It’s no surprise that the first week into the year our RSS readers, twitter streams, and Facebook walls have been overflowing with posts looking back on 2009 and looking ahead to 2010.  Throw the Google Nexus in the mix and it was nearly impossible to find a signal shrouded in all the noise, but believe it or not this week actually had a decent chunk of decent posts.

2009 and Looking Ahead to 2010

While you’ve been pelted in the face with these all week, there were definitely a handful of these posts that deserve a read.

A Decade of 21st Century SEO – It’s hard to focus on what’s ahead of you if you don’t know where you’ve been.  In the last decade SEO has come a long way, and Jill Whalen does a great job looking back at some of the highlights of the search industry over the last decade.

Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009 – One of my annual favorites, Tamar Weinberg has again put together an extensive list of internet marketing posts from the last year. The ideas and concepts shared in these posts are almost always timeless and a great resource to hold on to.

Link Building Trends for 2010 – The Link Week writers over at SEL pull together to give their thoughts on link building in the year to come and things you should seriously be considering and thinking about.

100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010 – Not sure what to write about over the next year? Lisa Barone’s got you covered with over 100 blogging topic ideas for the year to come.

David Harry’s Everything Search 2009 Recap

I remember Dave doing an outstanding job in 08 recapping all of the important search patents from the year and bringing them together in individual posts, but this year he hammered us with an arsenal of posts looking back on 2009 with the Top Picks of 2009 series.

Top SEO posts from 2009
Google Search Patents 2009
Yahoo Search Patents
Microsoft Search Patents 2009
SEO News 2009
Local, Social and Tools 09
SEO Videos 09

Social Media

Professors Teaching Social Media – As social media becomes more mainstream, we’re left to wonder how it will tie into a marketing or web based college curriculum.  Samir Balwani has been exploring professors who teach social media and has begun a twitter list to showcase some professors already in the field. From the time of the post Samir’s list has already begun to grow.

SEO

Advice for the Newbie In-House SEO – We’ve all been the new guy or gal at some point or another, and sometimes it seems impossible to figure out where to start. Patricia Skinner outlines some key concepts to have in mind when starting your new in-house SEO gig.

You Can’t Optimize Cardboard – A great post that explores the value of trust in regards to SEO. You can SEO a site all you want, but at the end of the day you need to call a spade a spade and if your online presence is absolute garbage, the consumer and the search engines are going to recognize you as just that.

Tools to Use and Learn hCard Format – While a lot of search marketers are still torn on the value of microformats and hCard’s there’s definitely a lot people still exploring their value, especially in the local search realm. Ann Smarty shares some great tools for mastering hCard format.

That’s it for this weeks Flashback Friday, hopefully you’ve found a post or two that flew under your radar this week and you have found to be valuable.  If you have any additional posts that you found of interest over the week please feel free to share them in the comments. I always love reading new things and discovering new search and social blogs.

It’s been a long journey since I started in the search marketing industry and over the years I have had the chance to meet and interact with a number of great search and social marketers. Many of whom I have come to look up to in one way or another.  Each of them bring upon their own talents and expertise. However, when I think of all of the different people I interact with on Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn I realize that there are a handful of folks that I am constantly looking towards for new inspiration and information. And with that I developed a list of the top 5 search and social geeks I wish I could spend just one day with to see their processes and how they work.

David Harry
Twitter: @theGypsy
www.huomah.com

David Harry, AKA ‘The Gypsy’ is one of the first search marketers who really got me to think outside the box.  He helped me to understand patents better and the importance of understanding information retrieval as a means to bettering my SEO. When we first started chatting it up a year or so ago I would spend hours scouring the net for new knowledge, patents, and information.  Unfortunately as time has passed and my kids have gotten older a lot of that free time has gone by the wayside, but his inspiration is still there and he is still someone I greatly admire and look to for new ideas.  If that weren’t enough, he also writes the SEO Dojo SEO Newsletter to keep me abreast on any geekiness I missed.

Tamar Weinberg
Twitter: @tamar
www.techipedia.com

Tamar is probably one of the first social savvy internet marketers I began following in my early days on Twitter and even Plurk (remember Plurk??). I’ve always loved how well she can cross over between the search and social realms and still display a balanced level of expertise.  Many marketers you come across are strong in one more so than the other, but I have always found Tamar to be a knowledgeable source on both ends of the spectrum.

Melanie Nathan
Twitter: @melanienathan
www.canadianseo.com

A friendly face and a sweet personality aren’t the only things that put Melanie on my list.  In fact the one thing about Melanie that I admire most is her passion for link building, of all tasks.  It’s not rare to find Melanie spouting off on Twitter about the latest sweet link she got hold of, nor is it uncommon for her to share some juicy link building tidbits on various blogs.  But what I admire is that SHE LIKES IT! As a search marketer one of the tasks I have always loathed is link building. Part of that may stem from the limitations I have to seek out quality links at my workplace, but I would love to know what it is she does that makes her link building efforts so fun.

Samir Balwani
Twitter: @samirbalwani
www.samirbalwani.com

I’ll call him social marketing’s rising star, because in my eyes he is.  I have seen Samir take leaps and bounds in his blogging and his marketing career over the last year and I don’t see any signs of him stopping either.  Another great mind whose posts have often forced me to think, Samir does a great job at giving folks some rhyme and reason to their social media marketing efforts and also gives some great insight on how easily it is to mess it all up. Samir’s knack for understanding social media, tracking social metrics, and interest in social media education are just some of the many things I have come to appreciate in Samir’s writing and in our interactions.

Audrey Seiberling
Twitter: @shirleytipsy
www.missshirleytipsy.com

The funny thing about having Audrey on my list is that 1) she is the one who started my search marketing career, and 2) I have worked under her not once, but twice.  In fact for almost a year we worked within 5 feet of one another.  But during that time I have never really seen her process as a search marketer. With taking over a lot of her duties upon her leaving my current company I have gotten a little bit more insight into how she worked, but haven’t really pieced together the whole process.  With a strong background in PPC and SEO and the fact that this whole thing started because of her, I would love to just have a day to see how it all comes together.

So there you have it, a handful, but by no means all of the search and social geeks I look up to on a regular basis. Who are some of the search and social marketers you admire?

Earlier this week Google announced  it’s partnership with a number of online music sources such as Myspace and Lala to provide searchers with new music search results that include music samplings.  However, it appears that this exciting new feature came at a cost.

Avid music searchers like me may recall that oftentimes when you would search for an artist you would get the Google Music result for the artist.  The result would provide you with info on the artist, related artist links and discography.  If that weren’t enough you had the ability to view individual albums and their tracklists, and get links to sites where you could purchase the music.  What was even more impressive was that Google actually had a relatively unknown music search operator that could be used to obtain this information immediately for your query.  For instance if you typed music:nine inch nails in the Google search bar you would be directed to the Google music page for Nine Inch Nails.  If you run that query now you are simply redirected to the Google Music Search page.

I used the music operator and the Google Music service quite frequently when it came to updating my MP3 data or seeking out new albums and imports to add to my music collection.  However it doesn’t look like Google is going to be an option any longer when it comes to this sort of data.  From what I can tell this data has been completely stripped from Google and if it hasn’t I have no idea where they have hidden it.

It seems to me that this sort of update from Google would have benefited from not only integrating the new features, but expanding upon the existing features.  Provide artist, album, and track data while providing samplings from various partners as well.  Why provide less data in exchange for some music samplings?

Overall I think this is a positive move from Google. I had always wished Google provided music samples with it’s previous music search services, so in that aspect this is a step in the right direction.  I only hope that with the slew of new music partners they can perhaps incorporate some additional data like that which was provided previously.  Hell, they could even kick it up another notch and partner with some lyric sites.  That would be music search gold.