
Can games theory explain culture?
Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behavior
Just add point: what UX can and cannot learn from games
Of lucky cats, lameness, and game-like logics
Incentivizing social media participation: points, giveaways, and other reward schemes
Complexity & Strategy
Cognitive edge: articles by Dave Snowden
Adding controlled serendipity to the web
Influencing business strategy through design
Platforms or campaigns? Both. AKA Platform-centric campaign model
Serendipity is unexpected relevance
Who needs agencies? A social platform just says "no" to Madison Avenue
Groupon and the future of web business models
The science of sharing: platforms inject data into the art of going viral
Apply the rules of improv to digital
11 tips on how to apply social interaction to design thinking
Do you know what your biggest risks are? Really?
Mobile & Social Retail
Amazon now allows you to send gift cards to friends on Facebook
The future is the mobile web, not the mobile app
Facebook likes bring Walmart deals
The 25 largest brand Facebook pages with the most likes
Study shows Facebook's retail appeal
Barcode Hero scans products to personalize physical retail
The Groupon clone industry is so big, it now has its own exchange
Agregate market's shopfans bring social retail storefronts to Facebook
Facebook's plan to take over the web
Online consumer generated reviews have big impact on offline purchases
The Internet of Things
Tweet street: 7 extraordinary Twitter uses in the home
Emerging trend: physical-digital interaction evolves
How a physically aware internet will change the world
Digital Visibility
How personal metrics can change our lives
Stupid Ideas
Forbes crowdsourcing names we need to know in 2011
MySpace unveils new, artsy logo
Gap pulls a Tropicana, nixes new logo
Are you ready to blow your million dollar idea away?
Mobile Apps
Less than half of brand managers use mobile apps
13 branded apps that got it right
How important have apps become?
Advertising
How the internet has changed advertising
How to translate a big idea to the masses
Digg's empty search results promote Burger King's double cheesburgers
Where is online advertising most powerful?
The ivory tower conversations (a.k.a. the future of advertising and the future of agencies)
My talk on future of advertising models
The future of advertising agencies
Virtual Goods
Madison avenue and the land of make believe
Loneliness, happiness, and other interesting things
Mark's scrapbook of oddities and treasures
Happiness aint all its cracked up to be
From prices to prizes: competitions
Things you didn't know about happiness
The riddle of experience vs memory by Daniel Kahneman
Behavioural economics reading list
Bonus: Hand-picked posts from I [love] marketing
Do we need a new definition of creativity?
Why Nike's Write the Future is rewriting the past
Marketing's industry cognitive blindness
Why brands should NEVER think like media companies
Don't build an old brand with the new tools
Enjoy!